It’s here! After months of delay, the council tasked by President Trump to review the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released its final report earlier this month. 

If you’re not a disaster policy nerd like we are, here’s some quick background.

Up until the founding of FEMA in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, disaster response in the United States was largely disorganized and reactive. The agency has since gone through several major updates. Passage of the Robert T. Stafford Act in 1988 established the formal mechanism for disaster declarations and federal disaster response, while in the years following the 9/11 attacks FEMA transitioned from an independent cabinet agency to part of the newly established Department of Homeland Security. 

Recently, FEMA has come under intense scrutiny from the second Trump administration for being seen as ineffective, bureaucratic, and in some cases politically biased against him. While FEMA has had issues in the past related to delayed response times and survivors receiving aid (and criticism with how it handled Hurricane Maria), reports show that many of these issues may be related to an increase in major disasters due to climate change, as well as a lack of regular training, sufficient funding, and adequate staffing – rather than structural issues with the agency. In addition, traditionally “red” states (like Texas, Louisiana, and Florida) typically receive more FEMA funding due to the amount of disasters they experience, so claims of political bias are largely unfounded. 

Yet when Trump took office for the second time, there were calls to get rid of FEMA altogether. However, after pushback from citizens and lawmakers and several major disasters, the aforementioned council has opted to avoid recommending completely dismantling the agency. Instead, the council proposes major changes to the way FEMA operates (the council repeatedly refers to a “transformed agency”), via ten general recommendations. Here’s our quick snapshot of the good, the bad, and the ugly of these recommendations, with more detail below:

• The Good: An emphasis on mitigation and streamlining the application process for disaster survivors, along with a focus on getting money to states and survivors quicker.
• The Bad: Shrinking and privatizing most of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), while slashing overall federal funding for disaster response and recovery.
• The Ugly: An unrealistically short timeline for implementing recommendations in the report, as well as a reductionist approach to how disasters enact damage.

Also, a quick note on the United States’ approach to disasters: there is generally an overemphasis on acute economic impacts, and not what they do to systems as a whole long-term. As many disaster researchers will tell you, while hazards can be natural, disasters are not. Disasters are the result of hazards adversely impacting people and their communities due to decisions that increase vulnerability and risk exposure. If we limit our approach to disaster recovery to include only economies and infrastructure, we’ll tend to overlook other critical factors, like public health, social connection, and community wellbeing, that contribute to these vulnerabilities. Just because a house has been rebuilt or power has been restored does not mean recovery has been achieved. Before we implement sweeping changes to the agency responsible for disaster response, it’s important that we as a nation consider this in our approach to disasters.

With that aside, onto the deeper dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of the review council’s report.

The Good

First, the council re-emphasizes FEMA’s core mission of “[reducing] the loss of life and property and [protecting] the Nation from all hazards”, with the guiding principle of disaster response being “locally executed, state or tribally managed, and federally supported”. This is in line with the survivor-led response approach that many local recovery groups have recommended. Communities have the local knowledge and boots-on-the-ground presence needed to ensure that recovery efforts are appropriate for their situations and contexts, but often lack the funding to implement tailored solutions. The council suggests that FEMA strengthen regional coordination, which could in turn support community- and survivor-led response. 

Another positive is the council’s emphasis on rapid mitigation and hardening support to increase efficiency and prevent damage from future disasters. This includes modernizing the federal disaster response by implementing the National Resilience Strategy and updating flood risk information and land use to prevent building in flood plains, both common-sense solutions that can prevent the worst damage from disasters before they even occur. They additionally recommend a two-phase program that would replace the Hazard Grant Mitigation Program (HGMP) with a new program designed to more rapidly distribute federal funding to states (the first 5% of federal funds within the first 30 days following a disaster declaration, followed by an additional 10% within six months). The council calls this new program the “Refined Risk Reduction” Program (R3P), and could potentially address issues survivors have brought up with administrative burden around disaster aid, such as by modifying the Individual Assistance Program and consolidating relief applications into a single direct payment program. There are also specific relief allocations for renters (who often get left out of recovery discussions), including the equivalent of three to six months of rent.

Finally, a recommendation could be either positive or negative (depending at least partially on the details of implementation) is changing how surviving homeowners get reimbursed for individual assistance, including how the amounts are calculated. Currently, home repair assistance payments are capped at $25,000 and based on loss estimates, regardless of property value. The council suggests changing this cap to no more than 15% of the home valuation (so a home valued at $250,000 would qualify for a maximum payment of $37,500), but expanding the purpose of such payments to cover everything from home repairs to funeral costs – i.e., requiring the payments to stretch further than they do currently. Another issue is that FEMA funding has been found to favor wealthier individuals, and basing funding on home valuation has the potential to further drive disparities in aid. Supplemental funding opportunities and/or proactive aid and assistance for lower-income families could potentially reduce this risk.

The Bad

Perhaps the most concerning recommendation of the council is its call for a “lean FEMA workforce”. While the council is less aggressive overall in demanding FEMA staffing reductions than previous drafts (and now just calls for a strategic review of requirements to “determine appropriate staffing levels”), further staffing reductions could exacerbate issues we’re already seeing with FEMA from previous personnel cuts. Disaster survivors have also condemned further FEMA staffing cuts. The council also suggests adjusting how insurance rates are calculated under the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and shifting more flood insurance policies to private markets, which could prohibitively increase premiums, decrease regulation, and lead to more uninsurance and underinsurance in risk-prone areas unless there are appropriate safety measures in place. 

Finally, the council recommends decreasing the overall federal share of disaster assistance funding from 75–100% to 50–75% of costs, with states expected to cover the rest. Many states do not have resources to cover the difference – at least in the near term. With a sufficient transition period, though, more heavily weighting state responsibility for disaster aid may increase sustainability in the long term given that the Disaster Relief Fund repeatedly runs low on funds, and that there are concerns with fund depletion as disasters continue to increase in frequency and severity. Another concern is the council’s prioritization of “high performing states”. While this would encourage more states to have hazard mitigation plans in place, it could result in biased decision-making that would favor certain states, and may leave states with fewer financial resources or rare disaster occurrence with less support when it’s most needed.

The Ugly

The biggest overall issue with the council’s suggestions is that they recommend a 2–3 year timeline for states and tribal governments to prepare their fiscal and physical resources to lead disaster response efforts (rather than relying on FEMA). This is an unrealistic timeline, as many states do not currently have sufficient emergency management resources, legislation to establish and support relief funding, or identified revenue streams to pay for the increased cost-share for states. And on top of that, some state governments (like Texas) only meet every two years, making the 2-3 year timeline impossible. Another issue with the council is the apparent bias in its makeup. While it did include representatives with leadership and emergency management experience from hard-hit states like Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia, there was a notable lack of members from other disaster-prone parts of the country, like California.

Another problem is the council’s recommendation of using a parametric insurance program to replace FEMA’s current Public Assistance Program (the main funding source for community-level disaster recovery). Parametric insurance is a type of insurance where payments are disbursed almost immediately following certain trigger events, and while it has demonstrated potential in rapidly distributing funds after certain hazardous events, there are too many variables to feasibly consider replacing the entire Public Assistance Program in 2-3 years. For example, the council includes an example of determining payment amounts by hurricane category (e.g.,: a Category 2 hurricane would disburse less funds than a Category 4). However, hurricane categories are based on wind speed alone, and hurricanes with weaker winds can still do extensive damage through other means, like storm surge and rainfall (Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 are two such examples). These complexities would have to be accounted for when establishing the thresholds of a parametric insurance framework, and without rigorous pilot testing, runs the risk of over or underpaying states following disasters.

One final concern is the council made no mention whatsoever of the BRIC (Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities) grant program. This absence from the report likely means BRIC is not a priority for current leadership, despite it being one of the largest sources for proactive mitigation funding for states and communities. BRIC has been the subject of much consternation following its abrupt cancellation in April of 2025 and its later reinstatement in March of 2026 (following a lawsuit from several states). However, there is now a heavy focus on “shovel-ready projects” (i.e. physical infrastructure projects that have already been planned out). While this sounds good for efficiency, as we noted earlier, not all infrastructure critical to community wellbeing and recovery is physical and “shovel-ready”. Things like social and public health infrastructure are just as important for disaster recovery, but tend to be overlooked in recovery efforts. In limiting BRIC funding to these types of projects, states and local governments will be unable to be truly proactive in their mitigation efforts to prevent future damage from disasters. 

Conclusion

The review council’s recommendations are not as bad as they could have been and FEMA’s continued existence seems to be safe (for now). Indeed, many of the recommendations could yield positive results, especially when it comes to reducing the burden and obstacles that survivors face in getting help. However, some of the recommendations (like using parametric insurance methods, reducing state assistance, and attempting to implement sweeping changes over a fast 2–3 year timeline) could pose problems for states, communities, and survivors, and a longer transition period with pilot testing will be needed to ensure these changes happen efficiently and effectively. 

In the mid-1990s, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin developed lithium iron phosphate, the cathode chemistry that would come to dominate the global electric vehicle battery market. The technology was American. A few years later, A123 Systems, a start-up spun out of MIT, commercialized it, building what was then the largest lithium-ion battery factory in North America with the help of a $249 million Department of Energy grant. The technology worked. The company had customers, including several leading automakers.

But the broader ecosystem was not there: EV demand materialized far more slowly than projected, manufacturing costs remained high without the scale to drive them down, and no institutional mechanism existed to bridge the gap between a working technology and a commercially viable industry. The company received substantial public funding, but a single grant, however large, cannot substitute for the sustained ecosystem support at the early and scale-up stages that modern industrial production requires. A123 filed for bankruptcy in 2012. In 2013, China’s Wanxiang Group acquired it.

Meanwhile, China was building that ecosystem. The government launched EV battery subsidies in 2009, mandated technology transfer from foreign automakers, and designated advanced batteries as a strategic priority under Made in China 2025. Chinese firm CATL, founded in 2011, scaled the same lithium iron phosphate chemistry that American researchers had invented and A123 had tried to commercialize. By 2017, CATL was the world’s largest battery producer. Today it holds roughly 38 percent of the global market, with China as a whole responsible for nearly 80 percent of global EV battery cell production. BYD, another Chinese manufacturer, outsold Tesla in 2025 by nearly three to one (4.6 million vehicles versus 1.6 million), drawing on its expertise in battery manufacturing. The chemistry was ours; the industry is theirs.

This is not an isolated story. It is a pattern that repeats across the sectors most critical to American economic and national security. China controls over 60 percent of global rare earth mining and 90 percent of processing; MP Materials operates the only active rare earth mine in the United States. The solid rocket motor supply chain, which is essential to America’s nuclear deterrent and missile defense, has collapsed from six qualified domestic suppliers in the 1990s to two today. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 while the United States installed 34,000, a disparity that has accelerated since Covid. We now import over half of our active pharmaceutical ingredients, and Chinese companies now run nearly a third of global clinical trials, up from just 5 percent a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, China now accounts for 35 percent of global manufacturing volume (three times the American share) while leading in research and development in sixty-six of seventy-four tracked technology areas.

These figures are not, of course, mere abstract facts; they represent genuine economic and employment realities: for example, the automotive sector alone supports nearly eleven million American jobs. They also carry serious security implications: a defense-industrial base that cannot surge production, pharmaceutical supply chains dependent on geopolitical rivals, and critical minerals choke points that give Beijing leverage over American technology.

Read more in American Affairs.

The energy affordability crisis is hitting American communities hard, and nowhere is the pressure more acute than at the state and local level. Leaders are responding to the needs of their constituents while navigating a tangle of barriers—ranging from project development hurdles to political and social constraints. Tackling these challenges requires a holistic approach, as addressing one barrier—whether it’s clean energy permitting, financing, or supply chains—without the others won’t work.

To tune into the action on the ground, FAS convened practitioners, state and local officials, advocates, and policy experts to discuss what it will actually take to deploy clean energy faster, modernize electricity systems, and lower costs for households. 

We heard about lots of efforts underway in city halls and state capitals across the country, many of which are aligned with our recently released Clean Energy for Local and State Governments (CELS) playbook and other recent recommendations for capacity support and innovation at the state and local level. One message came through clearly: while barriers are real, so are the opportunities. Across the conversation, participants identified practical, high-impact levers that states and cities can use right now. 

The ideas were so good we wanted to share them far and wide—read below for more. 

Building capacity for ambition by maximizing what we already have

States and cities have good ideas—and motivation—to bring down electricity prices. But the reality is more complicated. Institutional and political constraints strongly shape the pace and scope of their desired reforms. State and local governments face legal and administrative limitations, including state-level restrictions related to financing, building codes, and utility authority. Many cities (and states!) operate with limited staff and budgetary resources. Lack of capacity makes it difficult to implement ambitious energy policies – even when there’s political will. 

Expanding this capacity is a path to better government and lower prices—and the first step towards rebuilding trust in government as a vehicle to do big things. Resources are a not-insignificant part of being able to do those big things, but of course, it’s not always possible to hire whole new teams of staff or stand up new programs. It’s also not always necessary!

We heard from state and local leaders across the county about how they’re getting creative with existing resources to carry out their promises to constituents. Permitting processes, for example, are an oft-cited barrier to increasing energy supply and driving down electricity prices. With little meaningful change at the federal level, states are looking for ways to improve their own permitting pipelines. 

Pennsylvania has led on this front by clarifying and centralizing permitting authority across agencies, establishing clear timelines and accountability for permit reviews, and digitalizing processes to cut down on administrative burden. Making progress didn’t require building whole new teams or throwing out environmental protections—instead, Pennsylvania made the permitting process clearer, more consistent, and more predictable to increase certainty for solar developers without increasing impact.

Identifying capacity investments with a high return like these are useful—not just for improving delivery, but getting near-term wins that governments can point to to build trust with constituents and provide proof of concept. The think tank and advocacy community can help by identifying creative solutions to increase government capacity at low cost and better leverage existing capacity. 

PUCs, PUCs, PUCs!

We heard a lot of anecdotes about increased attention on Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) given how hard utility bills are hitting constituents. 

Most critical decisions affecting utility bills occur in regulatory proceedings—rate cases and planning dockets in front of PUCs. However, these processes are often technically complex and dominated by utilities, which typically have significantly more resources and information than governments or community members. States and local governments identified help engaging with PUCs—through more capacity and increased data tranparency—as a key opportunity to reduce energy costs and make other clean energy and affordability programs work. 

Capacity at PUCs themselves also came up as a major barrier and opportunity. States can appropriate additional funds to PUCs to help them access adequate staff and technical expertise, or can establish intervenor compensation funds to help level the playing field in rate cases. Ann Arbor, Michigan reported saving ratepayers over $1 billion through interventions in electric and gas cases, in part by investing in legal and technical support for intervenors. Municipalities in Wisconsin, organized under the Wisconsin Local Government Climate Coalition, also banded together to intervene before the Public Service Commission and advocate collectively.

The advocacy community can help as well. By training intervenors, pressuring utilities to increase transparency or provide additional, and supporting local and state governments’ ability to intervene in rate cases, they can help provide key perspectives and evidence to inform PUC decisionmaking. 

Mind the (financing) gap

Unsurprisingly, state leaders identified the cliff in federal financial support for projects as a reason it is harder to implement state and local clean energy programs. 

Getting creative with financing can help state governments stretch existing funds or partner with peers or community organizations. States can use tools like revolving loan funds to support pre-development and construction financing, pooled lending authorities, or loan guarantees to reduce interest rates. Mechanisms that merge public and private financing capacities or improve transparency and certainty around project development can help public dollars go further. 

States and local governments are hungry for help using creative financing mechanisms. For example, how can municipalities play in using public debt to finance projects and reduce costs? This is a major place where the advocacy community can help. 

Don’t be afraid to experiment!

Policymakers were excited about experimenting with new policies that emphasize affordability, resilience, and economic benefits and in turn broaden political support for clean energy initiatives. One example discussed was the Utah Community Clean Energy Program, a first-of-its-kind opt-out clean energy procurement model created through collaboration between 19 Utah communities and Rocky Mountain Power. Approved by the Utah Public Service Commission in March 2026, the program allows participating customers to support new utility-scale clean energy resources through a modest monthly charge, with income-qualified households eligible to participate for free and all customers able to opt out at any time.

This work is already happening and not just in the areas highlighted here. Creating structures for policymakers to share successes and creative ideas can help multiply wins across the country. Collaboration can also support officials working in politically or institutionally constrained environments, where proof of concept and policy examples can help build momentum. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments offers one example of how regional institutions can pool resources to accelerate local action. Through its regional environment fund, the COG supports the design and coordination of climate initiatives that signal aggregate demand across members, like fleet electrification or emissions reductions. It then follows up with implementation guides, technical assistance, and best practices that local governments can adapt. 

There is a lot of momentum in utility operation and regulation to reexamine  the way we’ve always done things. Political will from state or local leadership can help question old ideas and advance new ideas to benefit the public. Combined with successful implementation experiments above, further experimentation and research can drive progress and support for state-level  climate leadership. 

Over the past few months, the Trump administration has been laying the foundation to expand the use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) for energy infrastructure and supply chains. This started back in March when the Trump administration issued an Executive Order extending to the Department of Energy (DOE) the authority to directly engage in contract allocation for energy needs under DPA Title I. 

A month later, on April 20th, the Trump administration released a series of Presidential Memoranda establishing presidential determinations for grid infrastructure, equipment, and supply chain capacity; large-scale energy and energy related infrastructure; natural gas infrastructure; coal supply chains and baseload power generation capacity; and domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity and delegating DPA Section 303 authorities to DOE. These actions are reminiscent of the series of presidential determinations that the Biden administration issued in June 2022 for energy materials and technologies, which also included transformers and electric power grid components. 

So what does this all mean and why does it matter?

DPA Doing the Heavy Lifting

The DPA grants the President a unique set of authorities designed to direct, expand, and expedite the domestic industrial base for materials, technologies, and energy crucial to national defense when the private sector cannot be expected to meet the nation’s needs on its own. For example, DPA authority was used during the COVID-19 pandemic to expand production of medical supplies and vaccines. 

DPA has a few titles that give different powers when invoked, with Title I and Title III being the most frequently used. Title I gives the President power to require private companies and contractors to prioritize certain contracts and orders over others for national defense purposes, including for materials, equipment, and services needed to “maximize domestic energy supply”. Using Title I, the government can, for example, require that manufacturers prioritize orders for the federal government or domestic customers over foreign exports.   

Title III gives the President powers to expand domestic production and supply of goods, materials, and critical technologies needed for national defense and allows the President to use an array of financial mechanisms to do so. To use Title III authorities, the President must first issue a presidential determination ascertaining that the requirements to use the authority have been met and then delegate the authority to an agency to implement. Hence, the series of presidential determinations issued last week. 

Breaking the Bottlenecks 

Notably, both the Trump and Biden administrations have issued presidential determinations to address vulnerabilities in grid component supply chains. The Trump administration’s determination states that the United States’ deteriorating grid infrastructure, constrained by long lead times and shortages of grid components, is detrimental to national defense; industry cannot alleviate these supply chain bottlenecks without government intervention; and the authorities provided in DPA Section 303 are “the most cost-effective, expedient, and practical alternative methods for meeting this need”. DPA Section 303 authorities invoked by Trump include “purchases, purchase commitments, financial support for the development of production capabilities, or other action” necessary to alleviate supply chain vulnerabilities. 

Through these DPA determinations, the Trump administration is explicitly tying the U.S. energy system to national security and making energy supply chains a national priority. In the context of grid supply chains, this is absolutely crucial given domestic shortages of components like transformers and breakers and an overreliance on imported goods in a time of geopolitical competition and fracturing relations. 

Grid equipment, however, was not the only focus of Trump’s actions. Three of the other determinations support expanding fossil fuel infrastructure for natural gas, coal, and petroleum production. The last determination, focused on “large-scale energy and energy-related infrastructure”, appears to be a catch-all for any other energy projects that the administration wants to support. The memorandum invokes Trump’s prior Executive Order 14156, which declared a “National Energy Emergency” due to the U.S.’ “current inadequate and intermittent energy supply.” This suggests that intermittent renewables like wind and solar will likely be excluded from eligibility. 

Such a large number of determinations raises questions about which ones will take priority. Can the U.S. government simultaneously support the expansion of natural gas, coal, petroleum, grid supply chains, and other large-scale energy infrastructure all at the same time? Trump’s DPA determinations explicitly direct the Secretary of Energy to implement them, adding a level of urgency and accountability. Yet, executing on all of these determinations will require significant coordination, staffing, and funding that has not yet materialized. 

Show Me the Money 

As we have written before on grid supply chains, federal policies like DPA can help correct for market failures, derisk the construction of new manufacturing facilities, and unlock faster grid modernization, but issuing a presidential determination is only the first step. Without a clear funding mechanism to implement the directives, we can only speculate where the money will come from.

Three possible sources currently exist. First, funding could come from whatever remains of the $1 billion that was appropriated in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) to carry out DPA activities. Some amount of these funds may have already been committed to the DoD and MP Materials deal, and it is unclear how much remains unallocated or what the administration plans to do with the remainder. 

The other alternative options could be FY27 appropriations or an FY27 reconciliation bill. The Department of Defense (DoD) is requesting an eye-watering $30.4 billion in DPA funding for FY27, nearly 100 times the amount appropriated by Congress for FY26. $30 billion of the requested amount is in mandatory funding, which would have to be appropriated through a budget reconciliation bill that the Trump administration is pushing for. Historically, the Pentagon has served as the manager of DPA funds, allocating funding to other agencies as necessary and directed by the White House, so while DoD is the agency requesting this funding, some amount could potentially be transferred later to DOE.

Complementing these funding sources is the $375 million in appropriations from FY26 to DOE to “enhance the domestic supply chain for the manufacture of distribution and power transformers, components, and materials, and electric grid components.” Typically only funds that Congress explicitly appropriates for DPA can be used to implement DPA authorities, but DOE could use the $375 million for supporting activities to help plan for DPA implementation (e.g. analysis and stakeholder engagement), especially since the goals of the appropriated money overlap with the goals of the DPA determination. 

Now what?

These determinations are just the beginning. Now, it will be up to the administration and Congress to either find existing funding or appropriate new funding. DOE will then need to create and follow through on an implementation plan. We at FAS will be keeping an eye on whether these developments actually materialize over the coming year.

The Office of Personnel Management has been busily reversing course on federal workforce reductions with some splashy hiring announcements. In December, it launched Tech Force, a pooled recruitment effort targeting 1,000 early-career technologists to be placed across agencies for two-year stints. In March, it stood up across-government shared certificate for project managers. It launched an Early Career Talent Network spanning five job categories. Two weeks ago, it expanded Tech Force into cybersecurity. OPM Director Scott Kupor has been explicit about his ambition: this is a “model for more centralized, efficient hiring across government.”

I’ll bite: yes, there’s a lot of promise in that! The instinct behind all of these actions builds on years of initiatives meant to create efficiencies out of the hundreds of thousands of hires made federally each here. Pooled hiring, which should include one well-designed announcement, one shared assessment, and many agencies drawing from the same pool of qualified candidates, is exactly the kind of tool the federal government should be using. I saw this up close when I was at OMB and I fully drank this Kool-Aid. The logic is compelling: (typically) the federal government processes over 22 million applications and hires over 350,000 people into public service every year. No private employer operates anywhere near that scale, which I still believe can be an asset, and pooled hiring creates the entry point to get there. 

But pooled hiring has a track record (going back several administrations), and it’s uneven. Most recently, the Biden administration championed it most ambitiously during the infrastructure surge, where OPM partnered with seven agencies and hired roughly 5,000 employees, doing things like USDA hiring 39 HR specialists off a single certificate (if this sounds underwhelming to you, trust me when I say it’s mindblowing to your average hiring manager; more explained shortly). But the same period produced plenty of pooled actions that generated duplicative work, agency foot-dragging, and candidates who aged off certificates before anyone made them an offer. FAS and others have been studying these challenges in the context of the permitting workforce surge, and the problems are structural, predictable, and repeating. Also? Solvable. 

The concept has promise but implementation has kept breaking in the same places. This piece is about why and about how to get it right, now, while there’s political will and active momentum to use it.

The Design Error at the Center of Everything

First, a quick explainer on how this actually works — because “pooled hiring” gets used loosely and the mechanics matter. A pooled hiring action is a competitive job announcement run either by OPM centrally or by a lead agency on behalf of multiple agencies and intended to fill multiple open positions in multiple agencies. Instead of each agency posting its own announcement, recruiting its own applicants, and running its own assessment, one announcement goes out, one applicant pool forms, and one assessment process screens candidates into a shared certificate of eligibles (government-speak for a ranked list of candidates that agencies can choose from). Agencies that have signed on to participate can then make selections from that certificate without having to run their own action from scratch. OPM-run actions (like the current Tech Force or the project manager cert) work the same way, just with OPM as the lead rather than a single agency. Either way, the cert is the output: a ranked list of candidates who have been assessed as qualified, available to any participating agency to hire from without having to solicit new resumes, review their qualifications, administer assessments, or other tedious parts of the hiring process.

That’s the theory. 

The shared certificate is where most implementations stop. Agencies get a screened list and then do their own thing — their own interviews, on their own timelines, with their own offer processes. Or maybe they don’t, even when they said they would! The coordination ends at the cert. Everything downstream remains fully siloed at each agency.

This is far from the ideal that most policymakers have in mind and what many private employers do. A genuine pooled hiring action pools the whole pipeline. Recruitment, assessment, interviewing, and offers — all coordinated, all running in parallel across participating agencies. That doesn’t work for every role, but in surge situations, or for roles where agencies make dozens of hires of the same roles every year, it’s great. Agencies don’t just agree to draw from the same pool. They show up on the same interviewing days. They make offers on the same compressed timeline. Candidates who applied once get considered by many agencies simultaneously with each running its own slow-motion version of the process.

Almost nothing the federal government currently calls “pooled hiring” actually does this. The new OPM actions are no exception. Tech Force is better marketed than previous efforts, and the private-sector partnerships are genuinely new. But the selection and offer stages remain siloed at each agency and I’ll be very curious if they make selections. That’s the design flaw everything else flows from.

What Breaks When You Don’t Fix the Design

When I was at OMB, we saw these failure modes up close, in what were probably deeply frustrating meetings with the valiant program team as we learned where the seams were. Some things we saw:

Pooled hiring worked when it was a clear administration priority and had OPM and OMB supplementation. Early indicators suggest that Tech Force has success because it’s clear that the administration, the OPM director, and OPM staff are both giving it attention and smoothing implementation behind the scenes.  That’s good for proof of concept, but it doesn’t show the weaknesses that can emerge when administration accountability doesn’t hold agencies to delivery on innovation hiring methods. 

Agencies didn’t trust screening they didn’t run. OPM’s own guidance requires agencies making selections from another agency’s certificate to verify that the original qualification and assessment criteria are appropriate for their position. That verification step becomes a second screening — which defeats the efficiency rationale entirely. Agencies that double and triple-screened candidates created more work than if each had run its own action from scratch. The fix isn’t better guidance, it’s building trust into the design upfront, by ensuring the people trusted with the most relevant subject-matter expertise help design the assessment in the first place.

Demand didn’t stay put. Agencies raised their hands, agencies or OPM ran a resource-intensive recruitment action, and then agencies were slow to hire — or circumstances changed before they did. The August 2024 OMB/OPM hiring memo specifically directed agencies to review available shared certificates before launching new hiring actions — a discipline that, if actually followed, would force better demand alignment upfront. It mostly didn’t happen and, absent the sort of prompting we talk about later, is hard to enforce. Partly this is a culture problem, but it’s also a structural one: agencies that don’t plan for talent surges find that new hiring needs don’t align with their existing workforce plans or their capacity to recruit, assess, and onboard. You can’t opt into a pooled action and then be surprised when the pool fills.

We struggled to tell the right people, and the system didn’t either. There’s a more fundamental problem sitting underneath the demand-alignment failure: hiring managers and HR specialists often don’t hear about pooled hiring announcements at all, and when they do, it’s generally not with enough lead time to actually prepare. Pooled actions get announced through OPM memos and Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council communications that circulate at the leadership level (and boy howdy did we circulate!), but that information doesn’t reliably travel to the hiring manager who is already three weeks into drafting a job announcement for the exact role sitting in a shared cert. And when it does arrive, it arrives as information: there’s no deadline attached, no checklist triggered, no reason to stop what they’re already doing. As it stands, among the 200K+ hiring managers, most made very few hires a year or in their overall career, so learning a process with barriers to entry was challenging. 

Nothing interrupts the default action.The deeper problem is that nothing in the hiring workflow itself cues anyone to look. When a hiring manager initiates a new action in the hiring system, they’re not pushed or incentivized in any systematic way to check for an existing cert. When an HR specialist begins drafting a job announcement, no flag surfaces to say: a shared certificate for this position series already exists, do you want to use it? The system simply lets them proceed. This means that even when an agency or OPM has done the work of running a pooled action and producing a cert, agencies duplicate that effort anyway; less due to indifference, but because the path of least resistance is to do what they’ve always done, and nothing in the process interrupts that default.

The fix here is partly cultural but a lot technical. The Agency Talent Portal and USA Staffing need to surface available shared certificates at the moment a hiring manager or HR specialist initiates a new action for a covered position: as a required check embedded in the workflow itself. If you’re about to post a GS-12 data scientist announcement and there’s an active governmentwide cert for that exact series and grade, the system should tell you, right then, before you proceed. Opt-out, not opt-in. The current design assumes awareness that doesn’t exist and motivation that isn’t reliable.

Pooled actions were expensive for the “owner” and the experts: While cost-saving overall, running pooled actions could be resource and time consuming for the “owner,” and particularly the subject matter experts brought in for assessment, particularly when hires were not ultimately made. 

The position description bottleneck. Pooled hiring inherits whatever good and bad planning exists in agencies’ position description (PD) libraries. Even for commonly-hired roles, position descriptions are not always readily accessible and, likewise, standard assessments often don’t exist at every grade level. But it’s a bigger challenge than that: the whole GS system presumes (competencies, job task analyses, and more) that every job is highly specialized, not generalizable for cross-agencies pools. FAS documented this directly: OPM and the Permitting Council collaborated to create a pooled, cross-government announcement for Environmental Protection Specialists — one job announcement producing a candidate list many agencies could use. But the assessment became a bottleneck because standard assessments didn’t exist for each grade level in the announcement, requiring significant additional development time. This isn’t an edge case, it’s a Tuesday. Breaking!  OPM Director Kupor just announced a new AI tool to generate PDs!  We’ll follow with interest. 

Hiring managers couldn’t get access without a permission chain. For a new hiring innovation to be adopted, you’d think that all the barriers, incentives, and opt-in/out dynamics would be aligned. You’d be wrong. Pooled hiring at a “mother may I” architecture: system passwords and access, coordinators, gating processes, intermediaries between hiring managers and shared certificates. It’s a design flaw dressed up as compliance. The same 2024 memo had to explicitly direct agencies to update hiring manager permissions in the Agency Talent Portal. That it needed to be said tells you everything about how poorly the access question had been handled. As FAS and the Niskanen Center jointly documented in their analysis of the current OPM hiring memos, the toughest tasks are also the most crucial: changing the culture around hiring to empower managers, and actually letting line managers be managers.

Talent teams could be a good idea that keeps getting launched without the authority or resources to actually work. Every administration for the past decade has called for empowered agency talent teams — small, specialized units charged with driving hiring innovation, adopting new tools like SME-QA, and coordinating participation in pooled actions. M-24-16 explicitly called for agencies to create and sustain these teams, and the current OPM Merit Hiring Plan has stood one up at the central level as well. The concept has potential but execution has been consistently undercut by the same failure mode: no committed resources, no authority to intervene, no access, and no product mindset. In understaffed agency HR offices that were not empowered to “get to yes”, the function hasn’t meshed well, and moreover, it’s arrived in a system that already lacks strong strategic workforce planning, a key enabler of its potential success. 

As FAS and the Niskanen Center documented agency talent teams, OPM communications and education support, and the necessary systems changes all require people, money, and IT investment that hasn’t materialized. Announcing a mandate is not the same as funding its execution.

But underfunding isn’t the only problem. Even well-resourced talent teams have struggled when they lacked the institutional standing to actually change agency behavior. The core failure mode is assuming that having good people in the building is enough — that talent solves problems on its own, without a clear theory of change about authority, access, and how decisions get made. An agency talent team that is advisory in nature, without a direct line to hiring managers and HR decision-makers, without leadership backing when they push back against entrenched process habits, and without metrics that create accountability for adoption, is not going to move the needle on pooled hiring participation. It’s going to produce reports and hold workshops and then watch agencies do what they were already going to do.

Veterans preference created confusion that nobody addressed proactively. Preference applies differently in delegated examining versus merit promotion contexts. When agencies share certificates across those lanes, legal ambiguity creates real hesitation. This is genuinely solvable — but only if OPM issues targeted guidance with each pooled action as a standard part of the launch package. Stepping back, it’s necessary to state that any type of absolute preference is going to make pooled hiring challenging. Clarifying guidance is a Band-Aid.

Small technical barriers compound the problem. One underreported friction point: shared certificate policies can constrain agencies from sharing certs across different geographic locations designated in the original announcement, or across different hire types — temporary versus permanent. An agency running a pooled action for DC-based positions can’t easily extend that cert to field office hires. A cert issued for permanent positions doesn’t smoothly cover term appointments. These are solvable technical problems that OPM and OMB could fix through policy revision but they require someone to actually map the barriers before designing the action.

And when agencies go it alone anyway, the burden multiplies for everyone. This is the part that gets lost in discussions that treat siloed hiring as merely inefficient rather than actively harmful. When agencies that are already understaffed — particularly permitting and HR teams — don’t leverage opportunities to work together, bottlenecks compound. Pooled hiring isn’t just a convenience for well-resourced agencies. For teams that are already stretched, it’s the difference between a manageable workload and an impossible one.

Agency HR leads without the skills or network to work across agencies. Like so much else, pooled hiring depends on relationships. OPM and agencies have not carefully selected the HR managers who not only understand the potential policy barriers to working across agencies but the collaboration skills and networks to solve problems quickly. 

The Assessment Question: Use the Right Tool Not the Easy One

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably heard of things like SME-QA, the greatest acronym in the hiring world. Let’s talk assessments. 

The default federal hiring assessment — the self-assessment questionnaire — is effectively worthless for identifying technical talent. As Jennifer Pahlka has put it, the system has been built so that the most important knowledge is how the hiring process works instead of the knowledge needed to do the job. A nationally recognized programmer once applied to the Department of Defense and was initially rejected because their resume described real expertise in language that didn’t match OPM’s classification keywords. Meanwhile, someone who understood the system could mark themselves “expert” across every self-assessment category with no verification at all.

The Subject Matter Expert Qualification Assessment, or SME-QA, was one of the skills based hiring toolkits developed to fix this: real experts screen for real skills, with HR ensuring merit principles hold. SMEs independently review every resume. Candidates who clear the initial bar then go through further steps like structured interviews, coding exercises, or written assessments — administered by other practitioners in the field, not generalist HR staff. For technical roles going into a pooled action — data scientists, cybersecurity professionals, engineers — SME-QA paired with a shared certificate is close to the ideal design. Build the assessment once with governmentwide SME input, share the cert, and every agency draws from a pool that was actually screened by people who know the field.

But any skills based hire practice has a scaling problem that’s been documented since the first USDS pilots. The work is resource intensive for federal agencies not used to dedicating so much SME time to a hiring process. As Niskanen’s recent analysis of the Chance to Compete Act makes clear, new written assessments developed by industrial-organizational psychologists are extremely resource-intensive to produce — likely prohibitively expensive at the scale needed to cover broad swaths of the federal workforce. But there are roles and moments where such dedicated investment makes sense. 

The design principle that should govern this: pooled hiring should be an opportunity to concentrate assessment burden at the enterprise level, not multiply it at the agency level. Build the assessment once, or maximize use of SME-QA time, governmentwide, for roles where it genuinely matters. Actually use them consistently rather than rebuilding from scratch at each agency. And as Niskanen argues, transform OPM’s role from compliance monitor to assessment engine: a marketplace of vetted, shared tools agencies can pull from rather than commission independently.

There’s a trust dividend here too. Agencies that contribute subject-matter experts to the assessment design have far more reason to trust the resulting certificate. Skin in the game at the assessment stage translates directly to confidence at the hiring stage.

A Note On Listening

Many successful pooled actions worked because OMB and OPM (or other senior White House offices) gave attention, capacity, authority and accountability to the process, bolstering agencies who were being asked to execute hiring  with unusual flexibility and competence. 

Overall, however, when agencies told OPM and OMB that pooled hiring was hard for them to execute alone, the response from the center was too often some version of: the guidance is out there, the instructions are online, that’s how the process works. Agencies described a cascade of rigidities that made implementation genuinely difficult, and we weren’t always responsive. We treated compliance problems as communication problems. If agencies weren’t doing it right, they must not have understood it correctly, so the answer was more guidance, clearer FAQs, better webinars.

That’s the wrong diagnosis. What they were telling us was that the process didn’t fit their reality and that the gap between what the policy assumed and what their operations actually looked like was wide enough that no amount of additional instruction was going to close it. When the people responsible for carrying out a policy are consistently telling you it’s hard in specific, consistent ways, the right response is to ask what’s broken in the desig.. The people designing these systems need to hear that feedback as signal instead of as resistance to be overcome.

This is the reason why the recommendations in this piece are about structural changes to how pooled hiring is designed, not about better outreach or clearer communications. Agencies don’t need another memo explaining how shared certificates work. They need a system that works in the conditions they’re actually operating in.

How to Actually Do This Right

The current OPM actions are a real opportunity. Here’s what would make them work, stated as plainly as possible.

Lock in real demand before you launch. Not expressions of interest: actual hiring commitments with funded billets and named positions. The failure mode is OPM building a pool that agencies shop from slowly or not at all. Require agencies to submit hiring forecasts before they’re included in a pooled action, and hold them to those forecasts with visible accountability.

Build assessment infrastructure before the announcement goes up. Standardized PDs, validated assessments, and clear SME selection criteria that agencies trust need to exist before the action launches. Thecentralized position description library called for in M-24-16 is the right vehicle. Critically, assessments need to exist at every grade level included in the announcement. 

Build the awareness and the system prompt together. Upgrade communication on pooled hiring announcements directly to hiring managers and HR specialists. But communication alone won’t fix this. The Agency Talent Portal and USA Staffing need to surface available shared certificates at the moment a hiring manager or HR specialist initiates a new action for a covered position series and grade. This should be a required check embedded in the workflow itself — before they proceed with drafting a new announcement. If you’re about to post a GS-12 data scientist announcement and an active government-wide cert exists for that series and grade, the system should tell you right then. The current design assumes awareness that doesn’t exist and motivation that isn’t reliable.

Pool the interviewing, not just the screening. Coordinated interviewing days. Same-day or 48-hour offer authority for hiring managers. Agencies competing for the same candidates simultaneously, not sequentially. Cross-agency onboarding cohorts that start together and build peer networks from day one. This is what actually compresses time-to-hire.

Fund and empower talent teams as implementation infrastructure. Every idea in this piece requires someone inside each major agency whose job it is to make that happen. That’s what a talent team is for. But talent teams need three things that they rarely get: a dedicated budget line, direct access to the hiring managers and HR leadership they’re supposed to influence, and metrics that hold them accountable for adoption rates and actual hiring outcomes rather than process activity. A talent team of one person with a shared budget and no senior sponsor is not an implementation strategy.

Give hiring managers direct access. Update the Agency Talent Portal permissions. Eliminate the intermediary layers between a hiring manager and a cert they’re authorized to use. Hold managers accountable for whether they hire. Culture change here is real but it follows structural change: when managers have direct access and clear authority, behavior shifts.

Make follow-through a metric with teeth. Agencies that opt in and don’t hire should have to explain why, publicly, to the President’s Management Council.The voluntary participation problem doesn’t get solved with please-and-thank-you memos.

Run continuous pooled actions for common roles. HR specialists, contracting officers, environmental specialists, IT managers — these aren’t surge needs, they’re permanent ones. A cert that’s always open, with agencies drawing from it as needs emerge, is far more useful than a prestige program that runs once a year and then goes quiet.

The Bigger Lens

(with thanks to Gabe Menchaca and Peter Bonner for making the stronger argument)

Pooled hiring is a microcosm of a question the federal government seesaws on constantly: what does it mean to govern as an enterprise rather than as several hundred agencies that happen to share a payroll source?

This requires admitting something those of us who have worked in the center don’t always say plainly: agencies and their leaders are protecting their turf for understandable reasons. They are accountable for their missions, their budgets, and their outcomes. When a pooled hiring action asks them to trust a cert they didn’t design, coordinate interviews around a shared calendar, and accept that they won’t get every single thing they want, and that’s a big ask! The trade may be worth making, but it doesn’t happen automatically, and the center has not historically done a good job making the case for why, or building the conditions under which agencies can actually say yes.

That’s a collective action problem, and it’s harder than it looks. It requires genuine leadership alignment across all the agencies involved, and a center that has made the benefit of cooperation concrete and visible rather than just asserting it in guidance. Too often the response to non-participation has been more documentation rather than an honest look at what the actual barrier was. That’s compounded by a structural problem worth naming: agencies are accountable for their HR outcomes but OPM holds much of the compliance authority over how hiring gets done. Accountability without authority produces exactly the behavior you’d expect.

The federal government has demonstrated it can operate differently. The BIL surge, the data scientist certs, USDA’s HR specialists (and maybe Tech Force) worked because the conditions were right: shared design, locked-in demand, leadership alignment, enough urgency to overcome the default toward agency autonomy. The question is whether we can build those conditions deliberately rather than stumbling into them during a crisis. That requires a solid theory of change about how cross-agency infrastructure actually gets adopted: one that takes agency self-interest seriously as a design constraint rather than an obstacle to be overcome by memo. Get that right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.

Spring is here and so is the debate on the budget. The Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) President’s Budget Request (PBR) is out and the appropriations process is in full bloom, even if one small but important piece of FY26 lags behind in the form of funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Meanwhile, states continue to step up and address the most pressing science and technology gaps. 

FY27 Science Funding: “Aww Mom, science cuts for budget again!?” 

As expected, there are more deep cuts for science R&D in the FY27 PBR. 

• Not So Fast: Appropriators on both sides are already signaling skepticism towards sweeping cuts and changes, such as Senator Moran‘s (R-KS) concerns about eliminating the National Institute for Standards and Technology’;s (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership. 
• More $$$ for AI: According to Department of Energy (DOE) Chief of Staff, Carl Coe, his agency “will need a lot more” funding to hit Genesis Mission targets. That says a lot from the guy who used to lead DOE’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts.
• Power of the Purse: FY26 oversight is still important as ever, and the House Science Committee minority released an impressive report detailing how NASA implemented unauthorized (read: illegal) cuts in last year’s budget in accordance with the FY26 PBR. It’s impossible to overemphasize how important it is to keep attention on this. 
  • “In 2025, NASA acted in concrete and formal ways to implement the proposals of the President’s Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26 PBR).”

Trump to NSB: “You’re Fired!” A moment of silence for science governance 

All 22 members of the National Science Board (NSB) have been fired as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and science at-large absorbs the latest blow to its basic operation from this administration. The NSB is mandated by law and appointed by the president. It advises the NSF, Congress, and the president on science. 

• Bc the Constitution?: There is little explanation for the dismissal, other than comments to Inside Higher Ed regarding the constitutionality of the board’s membership without Senate confirmation. Meh. 
• Lots of Change: This comes as we await a new NSF leader – Jim O’Neill – and NSF deals with sweeping changes like the elimination of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate. 
• Grants Still Slow: This massive loss of leadership only compounds the slow-trickle of science grant approvals and accusations of politicization. So far, this administration has canceled or suspended nearly 1,400 NSF grants. The NSF has only doled out 758 grants compared with 2,327 grants the same time last year. 

Labs of Democracy: States keep pushing on S&T policies 

States have no choice but to deal with the ever-pressing issues associated with the AI explosion and uneven federal support for innovation. We’re continuing to see the “Patchwork-Moratorium” AI policy tension play out at federal and state levels on both data centers and safety. 

• AI legislative action highlights include:
  • Maine’s governor vetoed a bipartisan moratorium on large data centers that would have made them the first state to do so. 
  • Florida is seriously considering an “AI bill of rights,” with the Governor and allies pressuring the legislature to act on tech accountability and child safety. 
• States are investing in entrepreneurship
  • Indiana is investing $15M to attract international tech startups through a venture initiative tied to Israel.
  • West Virginia is launching a new Office of Entrepreneurship to support startups and small businesses navigate state agencies and processes

Looking to May 

May brings more appropriations process fun as the committees scrutinize the president’s FY27 budget request and compose their own funding bills (which we can expect will again rebuke the massive proposed cuts to science). 

This contentious summer period will reach a boiling point as we arrive closer to the midterms, making meaningful legislating even more complicated. Congress is racing to get laws passed on pressing matters like AI and housing as well as standing business like FY27 funding. 

No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer? We know this Administration will be staying busy. 

There are lots we didn’t cover, so we’ll just have to talk again soon! 

It’s a fascinating time to be thinking about carbon markets. In one corner, California just reauthorized its carbon market program, the EU’s Emissions Trading System continues to evolve as the world’s largest compliance market, and a growing number of countries — from Brazil and Indonesia to Singapore and Kenya — are standing up or expanding their own systems, with the architecture for international carbon trading under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement beginning to take shape. In the other, markets are facing headwinds. Pennsylvania just dropped out of a regional carbon market, and while about a quarter of global emissions are now covered by trading systems, steep emissions cuts haven’t followed. 

More broadly, profound legal and political changes in the larger economy and in global climate policy are pushing forward a wide-ranging conversation on next steps in climate policy. In this transitional moment, carbon markets clearly have a role to play in economic and industrial policy, but that role, and the policy environment in which markets function, merits examination.What would it take for carbon markets to actually deliver at the scale and pace the climate problem demands? 

The standard story on the role of pollution markets goes like this: emissions trading worked brilliantly for acid rain in the 1990s, so let’s do it for carbon. Effectively pricing and trading carbon emissions is key to driving a clean-technology transition.

But that story glosses over something important. The acid rain program was operating in specific conditions, with a small universe of highly regulated power plants, shared grids, clear cost information, and a relatively straightforward, easy-to-deploy fix (smokestack scrubbers) for the problematic emissions in question. Carbon emissions trading is orders of magnitude harder – it spans every sector of the economy, involves far more actors, and requires infrastructural changes that don’t come cheap.

That doesn’t mean carbon markets are futile. It means they need to be fit for purpose and embedded in a broader policy strategy. We call this regulatory ingenuity: fitting tools to tasks, rather than hoping one tool does everything.

Three Tools, Three Roles

Climate policy has historically relied on three approaches, each with real strengths and real limits.

• Regulatory mandates have been effective at cutting smog and cleaning up fuels. But motivating a wholesale shift in energy sources – where the required infrastructure investment runs into trillions and the economic and societal implications are complex and multifaceted – has proven far harder to accomplish through existing regulatory tools, and far harder to sustain politically.
  
• Fiscal and industrial policy, exemplified by the Inflation Reduction Act, has helped drive down clean energy costs, build domestic supply chains, and deploy major industrial and regional strategies that regulation alone couldn’t deliver. Though IRA implementation faced deployment challenges, and a partial partisan repeal under Trump limited its reach, its core policy design moved markets. The replacement bill retains many of the IRA’s programs.
  
• Carbon markets have generated billions in revenues for reinvestment and, in principle, long-term emissions accountability. In practice, both governmental and voluntary markets have struggled to track and deliver emissions reductions reliably across the economy.

These tools work best together. Markets in particular have seen the most success as part of a “portfolio” of programs – including regulation and fiscal policy – where the carbon market functions as a backstop, setting direction and generating funds but not carrying the full weight of an economy-wide transition.

Zooming In On Markets

Positioning markets for continued success requires being clear-eyed about what they can and can’t do. Several structural limits are worth naming.

First, markets optimize for cost per ton, a powerful but incomplete signal. Capital flows to the cheapest reductions first, and that is how markets should work. But cheap reductions are not necessarily the ones critical to fully developed industrial strategies. For example, the marginal cost of generation is not the full cost of reliable, delivered, politically durable clean power. Integration, transmission, siting, and community acceptance all carry real costs that today’s price signals don’t reflect. Until those full system costs are reflected and competitive, markets alone will not scale clean energy at the pace or scale needed. This disjunct between cheap reductions and strategic reductions recurs across the economy. Bridging that gap requires R&D and early deployment to drive costs of needed solutions down to the point where markets take over. 

Second, carbon prices can’t drive decarbonization without affordable alternatives. A carbon price passed along to gas-pump drivers doesn’t transform transportation unless there is something cheaper to switch to. Where affordable alternatives exist, as in markets with cheap electricity and accessible EVs, adoption follows.  Where they don’t, carbon pricing cannot close the gap, and the political backlash against visible consumer costs has been swift.

Finally, market revenues may not cover the real costs of transition. Refinery closures, shifting energy economies, and job losses in fossil-dependent regions have major consequences for workers and communities, as California is now grappling with. Carbon revenues alone won’t fill that gap.

Beyond these structural realities, there’s a second, more fixable problem: carbon markets haven’t yet been built to function like mature markets.

The first problem is an infrastructure problem. Today’s carbon markets lack the infrastructure, breadth, and sophistication of mature financial markets. Registries are fragmented, data fields are inconsistent, chain-of-title is unclear, and there is no unified ledger capable of ensuring finality of settlement. A functional carbon market requires the same institutional foundations that other markets rely upon: transparent interoperable ledgers, consistent data schemas, reliable transfer and custody, and audit trails that regulators and institutions can trust. Only with this plumbing does a market become truly “investable.” Without it, liquidity cannot form and institutional capital remains on the sidelines.

The second problem is a comparability problem. In markets where a “ton” of carbon credit does not represent a consistent underlying asset, credits can vary dramatically in durability, additionality, leakage, and earth-system risk. These differences are economically meaningful because they characterize the credit, duration, and performance risks of this asset class, and current markets do not sufficiently account for them.

Financial markets long ago learned how to handle heterogeneous assets. Commodities are graded, mortgages are underwritten, bonds are rated, structured products are tranched in a standardized form that, when paired with transparency, enables informed decision-making. Carbon markets similarly need a standardized, quantitatively grounded way to express expected atmospheric impact. Infrastructure and comparability are mutually dependent. Without infrastructure, standardized units can’t be recorded, verified, or enforced. Without comparability, infrastructure has nothing meaningful to track.

These problems are solvable; indeed, efforts are underway to solve both the infrastructure and comparability gaps. But even a technically mature carbon market will still bump against the structural limits above. The market needs to be embedded in a broader strategy.

What Well-Designed Markets Can Do 

There is broad agreement that big industrial emitters — power plants, large manufacturers, heavy industry — are natural candidates for direct market participation, and especially so in the context of well-developed economic strategies that can attend to a range of transition equities. In compliance markets, where regulation creates scarcity, well-designed trading systems can accelerate their decarbonization while generating substantial revenues that can be directed toward harder-to-reach parts of the economy.

The harder question is what role markets should play beyond these large point sources — particularly in voluntary and offset markets, where demand is discretionary, the underlying units are heterogeneous, and market infrastructure is less mature.

One view is that most other sectors are poor fits for direct market participation and that the primary value of carbon markets lies in generating revenues and behavioral shifts from the parts of the economy that respond well to price signals, and directing those resources toward the parts that don’t. Natural and working lands, for instance, urgently need funding to manage climate risk —wildfires are erasing climate gains in California, and carbon sinks are deteriorating under pressure from fire, drought, and deforestation. Diffuse emitters — small freight operators, aging refrigeration systems, millions of buildings that need electrification — lack the capital or capacity to participate in complex trading systems. In this framing, carbon markets function less as direct decarbonization tools and more as engines of transition finance: pricing what can be priced, and channeling the proceeds toward what cannot. 

Adherents to this view would also emphasize that there are broad categories of public transition cost, like addressing major regional shifts in public budgets and private incomes as entire industries transition, that at minimum require additional funds and policy to manage. California’s closing refineries (and the attendant political debate over the fundamental structure of its fuels system and the fiscal stability of affected counties) are an example of revenue and policy challenges that a market alone cannot close.

A different view holds that the problem isn’t that many sectors are inherently unsuited to markets, or that markets can’t contribute to larger public finance challenges, but that the markets themselves are unfinished. Today’s markets lack sufficient demand signals that arise when governments impose some form of compliance obligation, whether through a tax, procurement standards, or other policy mechanisms. Carbon credits from forestry projects, land management, methane abatement, and engineered removal all represent real atmospheric interventions — but the current market has no rigorous way to compare what they actually deliver. Without standardized infrastructure and a common unit of impact, a forestry credit and an engineered removal trade as if they are equivalent when they are not, or one is excluded entirely when it could be valued proportionally.

In this framing, the fix is not to route around the market but to build the market properly — with the comparability tools and settlement infrastructure that would let heterogeneous credits be priced accurately and traded with confidence. A market built this way could reach diffuse actors through intermediation, aggregation, and structured products, much as mortgage markets reach individual homeowners without requiring each one to trade directly. A framework for carbon markets, which proposes standardized assessment of atmospheric impact per dollar, offers a concrete path toward this kind of market maturation. It could also more efficiently channel funds to public needs by helping direct scarce capital to whatever delivers the most verified atmospheric benefit per dollar.

Though we (the authors) differ about which view we believe to be most true, we also realize that these two views are not necessarily in conflict. Revenue transfer and market maturation can work in parallel. A strategy oriented around revenue transfer focuses on regulation, fiscal policy, and public investment to do the heavy lifting, with markets in a supporting role. A strategy oriented around market maturation invests in the infrastructure and standards that would allow markets to bear more of the weight directly. The right path almost certainly involves both, and getting the sequencing and emphasis right could be one of the most consequential design choices in climate policy today.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The above analysis lets us take a more sophisticated look back at the acid rain program. The lesson this program teaches isn’t “markets work, full stop.” It’s that markets can accelerate a transition whose economics are favorable, such as the transition to widespread use of smokestack scrubbers: straightforward, cost-effective technology. But markets cannot create that favorability, nor are they always designed to anticipate and manage second-order effects.

A second lesson is that well-designed tools, matched to the right problem and the right timescale, can deliver real results. That applies to carbon markets themselves — which today have design flaws that can be corrected — and to the broader policy architecture in which they sit. A powerful path emerges when well-designed markets are embedded in a broader strategy: enforceable regulatory limits that create real scarcity and price signals; industrial policy that is not only well-designed but well-executed; and a clear theory of how the costs and benefits of transition are distributed.

But it also applies within the market. If carbon markets are going to play a meaningful role — whether as engines of transition finance, as instruments of accurate pricing across heterogeneous climate interventions, or both — they need the infrastructure and standards that any serious market requires. That work is underway, and it deserves at least as much attention as the policy debates that surround it.

So what’s going on with carbon markets? We’ve asked one incomplete tool to do the work of three. And we’ve debated what role markets should play without finishing the market itself. It’s time to do both: modernize market structure, and stop asking markets to work alone.

Over the past month, we’ve been running digital service retrospectives with more than 100 people from across the United States to help us design more effective services that lead to better outcomes for people across the country. You can read more about our project here. 

We know that the biggest, boldest ideas can come from anywhere and we have deliberately taken a community-driven approach to our retrospective work. Our sessions are open to anyone who’s worked in government digital services — alums and current staff of USDS, 18F, TTS, and state and local teams who have spent years inside government trying to make things work — and we’ve given everyone a chance to contribute. The result is a lot to unpack: a huge amount of insight, frustration, pride, and hard-won experiences people shared with us. What struck us most was the tension: sometimes uncomfortable disagreement among people who had dedicated years to the same mission. That tension, it turns out, is exactly what this exercise is designed to surface.

When I landed at the US Digital Service, I immediately was inundated with stories, myths, mysteries, hero/villain narratives, and beliefs about what USDS does, how it does it, and why it works that way. Sometimes, the opinions were so strong that they came off like fact. And when I joined another agency, “the way things work” was approached as a set of truths written into legislation, rather than a series of decisions that accrued over time. Organizations built on destiny can be nearly impossible to improve — you can’t iterate on a legend, and you can’t refactor a belief.

Don’t get me wrong, much of the government — and likely most mission-driven organizations — behave like this. And even for those of us who were lucky enough to start new teams or even agencies in our lifetimes have played a part in institutional myth-making as well. 

But where it gets limiting is when beliefs become fact, habits become silos, storytelling becomes rules, and we lose our ability to be a learning organization — and with it, the ability to evolve, challenge, and push forward.

So, we decided now was a good time to challenge the system of beliefs that make up government digital capacity, as well as policies and approaches that felt un-challengeable. Let’s see what rules we can rewrite and beliefs we can reset: a few sacred cows are long overdue to be put out to pasture

What we’re calling ‘sacred cows’

A sacred cow is a long-standing belief, structure, or practice that people hesitate to question — even when it may no longer be serving the mission. Surfacing these isn’t about blame. Most of these beliefs made sense at some point. Some of them were correct at the time.

The problem isn’t that these beliefs existed – it’s that they likely have become perceived facts and traveled. New people joined USDS or 18F or a state digital team and absorbed the orthodoxy without questioning it. It got baked into how teams were structured, how trust was defined, what counted as success. A field that was supposed to be about iteration stopped iterating on itself. 

And now, we want to create permission to examine them with fresh eyes, so we can design something better.

We asked every group in our retros a version of the same question: What is something in digital service that feels unquestionable — but might benefit from fresh examination?

Here are some of our favorites: 

“Delivery and Tech are a specialty team’s job”

We have spent fifteen years sending in outside digital teams to fix what agency leadership (including many IT leadership) didn’t understand well enough to build right in the first place. At some point the question becomes: what if we just built the competency in the system instead of relying on a “save the day” model? In 2026, all organizations are software organizations. Every Senior Executive Service-level leader making decisions about policy, procurement, service delivery, enforcement, and hiring is making technology decisions. These fields must become agile, responsive to users, multidisciplinary, and strategic—and conscious of the digital environment they operate in and create. 

A common pattern is deferring delivery and technology matters to specialists and we look forward to seeing how this space changes and matures. We know we are not alone wanting to see civil service and personnel reforms and are excited to learn about future reforms recommended by colleagues like The Tech Talent Project and TechViaduct. We should expect more ambition and better delivery consciousness from our agency leaders in all roles. An operating model that relies on external fixes rather than internal competence will always be behind. 

“Policy designed without users or implementation in mind can still be good policy” 

This myth came up in every session, multiple times.  No one wants to accept this shortcutting anymore.

Policy development and implementation should never be far from the citizens it would impact — its end-users — and the implementers who deliver those results. And yet too often, policy gets designed by academics, economists, and MPAs in isolation from the people who will have to build the system that makes it possible and the people who will have to live with its gaps or failures. Implementation and impact become an afterthought. 

In many cases, this wasn’t accidental. The way digital services were scoped and deployed reinforced the myth — technologists arrived after the policy was written, the budget was allocated, and the flexibility was gone. By the time they were in the room, the important decisions had already been made without them. 

One example of where tech and policy worked well together was Direct File — from the earliest days, USDS played an integral role in the policy development phase, including building early prototypes and user journeys throughout the formal policy process. Not only did the Direct File team carry that work forward into the product itself, but the multidisciplinary, cross agency relationships built during those early days supported the product through to its launch. 

Today, the technology that the government connects to Americans, the data that tracks results, and the design that saves time and stress are not optional components of policy – they’re how policy actually reaches people. Policy that skips this loop doesn’t just launch slowly — it launches wrong. Moving forward, 100% of policy needs to be designed with technologists, designers, and data scientists at the table, as the necessary translators to end users. 

“We can’t affect urgent change without damaging trust” 

Building trust between digital teams and agency partners came up in almost every session and almost everyone agreed it mattered. Where it got interesting was the question of who we build it with, why, and can it hold us back or slow us down when time is short? 

It was widely acknowledged that building trust is critical to the success of launching scaled, utilized, and beloved digital services. We also we had some really interesting discussions/debates around building trust inside of agencies. Trust was important — but alignment broke down on whether trust with agency partners is a core foundation, necessary as a form of permission, or a relationship built in practice through successful partnership. Trust can be invoked to justify waiting — or to avoid taking a position altogether. But it can also be the reason work doesn’t survive once the team leaves. 

Trust gained through the work is different from trust gained in order to do the work. Moving forward, we need to acknowledge this and ensure that the relationships we build will still carry forward through – and beyond – delivery.

Compliance is a proxy for quality control 

The Paperwork Reduction Act (a law meant to streamline how much data the government collects from the public) gets invoked constantly to stop user research before it starts. And the Authority to Operate process (the federal security review required before launching a system) is often a costly, never ending paperwork exercise that more often than not confuses compliance with security. Both exist for legitimate purposes, and both can be executed in ways that actually serve those purposes. 

But when they’re invoked as the default answer to slow or stop work, the cost is real: user research doesn’t happen, services launch without being tested against the people who need them, and security theater replaces actual security. 

Attempting to minimize burden on people and launching secure services are both good practices and, moving forward, we should look for transparent oversight that achieves this, while also ensuring the pace of delivery is not held back.  We’re keen to see future recommendations from partners in the state capacity ecosystem on PRA reform and TechViaduct on oversight recommendations. When compliance becomes the goal instead of the means, the people the law was designed to protect are the ones who pay for it.

We can’t have good tools

I kind of hate myself for even writing this because it is so obvious and frustrating. But, here I am, repeating what everyone said during our sessions because we are still saying it. 

Digital government professionals can use modern software to build, design, and launch great experiences… but with endless friction that makes it not worth asking. This plays out constantly: teams lack of access to modern resources and tools that allow them to work, like design software, coding environments, or even mission support tools, like Slack. The result is teams spending time on workarounds instead of the work, and talented people leaving for environments where the tools aren’t a fight to obtain.

Somehow, “we don’t have access to the tools we need” became an accepted condition of the work. It is time to reassess that. Procurement and approval processes should happen centrally to ensure that they are safe, secure, and ready to deploy in all agencies without significant delay.

The perfect team size exists!

Teams should be big! 

Teams should be small! 

This was another topic that came up in every session and there is no consensus on the right answer. The lack of consensus is actually the point — team size isn’t a principle, it’s a variable. Team size should be based on the problem you’re trying to solve or the outcome you want to achieve. Agency digital transformation cannot be realized with a USDS team of 2-4 people; that’s a gesture. Direct File had a product team of 75 (blended in house and vendor, but majority government employees) — that wasn’t bloat, it was what the problem required. But myths about team size calcify fast. Once ‘small and agile’ or ‘go big’ becomes part of an organization’s legend, rightsizing stops being a decision and starts being a heresy

Instead of assuming there’s a right size, identify the problem and build the appropriate team to solve it. Too often, building the team became the goal rather than the means — optimizing for org chart over outcomes. The team is not the product, the service is.

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Try this at home

The Sacred Cows exercise is an effective tool for debate and to challenge our own assumptions as digital government professionals. This list could have been a lot longer, and if we want to rewrite the rules for better government, the more experiences we hear the better.

Do these resonate? What have we missed? Here were our prompts, but feel free to expand: 

What is something in digital service that feels unquestionable — but might benefit from fresh examination?

• Operating models
• Talent assumptions
• Procurement habits
• Funding structures
• Risk tolerance
• Measures of success

The White House released its Fiscal Year 2027 budget request last week, with sweeping implications for science, technology, and innovation policy. Nestled in the cuts and investments of interest to the S&T community is a more complex story of how the administration is approaching the practice of science diplomacy–leveraging science as a bridge between countries in order to build trust, open dialogue, advance shared interests, and participate in discoveries that benefit the American people. 

Headlining the budget request are deep reductions in funding for programs and initiatives traditionally responsible for providing science diplomacy capacity. While those programs languish, and the administration is requesting investments in new and existing initiatives, a coherent reoriented strategy emerges: one that shifts away from traditional, cooperation-based, institution-building models of science and technology engagement and instead embraces a more transactional posture that prioritizes U.S. strategic competition and national security. 

The Cuts

First, the administration has requested significant program cuts and eliminations across agencies, with implications for science diplomacy capacity and priorities.

Department of Commerce

NOAA operations, research, and grants are cut by $1.6 billion, affecting international research partnerships such as Argo, which powers global weather forecasting through a global network of thousands of profiling floats; the Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program (GOMO), which provides one million ocean observations per day to “understand our changing ocean and its impact on the environment”; and the Partnership for Sustainably Managed Fisheries, which supports efforts to prevent illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. In addition, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) funding is cut by $993 million, with implications for the ability of NIST to credibly function as a world-class international standards organization. Finally, there is a $150 million reduction for the International Trade Administration (ITA), reducing America’s scientific and trade presence in what the administration has characterized as “low-value markets,” and potentially leaving a vacuum for a U.S. adversary to fill instead.

Department of Energy

Cuts to the Office of Science by $1.1 billion, affecting research programs that have historically anchored international scientific collaboration, such as the international fusion flagship the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Cuts to ITER imperil the domestic fusion research enterprise, as ITER is currently the only long-pulse fusion experiment with U.S. investment where some of the most difficult basic research challenges will also take place. In addition, the administration also calls for a prohibition on the use of federal funds for subscriptions to academic journals and for publishing costs, which can mean that federal researchers lose access to international journal databases, federal researchers may be less able to publish in high-visibility international venues, and foreign researchers will see fewer U.S. voices in shared academic spaces.

Department of Health and Human Services

The budget request proposes a $5 billion reduction in funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and specifically, the elimination of the Fogarty International Center, which advances NIH’s mission by “supporting and facilitating global health research conducted by U.S. and international investigators, building partnerships between health research institutions in the U.S. and abroad, and training the next generation of scientists to address global health needs.” Fogarty has a history of training biomedical researchers around the globe to defend against emergent health threats, including Dr. Sikhulile Moyo, who sequenced and identified the first major vaccine-resistant strain of COVID-19 in Botswana; and Dr. Christian Happi, who led efforts diagnosing and confirming Ebola in Nigeria which ended up saving millions of lives. 

Department of State and International Programs

The President’s request calls for a reduction of $4.3 billion for global health programs, with a restructuring of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) towards more bilateral health assistance under the America First Global Health Strategy (AFGHS). In addition, it calls for a $2.7 billion reduction in funding for international organizations like the United Nations. President Trump has not shied away from critique of the UN in the past, remarking that “not only is the UN not solving the problems it should, too often, it is actually creating new problems for us to solve.” Instead, the administration proposes supporting peacekeeping missions through more flexible funding in the America First Opportunity Fund (referenced later in this analysis under investments). The budget request also calls for a reduction of $642.4 million for Treasury’s international programs, with total cuts to multilateral financial institutions such as the African Development Bank and Global Environment Facility.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The administration proposes $3.4 billion in cuts to NASA’s science program, with implications for the SERVIR program, a joint venture with USAID which “provides satellite-based Earth observation data and science applications to help developing nations in Central America, East Africa, and the Himalayas improve their environmental decision making.” In addition, it calls for $1.1 billion in cuts to the International Space Station (ISS), considered a premier example of international science diplomacy and collaboration. The Administration has also canceled U.S. involvement in NASA flagship programs, like the Lunar Gateway, which are only possible through cooperation with dozens of countries. When the United States unilaterally withdraws from projects without consulting our partners, it can damage the reputation of the United States due to the hundreds of millions of dollars in unrecoverable effort spent by those countries. This undermines the credibility and reliability of the United States, making similar undertakings dramatically more difficult in the future.

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is requesting a dramatic cut to funding for its Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE), requesting just $2.74 million, down from $48 million in FY25. While NSF characterizes its overall budget request, down significantly from previous years, as a reflection of a “strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment,” OISE programs like Accelnet and MultiPlex provide funding for U.S. institutions to participate in international networks, giving American researchers access to specialty knowledge, platforms, and talent that is necessary to advance American discovery and innovation. This includes funding to ensure American leadership in international organizations like the International Science Council and ensuring access to extreme laser platforms currently only located in Hungary, Czechia, and Romania. At the requested level, OISE would be unable to support grant programs and maintain minimal staff.

The New Investments

At the same time, the budget also proposes significant new investments, whose shape is equally telling to the administration’s approach to science diplomacy.

Department of Commerce

The administration touts an unprecedented $215 million budget increase request for the Bureau of Industry and Security to protect American innovation and national security from the threat of “malign actors.” The DNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center defines malign influence agents as potentially being “foreign government officials, intelligence services, cyber actors, criminal groups, state-run media organizations, social media actors, and businesses with close ties to government officials.” Despite targeting malign actors in theory, in practice, this orientation has historically also implicated legitimate scientific exchange. While export controls may limit foreign competitiveness in the short term, once foreign governments adapt, they can also undermine the competitiveness of American companies.

Department of Energy

A $394 million investment to drive American dominance in critical minerals production, and the insulation of critical mineral production and processing supply chains from potential threats posed by adversaries. Notably, critical minerals are essential inputs for clean energy technologies, such as electric vehicles and battery storage, that the budget simultaneously eliminates funding for, even as it expands support for coal and fossil fuel production.

Department of State and other international programs

$5 billion in funding for the America First Opportunity Fund, which would replace several accounts–including Development Assistance (DA), Democracy Fund (DF), Economic Support Fund (ESF), and Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia (AEECA)–with a more flexible pool of money oriented towards bilateral partnerships and initiatives that, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will advance “US diplomatic, security, and economic goals.” In addition, the budget requests $13 billion in funding for critical mineral supply chains, complementing similar investments at the Department of Energy.

This is not simply a story of cuts; rather, it is a story of whole-of-government reorientation towards science diplomacy that has consequences not just for American innovation and competitiveness, but critical interests that we share on a global scale. How Congress responds to the President’s budget request with its own appropriations legislation, and how the broader S&T community engages with that process, will determine whether this shift represents a temporary recalibration or a more durable transformation of how the United States shows up as a partner on the world stage, and, equally important, how it is seen by its allies and adversaries.

Surprise! It’s a double album drop with the release of both the President’s Budget Request (PBR to us, not Pabst Blue Ribbon) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Budget Justification for Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) last Friday. As policy wonks, we here at FAS are here to give you the rundown on all the details for DOE’s energy and nuclear weapons program budgets. 

Jump to…

• The Good
• The Bad
• The Ugly
• Spotlight: Nuclear Weapons/NNSA
• Spotlight: Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation
• Spotlight: Grid Funding for OE, CESER, and Baseload Power
• Spotlight: HGEO

Big Picture 

Overall, DOE is requesting a 10% increase to its FY27 budget compared to 2026, bringing its total annual budget to $53.9 billion. However, this additional money would go almost entirely to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), giving them a 12% bump from 2026 levels to reach $32.8 billion. The remaining $21.1 billion left for non-NNSA DOE programs represents an 11% reduction of DOE discretionary funding from 2026 enacted levels. 

It’s important to note, however, that this budget request is just that, a budget request. Congress will likely have its own ideas about how DOE should be funded for FY27, and that too will evolve as staffers take into account appropriations requests from stakeholders and appropriators engage in negotiations and reconciliation over the coming months.

This year’s budget request introduces a number of new accounts, intended to reflect DOE’s reorganization last November. New accounts have been created for the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovations (CMEI) and Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office (HGEO), with former accounts for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Fossil Energy (FE), and others reorganized under them. 

Additionally, two large accounts have been created for Baseload Power and Artificial Intelligence & Quantum. The administration has proposed to fund these accounts at the level of $3.5 billion and $1.2 billion, respectively, by repurposing IIJA funding for the Hydrogen Hubs (likely also requiring the use of funds from cancelled awards). The Baseload Power funding will support activities across HGEO, the Office of Electricity (OE), CMEI, the Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), and the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER); the Office of Artificial Intelligence and Quantum’s (AIQ) funding will support seven new supercomputers at the national labs. 

Appropriators in Congress have expressed fatigue with DOE’s reorganizations, so it remains to be seen whether Congress will adopt these changes or keep the old account structure and leave it to DOE to reapportion money internally.

The PBR also indicates a move to rehire staff for DOE, after the agency lost 3,050 federal employees last year. Estimated numbers in the FY27 request reveal plans for a 3.5% increase in the number of staff supported by the accounts for DOE’s energy programs¹ and a 7% increase in the number of staff supported by NNSA’s accounts. The FY26 estimate only indicates the number of positions available, though, not the number of current employees, so the actual rehiring effort is likely much larger than the PBR numbers suggest. Rehiring is also likely to be a slow and difficult process, since the most qualified former employees are unlikely to return. Some recent DOE job postings have remained open for months without a hire.

Below, we present a rapid-fire summary of the budget numbers and highlights you need to know. And then keep scrolling for deep dives on the requests for NNSA, CMEI, grid programs, and HGEO.

The Good: New funding for the grid, clean firm energy, and critical minerals supply chains

• +$750 million in funding for the new Baseload Power account to reconductor existing transmission lines and expand grid capacity by 3-6 GW (see grid spotlight below)
• +$500 million and +$300 million in funding for the new Baseload Power account to uprate hydropower and nuclear power plants, respectively
• +$291 million (339%) in critical minerals and materials funding for the Advanced Mining and Mineral Production Technology Office within CMEI (see CMEI spotlight below)

The Bad: Cancellations and budget cuts across DOE energy programs that Congress will likely temper

• -$15.2 billion in rescissions of unobligated IIJA Funding: The Trump administration is once again expressing its opposition to implementing the remaining IIJA funding. The proposed cancellations appear to be indiscriminate of whether the programs align with this administration’s priorities or not. For example, DOE just announced round 3 of funding for the Battery Materials Processing and Battery Manufacturing and Recycling Programs, offering up to $500 million to support critical minerals processing, recycling and derivative battery manufacturing. Yet, in a contradictory move, the PBR would cancel the remaining $746 million still available for these two programs. 
• -$2.3 billion rescission of unobligated funding from the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act for the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program: This would effectively cancel all of the remaining credit subsidy funding for the ATVM loan program, significantly limiting its ability to take on risk and provide low-cost financing for innovative projects that need government loans the most. 
• -$1.9 billion (-63%) in energy innovation and affordability funding for CMEI compared to the FY26 budget for all of the offices that were reorganized into CMEI (see CMEI spotlight below).
• –$1.1 billion (-15%) for the Office of Science (SC): Climate Change research would be removed and replaced by high-performance computing, AI, quantum information science, fusion, and critical minerals research. Science workforce initiatives designed to encourage greater diversity would be eliminated entirely.
• -$150 million (-64%) for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E): Funding for this office is being redirected away from clean energy and towards AI, critical materials, and fusion fuels. Electric vehicle research and direct air capture are explicitly defunded.

The Ugly: Significant increases to funding for nuclear weapons and fossil fuels 

• +$7 billion (35%) for nuclear weapons production and sustainment (see NNSA spotlight below)
• +$1.94 billion in funding through the new Baseload Power account to preserve coal, oil, and gas industries: Activities would support upgrades to oil, and natural gas plants, pipelines, and fuel storage infrastructure for the purpose of extending the life of retiring coal and gas plants (4 GW and 5 GW, respectively) and adding 3 GW of new gas power to the grid.
• +$23 million (329%) for the Office of Coal’s activities supporting coal mining and processing to extend the life of existing mines (see HGEO spotlight below)

Spotlight: Nuclear Weapons/NNSA 

The NNSA’s budget is broadly divided into four buckets: Weapons Activities (exactly what it sounds like), Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation (which focuses on nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and nuclear-related counterterrorism), Naval Reactors, and Federal Salaries and Expenses. It is very easy to see which of these categories this administration is prioritizing.

The NNSA’s proposed $32.8 billion topline budget is a 29% increase from the FY26 enacted amount, but approximately 84% of that total is slated for Weapons Activities, which surged 35% from $20.4 billion enacted in FY26 to $27.4 billion in FY27. This is in addition to another $3.9 billion provided by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), most of which will be obligated in FY26.

The categories under weapons activities include warhead production modernization, infrastructure and operations, and stockpile research, among other things. Highlights from the FY27 budget request reflect the surging costs that come with modernizing all three components of the nuclear triad at the same time: 

• A new “Future Programs” budget line item adds $99.8 million toward feasibility studies for new-design nuclear weapons. One of these is believed by experts to be a warhead designed for hard and deeply buried targets, such as underground bunkers.
• Two major warhead programs—the new W93 warhead for submarine-launched ballistic missiles and the modified W87-1 for intercontinental ballistic missiles—increased by 37% to $1.1 billion and 41% to $913 million, respectively. Both these programs are projecting multi-billion-dollar costs by 2031. 
• Funding for the refurbished W80-4 LEP long-range standoff weapon (LRSO) cruise missile warhead reflects the weapon’s transition from development toward production, with the First Production Unit scheduled for FY27. Over $1 billion was requested for FY27 (-17% from FY26), and outyears will dip under $1 billion. 
• Similarly, the $46.4 million FY27 request (-6% from FY26) for the B61-13 bomb reflects the program’s planned transition from stockpile modernization to operations after completing its Last Production Unit in FY28. The out-year funding shows over $1 billion for FY 2028, and it is expected to achieve limited operational deployment by September 2032. 
• $400 million for the W80-5 sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) warhead was carried over from OBBBA. No other funds for the program were requested for FY27, but the line item budget has a steep hike and will surpass $1 billion starting in FY28. In comparison, the FY26 request was $272.3M.
• Funding for plutonium modernization and pit production at Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site nearly doubled in FY27, contributing to total production modernization costs increasing by 65% to $8.8 billion. This investment is meant to enable the NNSA to meet a new goal of producing 100 plutonium pits per year by 2028. 
• The FY27 request also includes a 69% increase to $880.7 million for “Tritium and Defense Fuels,” which covers tritium modernization programs as well as efforts to reestablish a domestic uranium enrichment capacity for reactor fuel supply and further tritium production instead of relying on old stockpiles. 

Interestingly, the Stockpile Sustainment program office has been renamed Stockpile Operations (under the Stockpile Management program), likely reflecting a shifting focus from its maintenance function toward prioritizing production and modernization for new warheads.

Spotlight: CMEI

CMEI is a mega-office within DOE that reports directly to the Secretary of Energy. Its programs and sub-offices are organized under three pillars: the Office of Critical Minerals, Materials, and Manufacturing (CM3), the Office of Energy Technology (E-Tech), and the Office of Innovation, Affordability, and Consumer Choice (IACC).  

The FY27 request would cut CMEI’s budget by 63% from $3.0 billion down to $1.1 billion. A closer look at the budget for each pillar reveals even deeper cuts: E-Tech faces an 88% reduction, while IACC faces a 93% reduction, both achieved through eliminating or nearly eliminating programs formerly under EERE, State and Community Energy Programs, and the Federal Energy Management Program. Notably, the administration is once again proposing to eliminate funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), which helps reduce energy costs for low-income households. Ending WAP now, while the U.S. faces a new energy crisis induced by the war in Iran, runs counter to the administration’s stated energy affordability priorities. These cuts would also gut much of DOE’s work on renewable energy, low-carbon transportation technologies, and building and industrial electrification efforts, though the Baseload Power account does offer an additional $500 million in funding for E-Tech to uprate hydropower plants. 

CM3 is the only pillar with a budget increase of 85%, but even that is concentrated within a single office: the Advanced Mining and Mineral Production Technologies Office is slated to receive a 339% budget increase. Meanwhile, other offices under CM3, such as the Manufacturing Deployment Office and the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Offices which run both critical minerals and manufacturing programs, are facing cuts of 18% and 19%, respectively.

Spotlight: Grid Funding for OE, CESER, and Baseload Power

Across the board, grid focused offices – the Office of Electricity (OE), the Grid Deployment Office (GDO), and the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) – lost significant levels of funding in the FY27 budget request. OE and CESER would see their budgets shrink by $56 million (22%) and $30 million (16%), respectively, compared to FY26 enacted levels: significant indeed at a moment when electricity demand is surging, extreme weather is straining grid infrastructure with increasing frequency, and the U.S. grid is already widely acknowledged to be aging and vulnerable. Underfunding these offices carries real risk for the administration’s own energy dominance goals, let alone broader reliability, resilience, and affordability of the U.S. energy system.

OE leads R&D activities and programs that strengthen and modernize our nation’s power grid to maintain a reliable, affordable, and secure electricity delivery infrastructure. According to DOE, OE will focus on “electrical energy dominance by combating the capacity crisis, navigating growing complexity, strengthening supply chains, and securing grid infrastructure” in FY27. 

Through the reorganization, OE acquired GDO’s staff and programs, so their funding has been moved into the Electricity account for FY27. These programs face the largest cuts: Distribution & Markets and Hydropower Incentives (which were moved to CMEI) would see their budgets zeroed out, while Transmission Planning & Permitting faces a 61% decrease. Cuts were also made to the budgets for Energy Storage (-39%), Applied Grid Transformation Solutions (-24%), and Resilient Distribution Systems (-18%). 

On the other hand, OE potentially stands to gain $750,000,000 in repurposed IIJA funding through the Baseload Power account for the purpose of reconductoring existing transmission lines with advanced conductors to unlock approximately 3-6 GW of incremental transfer capacity on constrained corridors. This is an important activity as reconductoring can double the capacity on existing transmission lines and is more cost effective than building new transmission lines, allowing more generators and customers to connect to the grid. However, this gain does not offset the loss of funding for ongoing activities designed to address other challenges facing the grid and grid supply chains. 

Complementing OE, CESER plays a critical role in strengthening the security and resilience of the U.S. energy grid and securing U.S. energy infrastructure from cyber threats. CESER’s budget structure has also been reorganized for FY27. The new Threat Analysis and Incident Response (TAIR) program seems to merge the former Policy, Preparedness, and Risk Analysis and Response and Restoration programs, while the Infrastructure Hardening and Technology Development (IHTD) program appears to inherit the former Risk Management Technology and Tools program. Assuming this is the case, TAIR faces a 31% budget reduction from $57 million in FY26 to $39 million in FY27; IHTD faces a 11% budget reduction from $110 million to $97 million. These cuts are concerning given the recent news of cyber attacks to U.S. energy and water infrastructure as a result of the war in Iran – the very kinds of attacks that CESER’s work is designed to prevent and address. 

The proposed Baseload Power account potentially offers a small amount of additional funding for CESER ($10 million) to “expand testing of supply chain components to identify and mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities.” However, that amount is only a third of the $30 million CESER stands to lose in FY27 funding if Congress follows the administration’s lead.

Spotlight: HGEO

HGEO was created during DOE’s reorganization by merging the Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) with the Fossil Energy Office (FE).² The new Office of Subsurface Energy is the largest office in HGEO, and it is composed of three suboffices: Coal, Oil and Gas, and Geothermal. Overall, the administration is requesting a 14% cut to HGEO’s budget, with the Office of Subsurface Energy facing a 19% cut. The Office of Geothermal maintains its funding at a constant $150 million, same as in FY26, while the Offices of Coal and Oil and Gas see decreases of 35% and 14%, respectively. 

The Office of Geothermal’s budget has been reorganized under new program categories, moving away from technology specific categories to a focus on supporting technologies at different levels of maturity: Pilots and Demonstrations ($92 million), Technology Research & Development ($40 million), and Commercial Scale-Up ($18 million). The Pilots and Demonstrations funding would continue the momentum from the $171.5 million Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) demonstrations, the largest federal funding commitment for EGS ever, in February. At the same time, however, the administration is also requesting a rescission of $25 million in remaining unobligated IIJA funding for the very same program, a counterintuitive move that seems to be for the sole purpose of expressing opposition to anything funded by IIJA. 

Under the Office of Coal, the Mining and Processing subaccount sees a dramatic 329% increase in funding for R&D aimed at modernizing coal mining and processing. This includes the application of AI tools and robotics to “extend the life of existing mines and coal-based power infrastructure”, reinforcing the administration’s ongoing use of executive power and taxpayer dollars to boost a declining energy source.

Lastly, the proposed Baseload Power account would offer an additional $1.94 billion in funding for coal, oil, and gas infrastructure upgrades to prevent 4 GW of coal power from retiring, preserve 5 GW of power from natural gas plants, and add an additional 3 GW of gas power – the single largest request for new funding in the entire DOE budget.

President Trump released his FY27 budget plan last week. What should we think about it?

Once upon a time, the President’s budget was a realistic proposal to Congress about what the federal government should spend money on. These days, it’s essentially just a declaration of everything the President would do if Congress didn’t matter at all.

There’s an argument, then, that we shouldn’t take the President’s budget too seriously: after all, recent history shows us that Congress doesn’t. President Biden repeatedly asked for, and failed to receive, massive IRS expansion, housing investment, and tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations; President Trump last year suggested massive cuts to federal science funding that Congress essentially ignored.

Yet the current Trump administration has also shown that it’s not taking seriously Congress not taking it seriously: including by impounding funds and pursuing other avenues to push its spending (and cutting) priorities through using executive action.

The way to calibrate is by treating the President’s budget as a fever dream…albeit one that might come true. With that in mind, here are some of the key dream sequences we’re paying attention to from a climate, environment, and energy perspective. Warning: some may keep you up at night.

Topline numbers

In terms of non-defense discretionary spending, the $660 billion FY27 request is a 10% decrease from current levels – a smaller swing than last year’s $557 billion FY26 request, which proposed a 23% cut that Congress largely ignored. However, the difference can be attributed almost entirely to the fact that Congress reset the baseline upwards when it rejected those FY26 cuts, as well as to proposed increased spending at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (for improving medical care) and Department of Justice (including funding for increased law enforcement in cities, funding FBI salaries, and re-opening Alcatraz).

For climate and energy policy specifically, FY27 largely runs the same plays as FY26: slashing line items related to climate change and advancing a fossil-oriented “Energy Dominance” agenda while rolling back clean energy and environmental justice investments from what this administration terms the Biden-era “Green New Scam”. As with FY26, the request targets climate, energy, and environmental programs with demonstrated bipartisan congressional support. One example is the CDFI Fund, which finances clean energy and community development lending in underserved communities and which Congress explicitly preserved last year after the administration first proposed eliminating it. 

Overall, the President’s FY27 budget request is less a new proposal than a budget formalization of many climate- and environment-related cuts that the Trump administration has pursued over the past year through executive action and impoundment. 

Energy

For the second year in a row, the Trump administration is requesting to cancel almost all remaining unobligated IIJA funding across the Department of Energy ($15.2 billion in total). What’s striking about these cuts is how indiscriminate they seem to be, including cuts to programs that align with this administration’s stated priorities (including critical minerals, geothermal energy, and hydropower). The throughline appears to be less about policy judgment than about demonstrating categorical opposition to anything passed under the IIJA banner.

Yet not all of this funding is being outright cancelled: some is being redirected. $4.7B of unobligated IIJA funding intended for Hydrogen Hubs is being steered toward baseload power and AI supercomputers instead. When you dig deeper into that redirect, it’s a mixed bag. $1.2B will go to new supercomputers at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Labs, as part of DOE’s new Genesis Mission. The remaining $3.5B would largely support coal, oil, and gas infrastructure upgrades and prevent 4 GW of coal plants from retiring as planned. The same tranche of funding will also support some genuinely needed improvements, such as strengthening grid reliability, installing new battery storage, and improving the power output of nuclear and hydropower facilities. Funding for geothermal, ostensibly an administration priority, is surprisingly absent given its status as a firm baseload power source.

Mixed messages around geothermal continue in the budget for the new Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Office (HGEO), created during DOE’s November 2025 reorganization by merging the Geothermal Technologies Office with Fossil Energy. The administration requests $676 million for the combined office, a 14.1% decrease from the FY26 enacted. The most striking line item within HGEO is a 329% surge in funding to modernize coal mining processes and extend the productive life of existing mines, including through the use of AI and robotics. Geothermal funding is preserved at $150 million, emphasizing pilots and R&D over commercial-scale projects. Again, what’s conspicuously missing – given the administration’s stated enthusiasm for geothermal as a firm baseload source – is any meaningful push toward commercial-scale deployment. 

Beyond the IIJA cancellations, the administration is requesting a massive 63% cut to the budget of the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) – the reorganized successor to the former Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy – compared to the FY26 budget of the offices folded into it. The only winner seems to be critical minerals, which receives a $281 million (339%) increase in funding compared to FY26. Similar to FY26, the request zeroes out the budgets for hydrogen, solar, and wind programs, as well as state and community energy programs and the Federal Energy Management Program. The request also nearly zeroes out budgets for bioenergy, vehicle, and building technologies, while making deep cuts to hydropower and industrial efficiency and decarbonization technologies. 

Cuts continue for DOE offices responsible for keeping America’s lights on. The Office of Electricity (OE) and the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) face cuts of 22% and 16%, respectively, from FY26 enacted levels: significant indeed at a moment when electricity demand is surging, extreme weather is straining grid infrastructure with increasing frequency, and the U.S. grid is already widely acknowledged to be aging and vulnerable. Underfunding these offices now carries real risk for the administration’s own energy dominance goals, let alone broader reliability and resilience.

Wildfire resilience

The two largest federal landowners – the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) – are both slated for significant cuts under this budget, at 13% and 19% reductions from FY26 enacted levels, respectively. The takeaway: while the FY27 budget makes some new investments in wildfire resilience, it does so against a backdrop of overall austerity.

That said, the budget request acknowledges the escalating urgency of the wildfire crisis. Wildland fire suppression resources at DOI received a modest 3.5% increase; preparedness and fuels management at the agency also saw a slight bump. Additionally, the budget introduces a Fire Intelligence and Technology line item in DOI’s budget funded at $123.5 million. This includes $20 million to support a Wildfire Intelligence Center that appears broadly aligned with proposals such as those laid out in the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462), which FAS endorsed. 

The real-world efficacy of these wildfire-specific investments could be undermined by cuts to fire-relevant research and monitoring infrastructure. While the request states that “the USWFS will fund all wildland fire resources currently funded separately by [USDA and DOI],” proposed cuts to Forest Service programs such as State, Private, and Tribal Forestry and Forest and Rangeland Research could also impact fire resilience.  Budget cuts and layoffs at FEMA, NOAA, NASA, and EPA could also materially compromise capacity for other critical wildfire tasks the government is responsible for (e.g., fire detection, fire response, weather forecasting, smoke monitoring, and post-fire ecosystem assessment). For example, the NASA/USGS Landsat program helps us understand the impact of wildfires on the landscape and support better management. NASA’s FY27 budget justification allocates $109 million “to support a phased transition of the Landsat program to a commercial solution” rather than continued government involvement. The justification offers no detailed rationale for why privatization is the right path forward.

Cuts to USDA Forest Service Wildland Fire Management accounts reflect the Administration’s intent to consolidate wildland fire functions across DOI and the Forest Service. Echoing an earlier Executive Order, the budget proposes fully unifying the USDA Forest Service’s wildland fire resources and operations into Interior’s newly created U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS). While DOI has reportedly begun consolidating wildfire operations across its own agencies under the USWFS, integration of the Forest Service is on hold; FY26 appropriations bills directed Interior and USDA to contract a feasibility study of this approach. It is unclear how this reorganization would interact with the recent proposal to move Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City. 

Environmental pollution 

From an environmental protection standpoint, the most glaring single number in this budget is President Trump’s proposal to cut EPA’s budget by $4.6 billion — a 52% reduction that would bring the agency to its smallest budget since the Reagan administration. How does the administration propose slashing the EPA’s budget by more than half? By targeting specific programs that have historically done some of the agency’s most consequential work.

Among the casualties: the program that oversees Superfund site cleanup. Superfund sites are locations that are so contaminated by pollution that they’re considered dangerous to human health. Think sites of former mines, toxic waste dumps, and other nastiness that make the families that live around them very sick. There are more than 1,800 Superfund sites across the United States, concentrated heavily in Texas, California, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Washington. Without the Superfund program, cleanup won’t happen, and families living nearby – who often can’t afford to move or don’t even know the risk exists – will just keep getting sick. 

Like breathing clean air? Happy the ozone layer is healing? Too bad. If Congress follows the President’s proposed budget, then the Atmospheric Protection Program will be eliminated. The APP is the EPA office responsible for reducing air pollution, restoring the ozone layer, improving energy efficiency, and researching climate change. These aren’t marginal cuts. They’re core federal functions that have measurably improved air quality and public health over decades.

The contrast with what the EPA is being asked to invest in is telling. One notable increase in EPA’s budget is a $14 million boost for NEPAssist, the web-based tool that streamlines permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act. This boost reflects the administration’s vision of what EPA is for: making it faster to approve projects, but not study or reduce the pollution they might produce.

Energy affordability, extreme heat, and public health

The FY27 proposal once again tries to eliminate the only sources of funding to support families struggling with energy affordability. The proposed budget would fully defund the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program, which supports families with heating and cooling bills at a time when one in three American households are facing energy insecurity and electricity rates are surging across the country. The budget also zeroes out the Weatherization Assistance Program, which funds home retrofits that reduce energy consumption and help families stay safe during extreme heat and cold. Getting rid of both LIHEAP and WAP simultaneously leaves no federal backstop for the most vulnerable households at the precise moment that climate-driven temperature extremes are intensifying.

The FY27 proposal also targets research and data collection critical to evaluating extreme weather and heat’s risks and impacts. The proposed $1.6 billion cut to NOAA’s Office of Research and Development by $1.6 billion would eliminate programs to help communities prepare for and protect against extreme heat events, flooding, and other climate-linked weather hazards. The planned commercialization of NASA’s Landsat raises further concerns about data continuity and access, particularly for local governments and planners who depend on Landsat data to assess heat islands, drought conditions, and other environmental risks.

On the health system side, the budget would eliminate the Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP), the only program supporting health care systems ready for all hazards – including floods and storm surge that can inundate hospitals, and extreme heat waves that can overwhelm emergency rooms. HPP funding has helped regions such as the Pacific Northwest, where extreme heat has already been deadly, avoid repeating past disasters. The budget proposes redirecting these functions to the CDC’s Public Health Emergency Preparedness program, which experts have long identified as insufficient for the scale of the need.

Workers and families face additional exposure under this budget, which scales back prevention and enforcement dollars for workplace safety. The proposal budget cuts the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s budget by 10%, with reductions focused on enforcement capacity and workplace safety training funding. And two of the primary federal vehicles to support community-level climate resilience would be eliminated. The Community Services Block Grant and the Community Development Block Grant, have both been backbone sources of funding to support efforts to prepare communities for extreme weather’s impacts. For example, the Community Services Block Grant provides the operational funding for Community Action Agencies, which are a key pass-through organization for implementing efforts like home weatherization.

Climate and environmental science

The FY27 budget doesn’t just target programs aimed at reducing emissions and cleaning up our environment. It targets the scientific infrastructure that tells us what’s happening and how to fix it. The President’s budget request would systematically defund the agencies, offices, and university programs responsible for climate observation, modeling, and research across the federal government. NSF has historically been the nation’s primary funder of basic research, including the university-based science that generates most of what we know about climate systems, ecosystems, and environmental change. The administration proposes cutting roughly 55% (~$5 billion) from NSF’s budget, with about a third (~$1.8 billion) of this coming from the parts of NSF (geosciences, biological sciences, engineering, and polar programs directorates) most directly relevant to climate and environmental science. AI and quantum computing are the only areas the administration proposes to protect or grow within the agency.

The DOE’s Office of Science would take a $1.1 billion hit, with just under half of that coming from the Biological and Environmental Research program, which funds atmospheric science, climate modeling, and ecosystem research. The administration’s own budget language is candid about the intent: these cuts will, it states, “stop wasting Biological and Environmental Research resources on climate change” and refocus funding toward “AI-enabled earth-energy system modeling to support the Energy Dominance agenda.” At the same time, $1.1 billion is being invested in the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI), though this number is both a cut compared to FY26 enacted levels from CMEI and is framed explicitly around supply chain security and domestic resource extraction rather than decarbonization.

For the second year in a row, the budget proposes eliminating NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which houses the nation’s core weather forecasting and climate modeling capabilities (including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the birthplace of modern climate modeling). What’s notable about the FY27 request, as analyst Alan Gerard points out, is that it doesn’t even acknowledge OAR’s existence despite Congress having essentially fully funded it in FY26. This illustrates the administration’s willingness to pursue its biggest priorities by hook or by crook.

Finally, EPA’s research and development budget would be reduced to only what federal law legally requires, effectively eliminating the agency’s in-house capacity for the modeling, technical research, and expert analysis that underpins national environmental regulation. An EPA stripped of scientific capacity is an EPA that can neither generate the evidence base for new rules nor credibly defend existing ones.

For the last 4+ years, I’ve sat at the intersection of local governments and universities. That time has been used to be a convener, a communicator, and importantly, a student. These two types of institutions are critical to our communities. How do they work together? How can they support each other? How can we think differently about their relationship to one another – moving beyond big employers and land users to thinking about the fruits and labors of what the research community can do for local policy making. 

From my personal experience and that of my time at MetroLab, one thing was clear: we need to focus on the demand and supply for research to the local government community. While well intended, much of the research community assumes what local governments need. How can we break these assumptions and understand what the true research needs are for cities and counties across the country? 

Inspired by the annual Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, MetroLab envisioned an opportunity for a priority research needs document that is informed by, and in the service of, local governments. 

This effort came with ambitious goals. First, it needed to represent local governments across the country. To do this, we knew we had to have a breadth of scale; we needed to talk to folks inside local governments that “live in the weeds.” We knew that it was important to get the perspective of local governments across all geographies with varying priority concerns and varying levels of resources. In-person workshops were a must to meet the community where they are.

Next, it needed to make sense to the research community. Each in-person workshop was hosted on a university campus. Every single research question that resulted from the workshops or the surveys has been reviewed to be presented in a way that can easily shape a research project or program. 

We set out to work, hosting workshops and surveys. At our in-person workshops across the country we had a total of 42 universities represented, 12 local governments (with 85 unique departments represented in total). We recovered hundreds of Post-it notes and created a master database of over one thousand research questions or points of feedback.

With gratitude and enthusiasm, we are publishing the results. In total, FAS is publishing nineteen reports, including the overarching findings  – The Civic Research Agenda. 

7 POLICY SPECIFIC RESEARCH AGENDAS	9 CITY/COUNTY SPECIFIC SCIENCE R&D REPORTS	1 RESEARCH TO-IMPACT-REPORT
Housing	City of Allentown, PA	The Research-to-Impact Ecosystem: Perceptions, Barriers, and Recommendations
Economic Development	City of Baltimore, MD
Human Services	City of Columbus, OH
Climate and Energy	Guilford County, NC
Transportation	City of Houston, TX
Community Engagement	City of Kansas City, MO
Service Delivery	City of Lincoln, NE
	City of Little Rock, AR
	City of Syracuse, NY

Importantly, we learned more than just research questions. We studied how these institutions work together, what are friction points, and how transformative partnerships thrive between the research and local policy making communities. 

For example, we asked folks for both institutions, what myth do you want to bust? And this is what we found: 

Myths local governments would like to “bust” – in other words, statements they believe university communities believe but are untrue –include the following:

1. [21%] that local governments have a lot of money available, are themselves adequately resourced, and have ample time to read large amounts of research
2. [20%] that local government staff are uninformed, not smart, or not resourceful
3. [16%] that local government staff lack motivation, are lazy or don’t care, and want to preserve bureaucracy
4. [13%] that local governments cannot innovate and adapt
5. [13%] that local governments are hard to work with, and in particular, they resist academic insight
6. [6% ] that local governments are not data-driven 

Generally, local governments aimed to position themselves as capable partners, and to correct structural misconceptions. 

Myths universities would like to “bust” – in other words, statements they believe local government communities believe but are untrue include the following:.

1. [25%] that universities are elite; faculty live in an ivory tower
2. [19%] that universities produce research that is impractical, only theoretical, or not client-driven
3. [15%] that universities only care about publishability, and faculty/staff do not care about their community
4. [11%] that universities are slow, research takes a long time, and they can’t work quickly
5. [11%] that universities have a lot of money and funding is not constrained
6. [11%] that research only takes into account quantitative data

Almost half of all responses indicate that faculty and staff at a university feel they are perceived as detached, selfish, or difficult partners. University participants wanted to convey to the audience that research is indeed useful, applied work matters, and that research is impact-oriented.

Why does this matter? It’s a foundation on which to build. Bringing two institutions together should include the following considerations: how do you know who to talk to, what are the levels of trust to work together, and how do you consider potential road blocks from the start. 

Recommendations

First, the primary goal of this report is to provide to the research community these questions that are in demand by local governments. But that is just the start. They must then get answered, and they have to be produced in a way that optimizes  the “supply” of research – will research publications be applied. 

Some top findings on how local governments want to ingest research: 

One hundred percent of respondents cited that a concise summary of results that is easy to understand is very important or important. No more than one page and no technical jargon.

One hundred percent of respondents also cited that research needs to be as specific to their community as possible. 

Local governments almost always want to see a comparison to their peer cities/counties.

As appropriate, research that goes beyond observation and makes recommendations is highly actionable. 

I’m going to say this again. ONE PAGE. Executive summary no more than one page. I know. Not the easiest. 

What’s Next

I hope these research questions get answered. Imagine the world of what’s possible if these questions are addressed. If these knowledge gaps close. We could have increased housing supply, understand the impacts of our policy interventions, and can do more with less.

The Civic Research Agenda considers civic research as infrastructure. Treating the pipeline as civic infrastructure means making collaboration predictable and durable. It could include elements such as:

• Standardized data systems and clear data sharing agreements
• Dedicated research partnership or translation staff
• Clear public entry points for engagement
• Shared templates for scoping, executive briefs, and implementation planning
• Recurring joint priority-setting aligned with city strategic plans

These are solvable problems. If local governments and universities can commit to creating and maintaining the coordination and collaboration required, we can unlock policy innovation for communities across the country, starting at the state and local levels. 

This report is a roadmap that will move further the theory of change that our research ecosystem has a bounty of insights and policy interventions, and when done in partnership with local innovators, catalytic impact is in our grasp. 

FAS looks forward to continuing this work, and hopefully, bringing research problem statements and answers to communities across the country.

Feedback from Community Leaders

“As Kansas City’s top research university, the relationship between UMKC and the City of Kansas City is vital,” said UMKC Chancellor Mauli Agrawal. “When we closely collaborate with the community, we’re able to align UMKC’s advanced innovation capabilities with the city’s needs, ensuring that the solutions we generate have a direct, positive impact on the quality of lives of our residents. It’s important to note that our university’s community partnerships are not just about advancing academic inquiry — they are about building a stronger, more resilient Kansas City.”

“If we want to make positive, lasting progress on the most pressing challenges facing our cities—from gun violence and homelessness to transportation and traffic safety—we must be able to access and understand cutting-edge research and innovation,” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. “MetroLab is working to make it possible for policymakers across the nation to influence the creation and pioneer the implementation of evidence-based solutions and research to help us build more equitable and thriving communities.”

“The City of Lincoln welcomed the opportunity this convening presented to catalyze our research partnership with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Following the workshop, we have continued to collaborate with UNL to develop the City’s Research Agenda.” – Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird, Lincoln, NE

“Research is essential to us. We hosted six university institutions at our workshop and are keen on continuing these conversations. We want to have the data to provide tailored solutions to each of our individual neighborhoods, we want to know what programs get the best outcomes, and we hope to partner with our universities to better our evaluation capabilities so that we know what’s working and what needs to be improved.” – Mayor Matt Tuerk, City of Allentown, PA

“The event was a huge success, not only because it was well-attended and well-run, but because the participants responded with action.” – Dr. Ruth N. López Turley, Director, Kinder Institute for Urban Research