ANNALS OF TRUMPI$TAN: Trump Administration Kills a Flagship Annual Report on the Arctic (Raymond Zhong, NY Times, August 11, 2026)

From The New York Times:

Trump Administration Kills a Flagship Annual Report on the Arctic

The top of the world is warming faster than any other region. For 20 years, the Arctic Report Card chronicled the extraordinary transformation.

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The Arctic Report Card drew on the expertise of hundreds of scientists and other specialists around the world.Credit...Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

By Raymond Zhong

Climate reporter

Aug. 11, 2026


The Trump administration has pulled federal funding for an annual report chronicling the changing environment of the Arctic, where rapid warming is upending ecosystems, reconfiguring trade routes and scrambling Great Power strategy.
Every year for the past two decades, the Arctic Report Card has provided a checkup on the health of the region, which is heating up at several times the pace of the rest of the globe. Sea ice has dwindled. Snow cover has shrunk. Glaciers are thinning out. Tundra vegetation has grown more abundant, leading to wildfires that burn through huge areas.

Now, the report’s coordinator and publisher, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is withdrawing its support for the report card. In a statement on Tuesday, Kim Doster, the agency’s director of communications, didn’t provide a reason.

“Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA,” Ms. Doster said. “All data historically contributed by NOAA to the product will continue to be collected and will remain publicly available.”

In her statement, Ms. Doster said other NOAA programs would continue to support research in the Arctic that contributes to “national security, weather prediction, safety of navigation and the economic vitality of coastal communities.”

Politico first reported that NOAA was ending its support for the report.

Each year’s Arctic Report Card compiled data collected by many researchers and multiple agencies in addition to NOAA. It drew on the expertise of hundreds of scientists and other specialists around the world. Its aim was to document the extraordinary transformation of a region where human activities — fishing, shipping and mineral exploration, to name just a few — are uniquely dependent on environmental factors.

The broad importance of climate and ecological changes in the Arctic is why NOAA worked to ensure that each year’s report would be relevant to many kinds of people and organizations, including Indigenous communities, businesses and the military, said Rick Spinrad, the oceanographer who led NOAA during the Biden administration.

And yet, because the Arctic is such a bellwether of the effects of global warming, the report card was a natural target in the Trump administration’s efforts to root out what it calls climate alarmism, Dr. Spinrad said. “It’s another inane step in this administration’s turning a blind eye to climate change, among other environmental issues.”