Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Major · Needs Congress

Repeal or reform the Global Change Research Act of 1990

Attempted

439 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Revisit and repeal or reform outdated environmental statutes. A high priority should be the repeal or reform of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which has been misused for political purposes.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    OSTP, acting for USGCRP, proposed an amendment to the Fifth National Climate Assessment on the federal use of high-emissions-pathway results — the administration reshaping the Act's product administratively. No bill to repeal or amend the Act has been introduced.

  2. Attempted

    Executive workaround, not legislation: the administration dismissed the roughly 400 authors of the Sixth National Climate Assessment by memo saying the report's scope was being "reevaluated", having cut USGCRP's coordinating staff earlier in April. The Act, which requires the assessment every four years, is unchanged.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Negative search for the legislative ask (2026-08-27): a search of the 18,433 bill titles we keep and search for “Global Change Research”, “climate assessment” and “USGCRP” found none. Federal Register full-text “Global Change Research” since 2025-01-20: only the OSTP notice above and unrelated rules.
  • attempted confirmed in a consistency review under the rule that executive action on an ask needing Congress is attempted if it routes around the statute and partial if it eliminates what embodies it: dismissing the assessment’s authors, cutting USGCRP staff and proposing an amendment to NCA5 all work around the Global Change Research Act while leaving the statute, its four-yearly assessment requirement and USGCRP itself in place. Nothing the executive did rescinds a regulation that embodies the Act, which is what would make it partial.
  • No Primary source for the April 2025 dismissals was found: globalchange.gov no longer resolves (DNS failure on 2026-08-27), and the dismissal memo is not on whitehouse.gov or the Federal Register. NPR’s report (https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5380816/climate-assessment-authors-released) timed out on fetch — lead.
Action
repeal
Object
Global Change Research Act of 1990
ID
1176