The climate crisis isn’t a far-off threat, it’s here, and current leaders met it with denial, delay, and erasure. From the start, the Trump administration has dismissed climate change as a hoax, a talking point that played well at rallies but came at a steep national cost. While his administration’s actions have sometimes contradicted that stance, the inconsistency has only sown confusion, eroded public trust, and set the tone for inaction.
Nowhere is this more painfully clear than in the wake of the July 4th Central Texas floods. After Hurricane-season rains dumped unprecedented water across Kerr County, killing over 130 people and destroying thousands of buildings, it took 72 hours for FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue teams to be deployed. That delay, forced by Secretary Noem’s mandate that any FEMA expense over $100,000 required her sign-off, cost precious time for search, rescue, and relief.
FEMA had shed one-fifth of its workforce, halted preparedness training, cut key grants for rural counties, and throttled interagency communication to push states to assume burdens previously managed federally. This strategy actively hampered frontline efforts when they were needed most, pushing individuals already in crisis into deeper chaos.
That same month, the EPA under Trump drafted a proposal to rescind its 2009 “endangerment finding” declaring greenhouse gases hazardous to human health and welfare. The new proposal argues that the Clean Air Act does not grant the agency such authority, which is an outright assault and repudiation of the nation’s climate crisis. If finalized, the EPA’s ability to regulate tailpipe emissions, power plant pollution, and industrial CO₂ essentially vanishes. To be clear, the EPA is stripping environmental safeguards by removing the foundational legal justification. Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator, claimed, “If finalized, today’s announcement would amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”
Compounding these blows, the current administration has shut down the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s website, wiping out access to all five National Climate Assessment reports and associated data. These congressionally mandated, peer-reviewed assessments are vital for communities and local governments to understand climate threats, from flood maps to heatwave projections. Deleting them obscures critical knowledge that can save lives and livelihoods. As one former NOAA employee put it, “Federal climate science is being systematically erased.”
And per usual, low-income communities, people of color, and those in climate-vulnerable areas will pay the price. When FEMA falters and climate rules vanish, those without political reach or financial reserves are hit hardest.
We need more than outrage. We need accountability. We need a climate policy built on science and transparency, not erasure. Silence in the face of rising waters, burning forests, and disappearing science is complicity.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once warned, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there “is” such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”
