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The cuts to a Princeton University program come as the Trump administration has been reviewing an array of research grants related to global warming.
- April 9, 2025Updated 1:38 p.m. ET
The Trump administration announced it is cutting nearly $4 million in federal funding for climate change research at Princeton University, saying that the work promoted “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and increased “climate anxiety” among young Americans.
The cuts to programs that study topics like sea-level rise and coastal flooding were announced Tuesday by the Commerce Department, which houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s premier climate science agencies. They come after federal agencies including NASA and the Energy Department announced last week that they would pause dozens of research grants at Princeton.
NOAA currently spends roughly $220 million per year funding climate research, but the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to pare back those efforts.
Among the latest cuts was funding for the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, a collaboration between NOAA and Princeton that focuses on improving computer models that show how the ocean and atmosphere are changing. One of the program’s meteorologists, Syukuro Manabe, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 for his work on modeling Earth’s climate and predicting the effects of global warming.
In pulling funding for the program, the Commerce Department said that the collaboration “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” The agency also said it would stop funding the program’s educational initiatives targeted at students in kindergarten through high school students.
