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Where have all the scientists gone?
According to federal employment data, over the last four years, many of the ones employed by the government quit, retired, or moved to other agencies. Scientists say the exodus occurred largely because of the Trump administration’s hostility toward science.
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The numbers are even worse at the United States Department of Agriculture. During the 2019 fiscal year, over one-third of staff members left the agency’s Economic Research Service and its National Institute of Food and Agriculture (that’s about 200 employees). Most of the losses occurred after the Trump administration moved the scientists’ jobs from Washington, D.C. to Kansas City.
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Biden s transition team found that there was a gutting of the federal workforce under Trump.
The depleted staff at federal agencies could hurt Biden s policy priorities.
The new administration is scrambling to make government work cool again.
Joel Clement was a veteran Interior Department official studying the way climate change impacted Native American tribes in Alaska when he got a sudden job reassignment from the new Trump administration.
He would be moving, he was surprised to learn in June 2017, to the department s accounting office tasked with collecting royalty checks from fossil fuel companies.
For Biden, protecting the environment means filling vacant science jobs
Laura Dodson, an economist and union official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says federal environmental research could be hobbled for years by the loss of experienced scientists during the Trump administration.
(Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)
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Polluting factories go uninspected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Leadership positions sit vacant at the U.S. Geological Survey’s climate science centers. And U.S. Department of Agriculture research into environmental issues important to farmers is unfinished.
The ranks of scientists who carry out environmental research, enforcement and other jobs fell in several agencies sharply in some cases under President Trump, federal data shows. Veteran staffers say many workers retired, quit or moved to other agencies amid pressure from an administration they regarded as hostile to science and beholden to industry.
Published: Tuesday, February 2, 2021 Linda Birnbaum (L) and Lisa Jackson (R) Photo credit: Louie Palu/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
Linda Birnbaum (left) left her job leading the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences during the Trump administration. The Biden administration faces the challenge of refilling the ranks of scientists, like her, who left the federal government during the Trump era. Birnbaum is pictured in this 2011 file photo next to then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson (right) at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing. Louie Palu/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
Linda Birnbaum would have continued to direct the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, but she says she was tired of being so tightly controlled.