As ranking member of the US Senate Environmental and Public Works committee, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse convened a “spotlight” hearing Tuesday, September 29, also attended by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Jeff Merkley, to highlight the consequences of industry and Trump administration attacks on climate science. Senator Whitehouse invited me to testify at the hearing, on the topic of these attacks on science, the industries benefiting from these attacks, and the harm they’ve caused that affect the health and safety of everyone in the US. My full written testimony is here, and the oral testimony I delivered yesterday is below. You can also watch the full hearing.
The Supreme Court will be considering the question of fossil fuel industry accountability for climate deception and its resulting harms on Monday, October 5, in oral arguments for the case Suncor v Boulder. I’ll be speaking at the People vs Big Oil rally outside the Supreme Court that morning in support of justice for the people of Boulder, Colorado, and all of us whose health, safety, and livable environment are at risk because of the decades of deception perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry.
The testimony the other witnesses and I provided at this hearing powerfully illustrates why Congress must reject a liability shield for Big Oil. Send a message to your legislators now urging them not to give these companies immunity.
Ranking Member Whitehouse, Members of the Environment and Public Works Committee: My name is Dr. Gretchen Goldman, and I am president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy organization with more than 600,000 supporters nationwide—including scientists, engineers, and concerned citizens from all backgrounds.
Rigorous, independent science has long been a cornerstone of US leadership in research, technology, medicine, innovation and security. Federal funding seeded early research into the internet, Doppler radar, MRI technology, and sequencing the human genome, just to name a few examples.
And beyond research, federal scientists do critical work through evidence-based policy decisions, regulation, and communications that keeps us all healthier and safer, whether we realize it or not:
- Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the Food and Drug Administration work quickly to identify and contain food-borne illness and infectious disease outbreaks;
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists protect our local communities from deadly severe weather; and
- The US Environmental Protection Agency experts have saved thousands of lives through cleaner air and water for decades.
These science agencies work on behalf of the American people, are paid for by American tax dollars, and are staffed by dedicated public servants.
Or at least they used to be.
The Trump administration has engaged in an all-out assault on these and other science agencies and programs across the federal government, harming the American people and enriching the powerful and polluting.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has identified more than 600 such attacks on science in just the first 18 months of the current administration.
From weakening health guidance and pollution standards, to gutting scientific infrastructure and censoring data, these attacks on science jeopardize people’s health and safety; risk America’s long-term investments in security and innovation; and threaten our standing as a world leader.
Attacks on federal scientists
Since inauguration day in 2025, nearly 95,000 science employees, including 10,000 PhDs, have left their jobs, resulting in centuries of lost scientific expertise and institutional memory.
NOAA lost more than 1800 employees during the first six months of the administration, amounting to the departure of more than 27,000 years of experience.
In addition to NOAA, the CDC, the EPA, the National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation all lost significant numbers of scientific staff, threatening their ability to carry out their missions.
Attacks on science-based regulations
The administration has singled out climate science in their attacks, adopting fossil fuel industry talking points and going after policies informed by the best available science—all while putting people’s lives and health at risk, as the impacts of climate change rapidly worsen.
Among the most egregious examples of this is the EPA’s recent repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding, a science-based legal finding which affirmed the agency’s statutory obligation, under the Clean Air Act, to regulate health-harming heat-trapping emissions.
As the National Academies highlighted in their own recent report, the scientific evidence for current and future public health harms from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions is beyond scientific dispute and has only grown stronger since 2009. The administration is now using this repeal as a justification to overturn standards to limit global warming pollution from vehicles and power plants.
The Trump administration has also targeted the regulations and safeguards that keep politics out of what should be science-based decisions.
They have gutted federal scientific integrity infrastructure.
They have demolished Congressionally mandated climate activities, like the US Global Change Research Program.
They have destroyed funding based on keyword searches for research with at-risk populations.
And they have admitted to canceling scientific funding in states the President did not win.
The role of the fossil fuel industry
The motivation for such a coordinated and sustained assault on the federal scientific enterprise is part of an extreme anti-science agenda, but goes beyond that.
The administration is delivering on promises it has made to special interests who profit from the suppression of science—and in the case of climate science, that special interest is the fossil fuel industry.
At the direction of the industry, the Trump administration is leveraging the full power of the federal government to attack science to protect industry profits and evade accountability—all at the expense of the American people and the planet.
Attribution science, which identifies and quantifies the contributions of climate change to long-term trends and extreme events, is a robust scientific discipline that has been cited by consensus scientific reports like those from the IPCC and our own National Climate Assessment.
Given its centrality in legal efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, attribution research has become a lightning rod for attacks by government leaders and industry allies.
Industry is so scared of this growing scientific evidence that it is seeking legislation from this Congress to provide legal immunity to the fossil fuel industry for the harm they know they have caused.
Coordinated attacks on FEMA, NOAA, EPA, NSF, NCAR and other agencies and programs are all part of a coordinated campaign to try to bury the evidence of climate change—even as people experience its harsh impacts—all to protect the profit margins of fossil fuel companies.
Closing
Independent science, access to scientific expertise, and strong support of scientific inquiry are critical pillars of a strong democracy.
Attacks on inconvenient scientific findings showcase the corporate capture and corruption that have come to define the second Trump administration, and it is people across the US and the world who will suffer the consequences. Thank you.