‘Science under attack’: Top climate scientist Kate Marvel explains why she resigned from NASA

March 25, 2026

6 min read

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‘Science under attack’: Top climate scientist Kate Marvel explains why she resigned from NASA

Climate scientist Kate Marvel talked to Scientific American about her decision to leave NASA amid federal government turmoil and funding challenges

By Andrea Thompson

Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

On Tuesday famed climate scientist Kate Marvel joined the more than 10,000 people with PhDs in science, engineering and mathematics who, according to Science, are reported to have left the U.S. federal workforce since President Donald Trump took office in January.

Marvel resigned from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), where she studied climate change and its effects on Earth’s systems. In her resignation letter, she wrote that “the decision to leave was not an easy one.”

“I thought I’d spend my entire career working at this wonderful place,” her letter stated. But she “never expected that science itself would come under attack, simply because it—like journalism, history, and even the best kind of art—is a way of seeking the truth. I’m leaving because I want to tell the truth.”

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Marvel has done high-profile work to understand Earth’s changing climate and is a frequent public speaker and science writer. (She has previously written for Scientific American.) When asked for comment, a NASA spokesperson said it would be inappropriate for the agency to comment on personnel matters.

Marvel spoke with Scientific American about her decision to quit NASA and the state of American science.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Tell us a little bit about your job with NASA.

I was a research scientist at NASA. It was my job to learn things about Earth, and that is the greatest job description I can think of, because this is the best planet and there’s so much interesting stuff going on here.

I focused largely on two areas of Earth science. One is detection and attribution of climate change—so what does climate change look like? That means the temperatures rise, but it also manifests in other weird ways: changes in rainfall, changes in extremes, changes in drought risk.

I thought a lot about “How is climate change—not just greenhouse gases but also aerosols and naturally forced climate change like volcanic eruptions—how does that affect the weather patterns, the things that we care about?”

The other part of my job was to look at feedback. So as Earth warms, how does it change, and how do those changes then feed back on the warming?

Recently I had become interested in what we call carbon cycle feedback: When you disturb the Earth system, how much of the carbon dioxide that human beings put in the atmosphere stays up there? That is a story about how living things on the planet are changing, because, right now, about half of the CO2 that human beings put in the atmosphere gets taken out by things that grow, by things that photosynthesize. And we don't know if that’s going to continue.

What did working at NASA mean to you?

What a dream, right? Those four letters are magic. They stand for exploration and discovery and doing big things. But I think, for me, they also kind of stood for this promise that America could be better than it was, that we could not only provide a good life for everybody but also tell people, “You deserve wonder; you deserve awe and discovery. And space is not a playground for billionaires. Space is something that belongs to everybody who lives on this planet.” I really believed in that mission, and I still really believe in that mission.

Why did you decide it was time to leave the space agency?

There was no real push over the edge. It was the accumulation of thing after thing after thing after thing. It’s hard to be a scientist in general right now, and it’s hard to work for the federal government as a scientist.

There were uncertainties in terms of: Are we going to get fired? Is DOGE going to come after us? What’s going to happen to our program?

[GISS] used to have a lease on a building over Tom’s Restaurant at 112th and Broadway in New York City, and that lease was ended. We were kicked out. We were dispersed. We have been kind of couch surfing at various New York City universities and libraries. That was very disruptive.

And then, when we apply for grants, we don’t hear about them or we hear, “This is a good proposal. Under any other circumstances, we would want to fund it, but we don't know anything about the money.” So it’s