Trump Ousts Members of Key Science Funding Board

Current conditions: Nearly two dozen states from Texas to Minnesota are bracing for days of thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, and winds up to 70 miles per hour • Japan is deploying 1,400 firefighters to battle a wildfire in Iwate prefecture that has forced at least 3,000 people to evacuate • While it’s nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny today in Chernobyl, Ukraine, exactly 40 years ago yesterday the weather worsened the world’s worst nuclear accident by blowing radiation from the melted-down reactor.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump ousts the board members from National Science Foundation

The Trump administration has dismissed every member of the independent board that oversees the National Science Foundation. In what The New York Times described as a “terse email” sent Friday afternoon, members of the 25-member National Science Board were told their position was “terminated, effective immediately.” Willie E. May, a terminated board member and a vice president at Morgan State University, told the newspaper: “I am deeply disappointed, though I cannot say I am entirely surprised. I have watched the systematic dismantling of the scientific advisory infrastructure of this government with growing alarm, and the National Science Board is simply the latest casualty.” The move to seize tighter control over funding for scientific research comes two months after the Environmental Protection Agency repealed the legal finding that underpins all federal climate regulations and days after the Department of Health and Human Services nixed publication of a study about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

Meanwhile, a top Republican in Congress has confirmed the limits of President Donald Trump’s bid to cap pay at the Tennessee Valley Authority. The White House’s push to limit compensation at the nation’s largest public power utility to $500,000 only applies to the chief executive, Representative Chuck Fleischmann, Republican from Tennessee, told The Knoxville News Sentinel. The White House sought to fire TVA CEO Don Moul last year, but ultimately backed down.

2. China calls for stricter controls of fossil fuel consumption

An oil price sign in Hubei province,. Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Beijing has laid out plans for tighter controls over fossil fuel use and greater oversight of heavy emitters in what experts told Carbon Brief was “a signal of China’s ongoing commitment to climate action and bridging policy” between the government’s national and sectoral five-year plans. The policy document, totaling nearly 2,800 words when translated into English, is what’s known as a “guiding opinion,” and “is not strictly binding, it bears the stamp of the two highest bodies in China’s political system, conveying a strong sense of authority,” wrote Anika Patel, the China editor at Carbon Brief, noting that “this is the first high-level document to explicitly link decarbonisation efforts with energy security and industrial development.” As Qi Qin, a China analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham last month: “I don’t think China is creating these technologies as a niche climate experiment anymore. They’re being folded into a broader industrial strategy. I think that the more important question is which of them are moving into real deployment now, and which are still at the stage of strategic signaling.”

At roughly the same time, the Chinese government has published an atlas of deep-sea mineral deposits as the People’s Republic looks to ramp up its ambitions to harvest critical metals from the ocean floor.

3. Maine’s governor vetoes bill to temporarily ban data centers

At the start of this month, I told you Maine was poised to become the first state to ban construction of data centers, at least temporarily. Not anymore. On Friday, Governor Janet Mills vetoed the bill, the Portland Press-Herald reported. In her message to the legislature, the Democrat said that, while a moratorium “is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates,” the “final version of this bil fails to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region.” The 2023 closure of Androscoggin Mill, a pulp and paper plant, dealt what she called “a devastating blow” to the town, located roughly an hour and 20 minutes north of Portland, and the server farm would help “promote reinvestment and job creation at the former mill,” she said. Mills is locked in a heated race with left-wing populist Graham Platner for the Democratic nomination to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins this November.

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4. First-of-a-kind green fertilizer project wins final approval

The British-listed green fertilizer company Atome is set to build a first-of-a-kind project in Paraguay, taking advantage of low-cost hydropower to produce ammonia using green hydrogen instead of natural gas. The firm’s final investment decision on the $665 million plant in Villeta, south of the capital of Asunción, comes as the Iran War disrupts fertilizer markets and drives up costs. “We’ve proven that you can actually close and finance an industrial-scale, green fertilizer facility,” chief executive Olivier Mussat told the Financial Times. “It’s never been done before.”

5. The U.S. just renewed a nuclear plant’s license in record time

Duke Energy’s Robinson nuclear power plant in South Carolina just won the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval to operate for 80 years as part of the fastest license renewal review in the agency’s history. The NRC cleared Unit 2 of the Robinson Steam Electric Plant — a single-unit pressurized water reactor — to operate for another 20 years. This, according to World Nuclear News, is the unit’s “second, or subsequent, license renewal: it received a 20-year renewal of its original 40-year license in 2004.” The NRC formally accepted the license renewal application for docketing on April 28, 2025, then completed the review within a 12-month timeframe. That’s six fewer months than the previous schedule, in accordance with an executive order Trump issued last year. “This milestone proves we can deliver results quickly without compromising safety,” NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said in a statement. “By focusing on essential factors for sustained nuclear power plant safety and applying lessons learned from past renewals, our team was able to work efficiently while maintaining their commitment to enabling timely safety decisions.”

THE KICKER

TotalEnergies may be exiting offshore wind in the U.S. for the price of $1 billion from the Trump administration. But over in Kazakhstan, the French energy giant is expanding its wind footprint. While the landlocked Central Asian country doesn’t have much in the way of shores off of which to build turbines, it does have vast, windy steppelands. TotalEnergies plans to invest in a gigawatt of wind power and 600 megawatt-hours of battery storage, Renewables Now reported.