We Found a Work Around to Trump Defunding Science

Opinion|My Research Under Trump Started Unraveling With a Text That Read, ‘Call Me’

It started with a text in late January: “Call me.”

I was in the Sonoran Desert, fleeing the Pacific Northwest’s winter gloom, and I pulled into a gas station to make the call.

“All work on the National Nature Assessment is to stop,” a Trump White House representative on the other end said. “Immediately.”

For over two years, nearly 200 other scientists and I had been working on the first full accounting of nature in America: an extensive report on its role in our health, economy and well-being. Now, with the revoking of a Biden executive order that called for the assessment, it was seemingly over.

Like thousands of scientists who have landed in the cross hairs of politics since President Trump took office again, my colleagues and I felt the deep pain of this sudden cancellation. I don’t believe we were singled out. We were just collateral damage in a broader political battle that reversed a dozen Biden executive orders.

Somewhere between the desert horizon and the chorus of the U2 song “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” looping in my mind, it hit me: I had to shake off the despair and get myself together. The project needed to continue. And so with encouragement from friends and mentors, my collaborators and I began reaching out — to potential partners, funders and publishers.

What we found wasn’t just financial support. It was energy. It was courage. People understood the urgency and the opportunity. And together, we began to reimagine the work not just as a continuation of what had been cut short but also as something new and more alive. A rigorous, independent effort to tell the story of nature in America.