As the aftermath of the presidential election rolls in, environmentalists, scientists and student organizations are left to anticipate the actions of a president previously unsupportive of environmental legislation.
After the election results were officially called for Donald Trump in the early morning of Nov. 6, the University of Rhode Island Student Action for Sustainability’s initial reaction was to cancel its weekly meeting, according to SAS secretary Keira Derrell. It was Derrell who suggested hosting a community debrief in lieu of a regular meeting.
“From results I was like, ‘oh wow okay, that’s a lot to take in and process,’” Derrell, a third-year majoring in wildlife and conservation biology, said. “I figured a lot of other students on campus, especially with the impact it’s going to have on the environment, would want to talk about it.”
Around 13 club members attended, including one who zoomed in from Germany, according to Dylan Murdock, the president of SAS. Murdock is currently the only male member of the executive board and one of the few men in the club.
“We have a lot of women and women of color on our board and in our club,” Murdock said. “I just understood that we couldn’t just go about our lives because for a lot of us in that room, our lives were no longer the same.”
While SAS is not an overtly political organization, Murdock said that the line between environmental issues and politics has become blurry for him.
“Environmental justice at its core is also striving for equality with the world, a balance,” Murdock said. “If we cannot even bring balance and justice to our own people, how can we expect to reflect that upon our environment?”
Trump has been quick to roll out his cabinet appointments, setting the stage for what the next four years could hold. Less than a week after his victory was announced on Nov. 6, Trump announced Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from Long Island, New York, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
“He’s heading an agency that practices science and he’s not a scientist, that’s a problem,” Laura Meyerson, a natural resources science professor in the URI College of Environment and Life Sciences, said.
The EPA is one of the 16 departments outlined in Project 2025 , an almost 1,000 page document self proclaimed ‘The Conservative Promise,’ to undergo thorough structural and leadership changes.
Twenty-eight pages of the document are dedicated to the EPA, with specific targets laid out. This includes suspending any ongoing or planned science activity without current authorization from Congress, eliminating or consolidating EPA laboratories and repealing Inflation Reduction Act programs that provide grants for environmental science activities.
The document’s section on the EPA was written by Mandy Gunasekara, the agency’s former chief of staff who served from 2020 to 2021 during the last Trump administration. Gunasekara, who also practiced as an environmental attorney, referred to climate change as a “perceived threat” in the document and tied the EPA’s goals to that of economic rather than environmental growth.
Trump has not publicly acknowledged any links to Project 2025, however his past stance on climate change does not suggest that environmental policy will be at the forefront of his concern. During his last days in office, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a framework for global climate action, according to the Department of State . This move was reversed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.
Chris Russoniello, an assistant professor in the department of geosciences at URI, is agnostic about the political landscape as it relates to his and others’ ability to practice sciences. However, Russoniello has one overarching concern about long-term climate and weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which characterizes change over long periods of time. If the new administration limits access to such data, scientists could face barriers in measuring new climate trends, Russoniello said.
“Maintaining those kinds of records is really important for us to understand what’s actually happening,” Russoniello said. “The other big thing that we’re seeing is just the availability of data, it’s something that some folks are worried about.”
Meyerson, whose invasive species research closely relates to climate change, expressed her concern for the funding available to climate research. She cited the National Science Foundation as a target for budget and funding cuts in the past.
The NSF is already on a downturn, with an 8% budget decrease in March after Biden signed a bill promising a double budget by 2027, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“It’s really concerning that any work that has to do with climate change will be targeted and not funded,” Meyerson said. “There was a time during the last [Trump] administration when we were sort of cautioned not to use the word climate change anymore, we were supposed to use different terms like environmental change.”
The offices of EPA New England, the EPA’s northeastern headquarters, looked the same on Nov. 6 as it had on Nov. 4, according to Jason Grear, a research ecologist at the EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory.
“We have our mission, we have our legislative mandates and elections don’t change those things,” Grear said.
Grear said that he and other scientists are separated from the EPA’s policy makers and regulatory decision-making processes. After working for the agency for over 20 years, Grear has seen four different presidencies and multiple administration changes.
“It takes a long time and if there are changes, it’s very subtle,” Grear said. “Most of the time I do feel that we’re pretty well shielded from it.”
This separation is important for the scientific operations at the EPA, according to Grear. Shielding scientists from these larger administration changes helps to ensure that desires and profit motives stay out of the research.
“If you believe that that’s the purpose of science and how science works then that kind of separation is a very good thing,” Grear said.
While the future of environmental policy in the U.S. remains unknown, Murdock and the other members of SAS have yet to be discouraged from their mission.
“They [SAS] want to keep on fighting and that this is something that has to be built up,” Murdock said. “It’s not for us anymore. It’s for the future of others, too. Back to climate change, we can’t give up on our Earth just because someone else says so.”