By: Izzy Pacenza, Shannan Lenke Stoll, and Abby Chernila
The day before Nepal and Tibet suffered catastrophic flooding due to glacial collapse, the Trump administration issued a proposal that would weaken the role of the most recent National Climate Assessment (NCA) in federal policy and planning. On August 25, 2026, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USCGRP) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a proposal to amend the 5th NCA, issued in 2023, to include caveats calling the study’s worst-case climate projections “implausible.”
This proposal is part of the federal government’s broader shift away from a precautionary approach to climate change, which includes worst-case scenario planning as an aspect of robust climate preparedness. The NCAs are the government’s most comprehensive reports on climate change and use a range of models and emissions scenarios to create projections that help policymakers, researchers, local officials, and communities prepare for future climate impacts. The projections the proposal targets imagine a future with the highest carbon dioxide emissions and no mitigation, a scenario based on the upper limits of climate impacts given the most extreme circumstances. The 5th NCA also incorporates projections imagining the opposite extreme, where a great reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric carbon dioxide removal occur. The USCGRP and OSTP proposal does not prescribe a caveat for this latter projection, however.
As the administration rewrites climate projections made almost three years ago, they are also crippling our ability to continue evaluating climate impacts in the future. In April 2025, the administration halted work on the 6th NCA set to be released in 2028 and dismissed all of the public servants drafting it. Three months later, the USGCRP’s entire website went dark, taking with it the primary portal for public access to all existing NCAs. As climate science develops and we cross new climate thresholds, findings from years ago become less relevant and new, more accurate findings are more important than ever. The continued provisioning of information like the NCAs that are tailored to the science and circumstances of the moment is integral to moving forward in a climate-impacted world.
We encourage you to submit a public comment on this proposal before the deadline on September 9, 2026. For information on how to submit an effective public comment, visit EDGI’s Public Comment Initiative.