Kate Marvel, Prominent Climate Scientist At NASA/Goddard Institute, Resigns: "This Is All Under Threat Right Now"

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.

“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.”

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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.

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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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