Trump Administration Purges Federal Heat Experts

As of early June 2025, top heat experts in the U.S. government have been fired, resigned, or accepted deferred resignation offers. This includes experts who chose to leave after being instructed not to speak to the public about heat-related health risks, as well as the entire staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) climate office. The moves have left the multi-agency taskforce known as the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) severely understaffed. Experts are concerned that the loss of staff and their institutional knowledge, along with a lack of a federal disaster classification for extreme heat, will undermine the progress towards extreme heat management that began only recently.

NIHHIS was established during the Obama administration to consolidate heat expertise across 20 federal agencies. The task force developed tools such as HeatRisk and the Heat Health Tracker to help the public, emergency planners, and healthcare professionals understand the impact of heat on health. In 2024, NIHHIS also created two Centers for Excellence dedicated to heat research, which were funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Trump administration cancelled those grants in early May 2025.

Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Institute at the University of Arizona and former co-lead for one of the heat centers, said, “They are cutting programs that are not really easy for state or local governments to replicate, and that can have drastic consequences… [for] people’s lives.”