WASHINGTON – Virginia Burkett has spent her career studying climate change with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), conducting research into the effects of global warming on our planet. But when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, his administration sought to downplay the impact of climate change. The administration cut funding, axed programs, and interfered with agency reports. Burkett spoke out against these actions, and the administration punished her with a demotion. Now Burkett has filed a whistleblower complaint to seek better workplace protections for government scientists ahead of this November’s presidential election.
“This is not about what happened to me,” Burkett told Nature in a detailed report published last Wednesday. “It’s about what could happen to others.”
Virginia Burkett [US Geological Survey]
According to Nature‘s report, Burkett was removed from her post as a scientist and moved into a policy position under a political appointee after she spoke out about the administration’s misrepresentations to Congress about the scale of cuts to USGS’s climate research.
This involuntary transfer violated rules intended to protect civil servants. The Office of the Inspector General issued a report in 2018 that found the administration had reassigned at least 27 “senior executives” like Burkett without following procedures. The administration’s “failure to document its decisions… resulted in the perception by a majority of the affected [Senior Executive Service] members that the reassignments were prompted by political or punitive reasons, or were related to their proximity to retirement.”
Burkett managed to fight the reassignment, but had to accept a demotion. (Burkett has since been promoted again to chief scientist for climate and land use with the USGS under the Biden administration.)
Burkett was also a co-chair of a White House panel that produces a report every four years, the National Climate Assessment. After the multi-agency panel submitted the final report in 2018, the Trump administration attempted to make changes to the report in line with the administration’s political positions – in particular, removing from the report that global warming could be halted if we emitted fewer greenhouse gasses. When Burkett spoke out against these attempts to interfere with the scientific findings of the report, she was replaced as co-chair.
The agencies did not respond to Nature’s request for comment, and former Trump administration officials claimed to not recall Burkett’s situation.
Seal of the US Geological Survey
Now Burkett has filed a 200-page whistleblower complaint alleging “abuse of authority and gross mismanagement” under the Trump administration. Instead of seeking monetary damages, Burkett is seeking institutional reforms: “new rules for interior-department political appointees involved in scientific communications; new procedures for scientists who want to file anti-harassment complaints; and reforms to the structure and operation of a panel that is supposed to ensure that the rights of career government employees are respected,” as Nature reports.
“I don’t want to be here,” says Burkett, “but if not me, who?”
Burkett’s story is one individual’s experience of the clashing philosophies regarding executive branch agencies. In one philosophy, which has long been the prevailing view, civil servants are hired and work with considerable autonomy from the political branches in order to ensure independent judgment and integrity within the government. In the other, all parts of the executive branch should be responsive to the political demands of the president, sometimes called the “theory of the unitary executive.”
Concentrating more power in the hands of the executive, including wide-ranging powers to hire political loyalists into positions currently part of the apolitical civil service procedure, has been a major goal of Donald Trump since the time of his previous administration. It is a major feature of Project 2025, the conservative policy plan authored in part by alumni of the Trump administration.
At the same time that the conservative movement seeks to make the federal workforce into a spoils program for political loyalists, conservative judges in the judiciary and especially the Supreme Court have sought to curtail the independent authority of federal agencies like the USGS. In recent Supreme Court cases like West Virginia vs. EPA and Loper-Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo, the Court has ruled against the ability for agencies to regulate their spheres of authority, especially when it comes to environmental regulations like protecting against air pollution or overfishing.
The Biden administration is currently attempting to institute a new set of rules that would protect scientists like Burkett, but many agencies have not yet implemented these policies despite a January 2024 deadline. Further, because those policies are simply model language created by a presidential administration, it would be just as easy for Trump to overturn them should he win in November as it was for Biden to create them after he won in 2020. Burkett and the organization that represents her, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, fear the Biden administration’s rules won’t be enough.
Melting glaciers [makabera, Pixabay]
The modern Pagan movement has a long association with the environmental movement, given that many Pagan religions are focused on worship of the Earth. The foundation of the environmental movement is a sound scientific understanding of our world and the changes that are happening to it, and sound science requires independent judgment of the evidence. Regardless of how this November’s election turns out, scientists must have the kinds of workplace protections sought by Burkett, or their research will only be reliable insofar as it matches the desires of politicians.
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