President Trump canceled the National Nature Assessment, which began its work under the Biden administration, shortly after he took office in January. It would have been due for submission to the White House earlier this week.
“The idea was that we don’t have a good national inventory of the state of nature,” Howard Frumkin, a professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Washington School of Public Health who was lead author on the report’s chapter on the relationship between nature and public health, told The Hill in an interview.
“We know a lot about our economy, we know a lot about our transportation infrastructure and our kids’ academic achievement, but nature is such an important basis for the economy and for health and well-being, for cultural benefits, but we never have had a good inventory of the state of nature across the country, of trends that may be affecting it, positive or negative, where and how it’s delivering benefits,” Frumkin added.
Frumkin called the decision to pull the plug “a little mystifying.”
“This is really not a political or ideological topic. We know that across the country, in red states and blue states and red counties, blue counties, people love the nation’s natural heritage,” he said.
He pointed to his experience working at the Trust for Public Land, where he said Americans in Democratic and Republican areas and everything in between regularly voted to issue bonds to protect green space.
The report has nearly 200 authors across 12 chapters covering nature’s intersection with everything from the economy to cultural heritage, and had a target publication date of 2026 before Trump canceled it. However, Frumkin told The Hill, the authors are currently weighing options for how to publish the final report in another form.
Read more at TheHill.com.
