Jane Clougherty has dedicated the majority of her professional life to researching the health effects of air pollution and, more recently, extreme heat. But in May, she got an email from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that ground her potentially life-saving work to a halt. 

Sitting on her parents’ back porch in Boston, the Drexel University professor learned her research had been cancelled — effective immediately. 

“There was no discussion, there was no warning, simply an email that said, ‘You’re done. This project is no longer within the administration’s scope. Cease and desist activities as of today,’” she recalled over the phone.  

The email, which was riddled with typos, disgusted Clougherty, who was spending her final days with her father who was in hospice care. “It was horrible and traumatic and a very unprofessional way to handle the elimination of these grants,” she said. 

But she also wasn’t surprised. For months the Trump administration had been hacking away at any work related to equity, climate change and environmental justice. Her research — which analyzed emergency room visits across New York State to understand the impacts of heat and air pollution on children’s health — was focused squarely on all of the above.

When asked about the grant cancellations, an EPA spokesperson told the 19th in a statement: “Maybe the Biden-Harris Administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing the EPA’s core mission.” 

Clougherty, who had a final year of research left on the multi-year federal grant, is one of thousands of researchers whose work has been affected by the administration’s cancellation of research grants across agencies including the National Institute of Health, the EPA and the National Science Foundation. Among the research casualties was a grant to study how to reduce the health risks of wildfire smoke near schools, and another that would research how to help children in rural areas who are at increased risk of exposure to pesticides and pollution. 

It’s work that would have helped some of the country’s most vulnerable children at a time when extreme weather events are becoming more common and the gains made in protecting environmental health are being overrun by a pro-fossil fuel administration that is cutting regulations that curb air and water pollution.

These issues disproportionately impact low-income communities of color. And, it’s moms who typically end up having to juggle their jobs and caring for their children’s health issues.

Now much of the work will instead gather digital dust as researchers look for new funding sources, or potentially abandon their research altogether. At particular risk to these changes are children, whose still-developing bodies are more susceptible to environmental dangers. 

Extreme heat is taxing on children’s bodies, because they have a harder time regulating their body temperature. Heat can also amplify air pollution by trapping it in place, which can affect kids with asthma or other respiratory issues. 

If Clougherty’s work had been completed, it may have helped communities across the country better understand how to protect kids from these health issues, she said. 

That’s because in addition to analyzing how children in the state were being affected by extreme heat and air pollution, Clougherty and her team were also studying community assets that could buffer children from these same hazards by analyzing large data sets that provide insights into a community’s characteristics.

They could analyze whether children lived in neighborhoods with a lot of green space, and how that correlated to their health when exposed to heat or pollution, she said. “We can also look at the characteristics of the schools that the children attend, and economic and other assets in their communities, such as access to grocery stores, Head Start programs, proximity to hospitals or health care services [and] quality of housing.”

By calculating which of these assets could have the best protective effect on children’s health, it would have helped local leaders plan where to target limited resources “to create the most bang for their buck,” Clougherty said. 

For advocacy groups like the Children’s Environmental Health Network, the ability to point to data is crucial to reaching policy makers. “We’re not used to having this granular, local level, children-specific research that we can use,” said Kristie Trousdale, the deputy director of the organization. “It just would have really helped us in our messaging to have these findings that are actionable and that can be used in a preventive way. Because we’re always reacting.” 

The Pediatric Environmental Health Team at the Mount Sinai health system in New York said in an email that they also rely on this work to inform how they develop solutions. “[Our] team responds to many inquiries from worried families and concerned health professionals about how to keep children safe. We draw from research like this to craft our responses and develop clinical tools.” (A member of this team is also a co-researcher on Clougherty’s project.)

Clougherty said the cancellation of grants does not affect just the current research but the field as a whole. “Oh, my God, the ramifications are extraordinary,” she said. “Scientific laboratories are not something you can turn on and off in short order. This is a lot of infrastructure being lost, a lot of lab-specific knowledge being lost, and staff are losing jobs.”

She also worries the country could lose early-career researchers who would carry this work into the future. “Right now, young trainees in public health and environmental health are looking at what’s going on and saying, ‘Does it make sense for me to put in the years of effort that it takes to earn a doctorate in environmental health if there’s not going to be a career?’” she said. “We are potentially losing a whole generation of scientific skill and knowledge.”

When grants are cancelled so abruptly, taxpayers lose out, too. Clougherty had been awarded a $1.35 million grant, and had already spent nearly a million of that funding when she received the cancellation notice. Clougherty has appealed the EPAs decision, but won’t find out until December whether her funding could be restored. 

For Trousdale, who also sits on the EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, the threats feel even more existential than cutting research grants, it’s the potential disregard of science altogether.

She worries about the EPA plan to rescind the endangerment finding, a determination made previously by the agency in 2009, that found that fossil fuel emissions were threatening public health. It required the agency to take action to regulate sources of this pollution and was based on a robust body of scientific evidence. 

“It seems to me that we are abandoning science now,” she said. “If we do that, I’m not quite sure how we are going to really keep our kids safe from our changing climate and environmental hazards in general.”

Now, to complete the work, Clougherty is left to look into private funders and foundations to make up the nearly $400,000 she lost. But she’s not optimistic . “It is not realistic to expect foundations or private funders to pick up the degree of infrastructure that’s being destroyed with the loss of federal funding right now,” she said.