Ex-Employee Says NASA Full of 'Fear and Anxiety' Since Trump Took Office
“They have stopped promoting or emphasizing climate science communication, they have minimized it. People inside the agency are concerned Trump will cut climate science funding. There is a fear and anxiety there and the outcome has been chaos.”
Tenenbaum said that around a month after Trump’s inauguration last year an “arduous review process” was put in place over every blog post, Facebook post and tweet that she put out from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
“I was told verbally by media relations it was because with Trump as president, climate change is now a sensitive subject,” she said. “There was confusion about what to do now we have a president who doesn’t believe in climate change. Everyone was scrambling. It was chaos.”
Planned blogposts on coal plants being turned into solar plants, “reasons to be positive about NASA” and an interview with Gavin Schmidt, a senior NASA climate scientist, were all either halted or scrapped due to interference from career staff nervous about provoking the new administration, according to Tenenbaum.
Figures show there has been a notable decline in NASA’s output of climate information since the election of the Trump administration. During 2016, NASA posted frequently on its climate change Facebook page, peaking at 122 posts during August of that year, according to CrowdTangle.
There were 53 Facebook posts in January 2017, the month of Trump’s inauguration, and NASA hasn’t come close to this total since, posting 21 times this March and 31 times in April.
This drop off in posts has resulted in dwindling interactions with the public on Facebook. During January 2017 there were more than 61,700 interactions—defined as likes, comments and shares—on the climate page. This has slumped dramatically since then, totaling just 7,000 in April. In April 2016, under the Obama administration, there were more than 100,000 interactions.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/ex-employee-says-nasa-full-of-fear-and-anxiety-since-trump-took-office/
