The informal complaint from the U.S. Geological Survey officials came filed just two days before President Biden’s inauguration. But it may help lay the groundwork for his new administration to swiftly undo an 11th-hour decision from President Donald Trump’s USGS director, James Reilly.
Biden’s team is hurrying to reverse dozens of Trump administration rollbacks of rules meant to confront the changing climate. On Wednesday, his administration detailed expansive plans to both wean the country from fossil fuels and restore the integrity of scientific research across the federal government after years of disregard for expertise under Trump.
One of the agencies Biden’s team will look to fix is USGS.
In late December, with just a month left in Trump’s term, Reilly issued an instructional memorandum requiring researchers to use models and data suggesting climate change will not be as dire as many scientists think. The memo was incorporated into the Interior Department’s overall operating procedures a week before Trump left office.
In their complaint, career officials at USGS said the memo was “based on his unsupported and non-peer-reviewed views” and included “fatal flaws” that agency scientists had “flagged as problematic” several times.
But Reilly, a former NASA astronaut and petroleum geologist, has urged researchers to limit forecasts to just the next two to three decades, saying it is too difficult to predict the future further than that.