Kate Marvel, a widely known climate scientist and author, has resigned from her position at NASA, citing the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science in the United States.
Dr. Marvel, who trained as an astrophysicist before turning to the Earth’s atmosphere, said in an interview that the administration’s actions made it impossible to remain at an agency that she loved.
She noted that NASA had recently rejected her proposals to study the effects of climate warming on the nation’s solar energy supply, that she and her colleagues were evicted from their NASA offices last year and that the uncertainty of federal funding for research made it difficult to work.
“It wears you down after a while,” said Dr. Marvel, who announced her resignation on Tuesday. “None of my internally funded science projects were funded. I wrote a couple other proposals, which, as far as I know, have fallen into a black hole.”
A NASA spokeswoman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Dr. Marvel joins an estimated 95,000 employees who have left federal science agencies through layoffs, retirements or resignations since Mr. Trump returned to the White House last year. Of those, an estimated 10,000 held doctorate degrees in the sciences.
Dr. Marvel was an associate research physicist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, a research center that the Trump administration effectively shuttered in May 2025, canceling the lease on its Manhattan office and forcing its staff of more than 100 to work from home. The center was located upstairs from Tom’s Restaurant at Broadway and West 112th Street, near Columbia University, and the diner’s facade appears in “Seinfeld” episodes.
With a doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge, Dr. Marvel, 44, is well known for her ability to clearly communicate climate science to audiences around the country. She has given public lectures at comedy clubs, a prison and on the TEDx stage, according to her website. She is the author of the 2025 book “Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel about our Changing Planet.”
Dr. Marvel worked at NASA from 2014 to 2022 and returned in 2024. She said she is currently a visiting scholar at New York University and is looking for other institutions to fund her climate research.
The NASA center where she worked maintains a record of surface temperatures going back to 1880, tracking satellite data on planet-warming greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. In 1988, the institute’s former director, James Hansen, was the first scientist to sound the alarm to Congress about greenhouse gases that were warming Earth. Its researchers have been involved with spacecraft missions to Venus and Jupiter and have used climate modeling to study Mars and the potential for life on planets orbiting other stars, known as exoplanets.
The Goddard Institute also operates GISS ModelE, a computer model that simulates changes in the ocean, atmosphere and land that are the result of increases in greenhouse gases, solar activity and the formation of clouds.
Cuts by the Trump administration to funding for climate science at NASA and other federal agencies will have long-term effects both on understanding what is happening to the environment as the planet warms, such as long-term droughts, wildfire and changes to ocean circulation, and also on society’s response to those changes, Dr. Marvel said.
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“If we lose the ability to study tipping points in the climate,” Dr. Marvel said, “we lose the ability to talk about that in a scientifically neutral way and we lose that sort of trusted government agency’s ability to inform decision making.”
“That is all under threat right now,” she said.
The NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, said recently that he wants to focus on exploring space rather than studying climate change.
“For NASA to assemble scientists and put out papers on politically charged issues, whether or not this is an impending climate catastrophe, is not helpful to the broader NASA mission,” Mr. Isaacman said in a March 9 interview with Science magazine.
“You have a previous administration that puts out on NASA letterhead the world is going to end, and then you have the next administration put out on NASA letterhead that this is all a hoax,” said Mr. Isaacman, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “How is that useful to anyone right now?”
The Trump administration has cut back or eliminated climate research throughout NASA. In March 2025, it laid off Katherine Calvin, the agency’s chief scientist and a climate expert, along with 20 employees in her office.
The Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which oversees satellite missions that track climate change, sea levels and the composition of the atmosphere, has been in turmoil during the past year, as well. NASA officials closed a third of its buildings, including 100 labs, according to the union representing engineers, scientists and technicians at Goddard. In December, the space agency closed Goddard’s library, a storehouse for books, journals and other scientific data about space and climate.
In December, the White House announced it was breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded weather and climate lab in Boulder, Colo. The administration is now reviewing proposals from other institutions and private companies to take over the center’s scientific research. The lab’s leadership has sued the administration to stop the closure.
Congress restored NASA’s funding for space exploration and climate science in January, but many scientists have complained that the money is not being spent.
Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Berkeley, Calif., said that the Trump administration’s moves are a reaction to the politicization of climate science during the Biden administration.
“Its unfortunate that Kate is leaving, and it’s understandable,” Mr. Nordhaus said. “It also points to the ways in which a bunch of influential scientists allowed the science to get politicized.”
But Mr. Nordhaus said that the Trump administration’s cuts to science have now gone too far.
“There’s lots of good basic science being done by these agencies,” Mr. Nordhaus said. “We want to continue to track atmospheric levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, we want to continue to understand the real consequences of climate change.”
Dr. Marvel noted that the Trump administration has also cut funding for biomedical research and many other fields of basic science.
“I was expecting an attack on climate science,” Dr. Marvel said. “I was expecting them to go after us. But actually, who they went after first was pediatric cancer research, Parkinson’s research, and childhood vaccines. What I was completely unprepared for was an attack on science, because it is a means of finding out and telling the truth.”
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