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Farmers and ranchers are finding themselves immersed in a battle over the way they choose their words as they hope to maintain US federal funding. An internal USDA spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post shows that more than $400 million of climate resilient projects administered through the Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS) are under review for possible termination.
The spreadsheet of USDA projects for possible cost-cutting includes instructions for regional and state conservationists to scrutinize each line item for the following terms, among others:
- “climate adaption and resilience planning”
- “environmental education/workforce training”
- “biodiversity and ecosystem resilience related to climate change”
- “climate smart agriculture and land use that does not directly benefit farmers”
About 40% of US cattle ranchers herd cattle to different parts of their ranches to give the grass time to grow back between grazing. Called “rotational grazing,” the practice helps ranchers keep their grass healthier, but it also helps the environment. Such a “climate resilient farming practice” was consistent with the Biden administration’s focus on environmental protections. But now — you guessed it — the Trump administration is threatening such projects, along with hundreds of other agreements “related to climate initiatives.” The cattle ranchers are part of the USDA’s conservation losses since the Trump administration’s sweeping funding freeze affecting farm conservation programs worth more than a billion dollars.
Climate resilient agricultural strategies are crucial for enhancing sustainable food production and security in a dynamically evolving world, and they’re not new. Such efforts can boost a farm or ranch adaptability to shifting weather patterns, reduce risks of yield loss, establish a sustainable base for food production to compete with global demands, and efficiently mitigating the adverse effects of climate change. Conservation agriculture practices, crop diversification, precision agriculture, raised bed systems, drought-resistant crop varieties, and efficient water management strategies are also key elements of a climate resilient approach to agriculture.
As climate change leads to unpredictable weather patterns along with extreme events and fluctuating temperatures, experts concur that agricultural approaches must be resilient enough to mitigate these challenges. Attaining wide scale adoption of climate resilient strategies requires joint efforts from governments, researchers, farmers, and the private sector.
Such cooperation is not happening right now in the US under the Trump administration, of course. If the Trump administration does not recognize such a crucial need, however, what chance do we have to build a sustainable, robust, and resilient food future?
In the cognitive dissonance in which we now find ourselves in the US, new research released today by the Pacific Institute and DigDeep outlines over 100 actionable climate resilient strategies for frontline communities’ water and sanitation systems in the face of intensifying climate impacts while addressing systemic inequities.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman suggests that Trump’s “problem is that he’s offering fake answers to fake problems.” The public, he continues, “isn’t buying it.”
In fact, Republican constituents aren’t buying it. With the Trump-Musk autocracy axing federal programs on which everyday citizens rely, “town halls in Republican districts have erupted with an outpouring of anxiety, complaints and outright anger,” Robert Jimison and Katie Glueck report in the New York Times this morning. The backlash has grown so bitter that the upper echelon of the Republican party have warned their legislators to do whatever they can to stay away from voter gatherings. Elon Musk and far-reaching cuts led by his Department of Government Efficiency have drawn the most condemnation from voters.
The fear is that embarrassing confrontations with the voters who elected them could be posted on social media spaces and even become fodder for a campaign ad.
Meanwhile, Katie Knibbs of Wired reported this week that cuts at the USDA have decimated the teams that inspect plant and food imports, creating risks from invasive pests and leaving food to rot as it waits for inspection.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
“If science is to honor one of its core values — a commitment to the truth wherever it might lead — scientists must stand up” for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in science, argues bioethicist Arthur Caplan. Instead, Caplan continues, the importance of diversity in science is an unshakeable reality that the scientific community must stand by.
The Government No Longer For The People
“An immigrant South African billionaire in the White House who has sieg heil-ed his way into the Republican Party’s soul,” wrote Michael Moore this week on his Substack. As if to offer evidence to Moore’s condemnation, the Department of Government Efficiency expert, Elon Musk, reposted an outrageous tweet saying that dictators “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”
While such dangerous narratives permeate the Trump administration, throughout 15 months of brutal war in the Middle East, an unlikely cross-border scientific collaboration has endured. Ornithologists at Tel Aviv University in Israel have continued to meet online with their counterparts in Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and European countries to study the potential for barn owls (Tyto alba) to reduce pesticide use in agriculture. The collaboration was described in the March 2025 journal, Nature.
The project enlists the owls to devour crop-eating rodents instead of relying on farmers using toxic rodenticides to control populations. In January, shortly after a ceasefire was signed between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, researchers from 13 countries gathered in Greece. Their mission was both to discuss how to expand the use of barn owls for biological control and to promote the project as an example of research collaboration to promote peaceful coexistence.
Forward-looking projects like this only highlight how far behind US scientific research will fall under the Trump administration.
Indeed, the US is now in a state in which conscious and determined fragmentation of citizen contributions to the greater society is daily practice. The true colors of the administration were on full display Monday when members of Musk’s DOGE team marched into the US Institute of Peace, an independent organization, and evicted its officials.
The institute was created by Congress in 1984 and works to prevent and end conflict, deploying specialists to work with US allies, training peace negotiators, and diplomats and briefing Congress. The organization’s website was updated with additional references to the “cost-effective” nature of its work, a likely bid to win the favor of Mr. Musk’s team.
It did not work.
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