MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Buried in the Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget is the near elimination of the Ecosystems Mission Area. That is a program that monitors living things and the health of the land and water that they inhabit. NPR's Ari Daniel reports that career scientists are deeply concerned about the potential cut.
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ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Sam Droege rummages around his trunk, filled with buckets, boots and vials before heading into a park on the edge of Washington, D.C., atop what was once a landfill.
SAM DROEGE: I have a net. Yes, we're going to catch bees.
DANIEL: Not honey bees but all manner of other bees.
DROEGE: Most of them, there's no stinging, there's no allergic reactions.
DANIEL: We stop at a blackberry patch. Its flowers sway in the breeze.
DROEGE: I don't know if you can even see that bee in there, but...
DANIEL: Where is it?
DROEGE: ...It's in there.
DANIEL: That little guy?
DROEGE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Wow.
DROEGE: Half the size of a grain of rice. But most bees are super small.
DANIEL: And yet, these teensy insects play an outsized role in pollinating all sorts of plants, including ones we grow and eat.
DROEGE: And so those little bees, they're running the world.
DANIEL: Droege is with the U.S. Geological Survey, where he heads up the Bee Lab, an outfit that supports researchers at other government agencies and universities who study native bees by helping states, for example, identify which bees are rare and in need of protection.
DROEGE: We're here to advise and help people understand what kind of bees are around, how they're doing, what their status is.
DANIEL: Droege's work at the USGS is part of the Ecosystems Mission Area, a group that helps the federal government manage and conserve wildlife and the natural environment nationwide.
DROEGE: There's people who are working on monitoring bats, monitoring birds.
DANIEL: There are teams who monitor fisheries, environmental contaminants and wildlife diseases.
DROEGE: So we work on problems that impact the nation as a whole. Someone needs to be looking at the bigger picture than what states and academics can often do.
DANIEL: And it's this program, the Ecosystems Mission Area, or EMA, that the proposed 2026 federal budget is slashing by 90%. Droege speculates it may be because EMA research into different species can inform regulations that limit the use of land and natural resources.
DROEGE: If you don't know anything, you don't have a problem. So having this kind of information is really inconvenient to business.
DANIEL: NPR reached out to the Office of Management and Budget to confirm the planned cut. In an email, a spokesperson replied, the EMA is, quote, "obviously irrelevant to science and is exactly the kind of waste President Trump ran on rooting out of the federal government." Jill Baron disagrees. She's an ecosystem ecologist at Colorado State University, and in the mid-'90s, while in government, she helped create the EMA.
JILL BARON: We suggested that this would be a more appropriate way to tackle grand societal questions than what we'd had before.
DANIEL: Baron points to her own 43-year research study of the Rocky Mountain National Park watershed. Early on, she and her colleagues were looking for evidence of acid rain. Instead, they found excess nitrogen coming from air pollution, which the federal and state governments then stepped in to reduce. And more recently, she's detected climate change impacts.
BARON: If you stop long-term monitoring, you not only can't see if the changes are getting worse, you can't see if the actions actually made a difference.
DANIEL: In addition, the EMA helps protect Americans from natural disasters like flooding, landslides, hurricanes and fire.
PAUL STEBLEIN: So if you lose EMA, it really fundamentally changes our ability to understand and respond appropriately to these challenges that seem to be expanding every day.
DANIEL: Paul Steblein was the wildland fire science coordinator under the EMA until he retired late last year.
STEBLEIN: Cutting a few million dollars is going to have billions of dollars of impact. It's going to affect people's lives. It's going to affect their health. I think it's shortsighted.
DANIEL: Back in the park in Washington, D.C., Sam Droege, with a flick of the wrist, whips his net through the blackberry flowers.
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DROEGE: See, there's that little bee right here. And I have to be fast 'cause bees are really fast.
DANIEL: He'll bring the bees he snags back to the lab to ID them and then they'll join a collection of some 800,000 bees that the EMA and the researchers they partnered with have amassed over the decades.
DROEGE: This is our life. Like, I would do this without being paid, which I very well may.
DANIEL: Droege says that he and his colleagues are now racing to make sure that vast bee library of theirs is safe, in case their work is suddenly shuttered. Ari Daniel, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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