Washington, D.C. — The federal government needs a better process for identifying and including climate science priorities in the president’s annual budget proposal, according to a new column from the Center for American Progress that urges more timely and improved coordination between the White House and relevant agencies.
The current process for determining and integrating climate science funding priorities across agencies is loosely coordinated and has become more decentralized and balkanized over time, the column says, resulting in a bottom-up process rather than a top-down one.
The column describes how federal agencies can work together—under the guidance of the U.S. Global Change Research Program—and offers a comprehensive timeline that the Biden administration and all future administrations should adopt to prioritize climate science investments.
“Making a few adjustments to the annual federal budget process would improve the value of U.S. climate science by giving decision-makers the information they need to plan for and react to local climate change impacts,” said Bianca Majumder, policy analyst at CAP and co-author of the column.
Science funding should not only be increased, but it should also be more specifically targeted to ensure decision-makers have timely and accurate information to respond to present climate impacts and plan for future climate-related events.
Read the column: “Optimizing the Federal Budget Process and Timeline to Center Climate Science” by Bianca Majumder and David Reidmiller
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