It was a sunny, dry desert day in Joshua Tree, with temperatures climbing to 75 degrees. Only five months earlier, President Trump had withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement, a commitment by 184 countries to curb global warming and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by implementing new environmental policies. As Joshua Tree’s Twitter feed stated in a follow-up tweet, “Emissions from burning of fossil fuels have increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This amplifies the greenhouse effect. Human activity is affecting the land, oceans, & atmosphere, altering the balance of the climate system & causing global changes.”

Michael Mann, an outspoken climate scientist and Pennsylvania State University professor who earlier that year had rebuked a congressional committee for dismissing scientific research, thanked @JoshuaTreeNPS for its tweets, albeit with an ominous note. “I hope this account remains active and in your hands…,” he posted.

Perhaps more than any president before him, Trump understands the power of social media, and @JoshuaTreeNPS’s tweets undercut the president’s views on climate change. Trump has called global warming a Chinese hoax and doubts whether humans are even contributing to it. One of his first actions as president was placing a social-media gag order on departments such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture.

Many of the president’s political appointees have expressed similar doubts about human-caused climate change. Scott Pruitt, who helmed the EPA from February 2017 to July 2018, once said scientists aren’t certain human activity is “a primary contributor.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry argues that natural causes, not carbon dioxide, are the main drivers. And Ryan Zinke, who resigned from Trump’s Cabinet in December 2018, has said the cause of climate change “is far from being definitively resolved.”

Zinke’s former domain, the Department of the Interior, employs scientists and natural resource managers across its many bureaus and offices, including the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service. In all, the department employs some 70,000 people. After Joshua Tree’s account tweeted about climate change, Zinke reportedly summoned the park’s superintendent, David Smith, to Washington, D.C.

According to a December 2017 story published by The Hill, Zinke brought Smith to his office to reprimand him. “Zinke made it clear to Smith that the Trump administration doesn’t want national parks to put out official communication on climate change,” The Hill reported. Zinke’s office disputed that description of the meeting.

Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the situation was “absurd.” But it is also worrying, and a warning to all national park employees “that they’re going to get the same kind of tongue-lashing if they share anything about global warming,” he says. “It only takes a few scapegoats to send a message to an entire agency that they should be keeping their heads down.”

Kyla Bennett, a former EPA scientist and lawyer who now works with the nonprofit watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), speaks every day to scientists working for the government. “People are frightened,” she says. “They’re frightened they’re being watched, that their cell phones are going to be confiscated and looked at, that their personal computers are going to be confiscated. They are afraid. ”

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Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists and Iowa State University surveyed scientists from 16 federal agencies about their experiences working in the Trump administration. The report, “Science Under President Trump,” includes accounts of censorship, self-censorship and political interference. About 630 survey respondents at agencies that work on climate change, or 18 percent of the sample group, agreed or strongly agreed that they had been asked to omit the phrase climate change from their work.

“We’ve been told to avoid using words like climate change in internal project proposals and cooperative agreements,” reported one respondent from the National Park Service.

Another 700 respondents said they’d avoided working on climate change or using the phrase despite having received no explicit orders to do so. “Survey results also suggest that communication issues extend beyond censorship of science to the right of scientists to speak about their work to the public, the news media and at professional meetings,” the report stated.

This winter, Playboy interviewed more than a dozen current and former federal employees, climate scientists and advocacy groups about how federal employees discuss climate science under the Trump administration. Some describe being sidelined or point to scientists scrubbing the phrase climate change from reports and grant applications. Others say they can’t comfortably mention global warming for fear of coming under scrutiny.

Their stories aren’t universal. Scientists at some agencies say the administration hasn’t hindered their work. But many others express deep fears about both job stability and their research. They don’t want to risk disrupting the continuity of climate-change data, some of which has been collected over decades, by drawing unfavorable attention to their studies. All but one current federal employee we interviewed asked to remain anonymous.

“Everyone is so terrified,” says Betsy Southerland, who worked at the EPA for more than 30 years and retired as director of science and technology in the agency’s water office in July 2017. Before she left, staffers authoring technical reports were already replacing the phrase climate change with extreme weather events, Southerland says. “We were self-censoring.”

The reason for that, she explains, is EPA employees want to protect their ability to release research that has been under way for years, well before Trump’s election.

Michael Cox, a climate-change advisor who resigned after 25 years with the EPA, noticed self-censorship in the Seattle office where he worked. People stopped saying “climate change” in meetings, he says, adding that the “climate-ready water utilities” program turned into “creating resilient water utilities.” Overall, employees seemed uncertain about what they could or couldn’t say and write.

On March 31, 2017, Cox submitted his resignation letter to Pruitt. He was out the door. He could safely make some noise.

“I am writing this note because I, along with many EPA staff, are becoming increasing [sic] alarmed about the direction of EPA under your leadership,” he wrote. Cox criticized the administration for denying fundamental climate science, slashing the budget and appointing political staffers openly hostile to the agency. “If, by some miracle you or your staff actually read this note, I can only hope you take a step back and realize that you are the leader of an organization of very hardworking, dedicated professionals who believe deeply in their work.”

It turns out someone did read Cox’s letter. Ten days later, a lawyer filed a public records request for Cox’s correspondence when he resigned, according to The New York Times. The resulting e-mails revealed the names of dozens of agency officials, including ones Cox describes as colleagues who shared his concerns over management. The agency, which did not respond to Playboy’s interview request, later hired the same lawyer to do “media monitoring” at the EPA.

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Federal employees, when working, don’t have the same free-speech rights as private citizens. Legally, it’s a distinction between right and privilege, a precedent set by the 2006 Supreme Court case Garcetti v. Ceballos, in which the court ruled that speech by a public official isn’t protected when expressed as part of their job.

Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, says this distinction is being wielded for partisan ends. According to Ruch, George Luber, an environmental health professor and leading expert on the disease effects of climate change, has been under investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since March 2018, in part because he didn’t get renewed agency approval to write a 2015 textbook. The head of the CDC’s former Climate and Health Program (established in 2009 and effectively discontinued in December), Luber is now barred from going to his government office without permission, and if he does enter the office, he and his car are searched, according to Ruch. Luber is forbidden from speaking, responding to interview requests or answering congressional inquiries. Luber’s dismissal was recommended in October, Ruch says, but walked back after Ruch took the story to The New York Times. Ruch suspects the CDC was self-censoring because Luber is a prominent voice in the science community. The CDC did not answer questions about Luber or about how its employees can discuss climate change at work and in public.

Ruch calls PEER a “shelter for battered staff.” He also fields queries from scientists trying to publish their research, as only two of the 18 federal science-based agencies surveyed allow employees to submit their work to a publication without prior approval.

“There’s no doubt the Trump administration is editing scientific documents to the point where they’re removing, for example, references to anthropogenic causes of climate change,” PEER’s Bennett says. “They are eliminating entire climate jobs and teams. It has gotten to the point where federal employees are afraid to even use the words.”

According to Bennett, department heads in many cases haven’t officially directed scientists to stop using the phrase climate change, but “they’ve gotten the message loud and clear.” They abide, she says, because their positions are precarious and they don’t want to risk losing them. Some scientists will communicate with Bennett only through encrypted mobile apps; others call from burner phones.

Halpern, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks some of the challenges over letting federal employees speak freely to the public and press stem from the aftermath of September 11. Under the guise of national-security concerns, federal employees became less accessible and control over speech from government workers increased significantly, he says.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is one of the most permissive agencies: NOAA employees don’t need permission to talk to reporters, the agency said in an e-mail to Playboy. U.S. Geological Survey employees, by comparison, must be granted permission before speaking to the press. “CDC scientists were told last year they needed to check with superiors before complying with even the most basic data requests from the press,” Halpern says. “We know people are less likely to tell the unvarnished truth if their bosses are listening or if they feel they’ll be reprimanded for saying the wrong thing in the eyes of their political superiors.”

That pressure is not felt evenly by all employees. Because the EPA is a regulatory agency tasked with enforcing rules on businesses and protecting endangered species, staffers may face more political and public scrutiny. But there are also unwritten rules, Halpern says: “Most nefarious is that a lot of directives aren’t written down or communicated. They’re simply hinted at.”

Joel Clement was the director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Department of the Interior. He was at home in his Washington apartment when a friend called one Thursday night in June 2017. “Check your e-mail,” his friend said. He had been reassigned, and he wondered if Clement had also been removed from his position. A message was waiting for Clement in his inbox. He too had been reassigned, in his case to a job in an accounting office overseeing royalty income from oil and gas operations around the country. It was part of a purge, he alleges. DOI did not respond to questions about Clement.

No supervisor spoke to Clement before his reassignment, but he says he fared better than some of his colleagues, who had been forced to move across the country with their families to begin unfamiliar jobs. Many were shifted into positions for which they were ill-suited. Clement counted himself in that group: He wasn’t an accountant. But, he says, when he reported to work at his new office, the employees were wonderful, bending over backward to try to train their new boss on something he knew nothing about.

Eventually, though, having lost the job he left the private sector for, “I decided to keep my voice,” he says. Clement reported what had happened to the Office of Special Counsel in July, and in October he resigned.

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Former U.S. Representative Lamar Smith, who was chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee before the Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterms, chastised scientists two years ago for ignoring “the basic tenets of science” and pushing a personal agenda to justify claims about climate change. “Alarmist predictions amount to nothing more than wild guesses,” he said.

It was March 29, 2017, and Penn State’s Michael Mann, who was appearing before the committee to discuss global warming, fired back. “If you get attacked every time you publish an article,” he said, “if that causes you to become subject to congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, obviously that’s very stifling, and I think the intention is to cause scientists to retreat.” The message to “the entire research community,” he said, “is if you too publish and speak out on the threat of human-caused climate change, we’re going to come after you.”

Many were wary of the Texas representative’s subpoena powers after Trump was elected. (IF YOU LIKED THE INQUISITION, YOU’LL LOVE THE HOUSE SCIENCE COMMITTEE, read one Mother Jones headline.) But Smith had warred with scientists during Barack Obama’s presidency too. In 2015 he subpoenaed hundreds of internal e-mails from NOAA staffers after an agency scientist produced a study that found there was never a global-warming hiatus, as some believed.

Halpern remembers Smith’s request as a “huge intimidation tactic”—but, he says, “attacks on government scientists predate this administration. It’s not something the Trump administration invented, but it’s something they’ve aggressively pursued.”

PEER’s Bennett, for example, was a whistle-blower at the EPA during the Clinton administration and considers her previous work nonpartisan. Both Republicans and Democrats have interfered with science or regulatory enforcement to a certain extent, she says. But both environmental enforcement and science overall are suffering the most under the current administration.

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who has contributed to multiple federally mandated National Climate Assessment reports, asserts that when President George W. Bush was in office, there “absolutely was censorship. The Bush administration’s approach was to edit or censor documents themselves.” Hayhoe, who teaches at Texas Tech University, adds, “You’d send a draft in for review and you’d get these comments back and be like, ‘Well, you know, this is not accurate.’ ”

Since Trump was elected, Hayhoe has received dispatches from her federal colleagues about research proposals languishing on desks, awaiting political reviews that weren’t required in previous administrations. Or research proposals being rejected or refused by political appointees. Funding woes. Self-policing. “If you don’t have to say ‘climate change,’ don’t say it,” she says, “because it’s like waving a red flag to a bull.”
No administration is perfect, says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Every modern administration has been accused of politicizing science—“but I do think what we’re seeing now is unprecedented.”

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“It’s not a secret the Trump administration is not a fan of science,” says U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientist Mark Williams (not his real name). But he hasn’t been told explicitly or through veiled threats to distance himself and his work from climate science. “The mandate is to use the best available science, and that hasn’t changed,” says Williams, who has worked at the USFWS for about a decade.

The agency has, though. Sally Jewell, interior secretary under Obama, would send weekly video updates to staff; at press time, the USFWS under Trump remained without a director two years into his term. Still, Williams says, “the tendrils of the administration really go down only so far.” With some restrictions, scientists are free to talk about their research with the public, says USFWS chief of public affairs Gavin Shire.

Thomas Miller (not his real name) supports the military’s scientific research in the Arctic and has worked for the federal government for more than a decade. During this time, he says, the mandate has been constant and clear: Employees who are not public affairs officers do not speak to the public. He keeps a personal Facebook page, where he posts updates and the results of research, but he tries to keep it apolitical. He was concerned, though, when he read reports after Trump’s election that the incoming administration was stripping data from public websites. When a guerrilla science movement emerged to preserve that information on independent sites, Miller shared the locations of some data sets with the organizers to save that information.

Outside his work group, Miller generally doesn’t talk about climate change—but not because a superior has suggested he shouldn’t. “The military as a whole skews conservative,” he says. “It’s not worth getting into conversations with people who are sitting there denying science.”

Hayhoe estimates that in the more than two years she spent working on the latest Climate Assessment, she could have published up to 10 of her own studies. The report involved hundreds of unpaid hours of work for others too. As someone not employed by the federal government, Hayhoe feels a responsibility to speak carefully and clearly on behalf of the hundreds of scientists who worked on the report. Many can’t speak for themselves, she says.

“This Assessment was a sacrifice by every single person,” Hayhoe says. “But it was a sacrifice made with full awareness that the climate is changing. It’s us. It’s here, and every human on the planet and especially in the United States needs to understand how climate change is already affecting us and the places we live. We feel a moral responsibility to share what we know.”

Hundreds of scientists have left the federal government since Trump took office. His election could disrupt the next generation of scientists, young graduates who “have decided not to go into this area because of uncertainty,” says Jim White, an environmental scientist and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Of course, thousands of scientists still work for the government. Todd Lewis, at NOAA, says they’re keeping their heads down. “We have to keep our records going,” he says. “We can’t afford to play political games and risk long-term records somehow being interrupted.”

More broadly, he thinks conservatism is the root of what he calls a “chilling effect” on science in the federal government. But Todd Lewis (not his real name), a research scientist at NOAA, says the political appointees at that agency “are actually fairly well-informed people, which I don’t believe to be the case for most of the political appointees for other jobs. At this stage, unlike at the EPA, our research isn’t being heavily impacted.”

He has noticed pushback on press releases, but he says that was common in previous Republican administrations. Ideally, a press release will include context to educate the public about the issue, but today there’s more pressure to stick only with what appears in the research the agency is publicizing.

Notably, in November the Trump administration did not publicize volume two of the Fourth National Climate Assessment report, which concludes that humans are causing climate change. It is a massive and dire study that federal and volunteer scientists, including Hayhoe, one of the lead authors, spent years working on. The government instead quietly released the findings on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.

Volume two is endorsed by 13 federal agencies, including the EPA and the Department of Defense. As media attention on the publication grew, the president’s administration began to disavow its findings, suggesting it was biased or problematic. Trump said he didn’t believe it.

There is another concern among scientists and their advocates: that the Fifth National Climate Assessment, due in 2022, will come under heightened scrutiny. They fear other projects will be canceled or more workers will abandon the agencies for posts where they can work more freely. But the biggest loss, according to Mark Williams of the USFWS, is time. Even if in two (or six) years environmental policies are reinstated and regulations again enforced, the planet will not have stopped warming.

“A lot of things can change pretty much immediately as soon as a new administration takes office,” he says. “But you never get that time back.”

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Many climate scientists have changed the way they talk about global warming. Hayhoe says the most effective place to start a conversation on climate change is by finding common ground. An evangelical Christian, she tries to connect with people over their values—having enough clean water to grow crops, say. And she’s not alone: A growing cadre is framing climate change as a moral and ethical dilemma, according to White. From his perch as a professor, White is watching recent graduates take jobs that allow them to blend science with advocacy—working at Protect Our Winters, for example—and lobby for climate-friendly policies.

“It’s a really strange world when obvious physical truths are pushed aside by tweets and Facebook posts that are clearly wrong but manage to capture people’s attention,” he says. As a scientist and an educator, he’s worried about this trend. It undermines the scientific business model. But, he reasons, it also compels scientists to learn how to advocate for their discipline. They’re becoming more literate on how to effectively talk to laymen.

Take Michael Cox, the former climate-change advisor who resigned from the EPA. He has reached a point where he doesn’t believe the science of climate change will gain traction with most people. “We’ve politicized this as a science debate,” he says. “It’s not a science debate. It’s a values debate. Crossing the mountain pass from western Washington to the more rural and conservative east side, you aren’t going to talk about climate change. You ask them about water.”

“Scientists have sat on the sidelines for a long time,” says Clement, who now works to expose political interference in science for the Union of Concerned Scientists. He and his colleagues were taught to maintain their integrity or stay neutral. But “they’re the ones who most need to speak up right now.”

Meanwhile, Hayhoe would welcome the opportunity to connect with Trump, but only if he were genuinely interested in engaging on the subject—and so far, she’s seen no evidence of that. But if she ever does, she knows what she would say to him: “The world stands at a turning point, which may determine civilization. Do you want to be remembered as the hero who saved the world?”