In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.
President Trump’s EPA plans to stop collecting greenhouse gas emission data from most polluters. Climate experts expressed shock and dismay at the move. “It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill,” one said.
The White House and DOGE have sought to eliminate thousands of jobs from the Forest Service. The wildland firefighting force is one of many targets within the agency.
Americans have long accumulated wealth by owning their homes, but a new study predicts that spiking insurance rates and climate disasters now herald an era of widespread losses.
Last October, California passed the nation’s strongest law to address the glut of oil and gas wells that are unplugged and ownerless, many leaking pollutants into the environment. But in its first major test, California regulators sidestepped the law.