Former NASA Employee Issues Desperate Plea to Head of Agency

"Last year, the Trump administration declared war on climate science. In the first two weeks of Trump's second term, the administration started scrubbing critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites and withdrew the United States from international organizations dedicated to combating climate change, dismissing them as a "waste of taxpayer dollars." Trump himself has dismissed climate science as " woke," while vowing to " drill, baby, drill " for fossil fuels as our planet stands at the edge of a climate disaster."

"Nowhere has that regressive agenda been felt more than at NASA. The agency announced in July that thousands of employees had accepted a controversial deferred resignation program, losing roughly 20 percent of its workforce as a result. In August, the Trump administration instructed NASA employees to come up with plans to terminate two major missions, including the premature destruction of a greenhouse gas-observing space satellite, dubbed Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), which is still collecting " exceptionally high quality " data while orbiting the Earth."

The Trump administration removed environmental datasets from federal websites and withdrew the United States from international climate organizations while promoting expanded fossil-fuel development. The administration characterized climate science as "woke" and advocated aggressive drilling policies. NASA lost roughly 20 percent of its workforce after thousands accepted a deferred resignation program. The administration directed NASA to plan termination of major Earth-observing missions, including OCO-2, despite that satellite’s continued collection of exceptionally high-quality greenhouse-gas data. Former NASA staffers warned that ending these missions would undermine critical climate observations, and NASA is seeking partnerships to continue some Earth science operations.

Read at Futurism