Trump Administration Lets Federal Climate Preparedness Committee Expire, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Government Was Helping Americans Plan For A Warming Country

WASHINGTON. In what administration officials described as a routine matter of letting a piece of paper lapse, the Trump administration this week allowed the charter of the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment to expire, disbanding the 15-member federal panel whose entire purpose was to help Americans understand and prepare for the consequences of a warming planet.

The committee, established in 2015, had been assigned the narrow task of translating the National Climate Assessment, the federal government's exhaustive accounting of climate threats, into practical guidance for the people most likely to be flooded, scorched, or otherwise inconvenienced by them: farmers, city planners, water utilities, and coastal homeowners. With the charter unrenewed, that guidance will now reach no one, an outcome the administration characterized as a modest reduction in bureaucratic overhead.

"The National Climate Assessment will still be produced," said a source within the administration, noting that the lengthy document cataloguing the precise ways the country is projected to become less habitable would continue to be compiled, printed, and placed somewhere. "We simply saw no reason to also fund a group whose job was to make sure anyone did anything about it."

Officials stressed that the assessment itself, mandated by Congress under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, remained fully intact, and that Americans were welcome to read its projections of rising seas, longer droughts, and failing crops before proceeding with no organized assistance of any kind. The move was consistent with the posture of a president who had repeatedly called climate change a hoax, and for whom a standing federal committee premised on its reality had represented a small but persistent contradiction. The 15 disbanded scientists, economists, and local officials, who had served without pay, were thanked for their efforts and told those efforts would now stop.

At press time, administration sources confirmed that the assessment's chapter on extreme heat had been received, reviewed, and filed in a building with working air conditioning.