USGS Faces Big Cuts, Endangering Chesapeake Science

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Vital research into threats to the Chesapeake Bay from invasive blue catfish, PFAS contamination, climate change and land use is on the chopping block as the Trump administration aims to decimate if not eliminate ecological studies done by the U.S. Geological Survey.

In its proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 released May 30, the White House has called for a 90% cut in funding for ecological research, laboratories and personnel at the USGS, which is the science arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“It’s the most important mission area in USGS that they’re cutting,” said Scott Phillips, who retired from the agency in 2023 after more than 25 years as its Chesapeake Bay science coordinator. Beyond water quality, he noted, fish and wildlife are “what people care about.”

The USGS is perhaps better known to the public for monitoring surface and groundwater flows, analyzing inland floods and assessing energy and mineral resources in the ground. But ecological research also plays a major role, Phillips said, and helps make the USGS the leading source of scientific information in the Bay watershed.

All told, the USGS spends about $17.5 million a year on research in the Bay watershed, he noted, with nearly two thirds of that devoted to ecological studies.

It’s not clear what else would be cut, though the General Services Administration in March proposed terminating leases for 25 USGS water science centers nationwide, including as many as eight in Bay watershed states. Those centers maintain a network of stream gauges that the USGS uses to monitor drought and flooding.

In a preliminary budget request released May 2, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said that it wanted to eliminate USGS “programs that provide grants to universities, duplicate other federal research programs and focus on social agendas (e.g., climate change).” The budget office said that, instead, the USGS would narrow its focus to “achieving dominance in energy and critical minerals.”

In April, though, the journal Science reported that an internal email from the then USGS associate director of ecosystems directed agency managers to develop a plan to wind down and then stop all activities in its ecosystems division in the next fiscal year, which begins in October.

The publication Government Executive, meanwhile, reported in May that the USGS was expected to lay off about 1,000 employees, focused on the ecosystems division — which is roughly its entire remaining workforce after accounting for voluntary resignations. The Trump administration’s “reduction in force” planned across most federal agencies was blocked by a California federal judge and upheld on appeal, with the case likely to go to the Supreme Court.

USGS scientists and managers in the Bay watershed declined to comment for this article. A USGS spokesperson referred questions about the proposed cuts to the OMB, where a spokesperson did not respond to the Bay Journal’s requests for an interview or information.

But the OMB’s proposed cut in USGS ecological research tracks with a recommendation from Project 2025, the presidential transition plan prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation before Trump was elected. Project 2025 called for abolishing what it called the “Biological Resources Division” of the USGS, which was renamed the Ecosystem Mission Area in a 2010 agency reorganization.

Instead of having ecological research done by the USGS, the OMB suggested having “necessary research about species of concern” performed by universities through competitive grant awards.

“We improve understanding of water quality, of what the fisheries need,” Phillips said. USGS monitoring of nutrients and sediment in the Bay’s tributaries provides important ground-truthing of whether pollution reduction practices adopted by watershed states are achieving the desired results.

If the USGS network of stream gauges and monitoring stations suffers cutbacks or interruptions, Phillips added, “you lose the pulse [of the cleanup effort]. You lose whether you’re making progress or not.”

The USGS also maps land use and land cover in the 64,000-square-mile Bay watershed, providing decision-makers with information on trends in forestland and development that can guide efforts to conserve ecologically important sites.

“I can tell you if you don’t have the science, you won’t [make] good decisions,” said Nathaniel “Than” Hitt, a fisheries biologist who left the USGS last year to work for the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. The USGS, he said, is “providing the foundational science for fish and wildlife conservation,” and without it “we’d be flying blind.”

At risk if the Trump administration’s budget is approved by Congress would be the Eastern Ecological Science Center, the largest of 15 USGS ecological research centers nationwide. It employs about 150 scientists and support staff with two laboratories in the Bay watershed that work on a diverse array of studies.

One of the labs, in Kearneysville, WV, focuses on fish health and factors impacting aquatic species, including chemical contaminants, habitat loss and invasive species.

Vicki Blazer, a research biologist at that lab, has spent years studying how intersex characteristics in smallmouth bass, a popular gamefish, are linked to chemical contaminants in the Bay watershed. In recent years, her focus has shifted to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Commonly known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS have been detected in smallmouth bass that Blazer and colleagues have sampled in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland. While PFAS contamination is often traced to military or industrial use, a paper she co-authored last year found the toxic chemicals in fish collected from streams that flow through farmland.

During Hitt’s time there, he worked with others to track how climate and land use change are diminishing brook trout, a freshwater fish so highly prized that it is the official state fish in four of the six Bay watershed states. The lab also identified spots where cold groundwater seeping into warming streams enabled temperature-sensitive brook trout to hang on, at least for now.

“The question is, where will be the last cold streams?” he said. “We helped answer that question.”

Retired USGS scientist Mike Erwin focused on waterbirds during his time at Patuxent from 1978 to 2012. He recalled helping launch the restoration of Poplar Island just off the Eastern Shore in Talbot County, MD. Using sand and sediment dredged from shipping channels in the Bay, state and federal agencies rebuilt the island, which had nearly eroded away. The island’s wetlands and other habitats now are home to a variety of migratory birds, including common terns, which prefer to nest on open, sparsely vegetated beaches such as at Poplar. Though relatively abundant elsewhere, common terns are classified as endangered in Maryland.

Another Patuxent scientist, ecotoxicologist Barnett Rattner, has spent nearly five decades studying ospreys in several Maryland and Virginia rivers of the Chesapeake, as well as in Delaware Bay. Much of his work focused on whether pesticides and other toxic chemicals accumulating in fish might be affecting the birds’ reproduction or survival.

For the past two years, though, he has worked with the Center for Conservation Biology at William & Mary to assess whether osprey reproduction around the Bay may be faltering because of a lack of food, specifically Atlantic menhaden. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering whether the Bay catch of menhaden should be restricted.

Patuxent scientists have worked on other pressing Chesapeake issues, such as the impact of invasive blue catfish on native fish species and the spread of avian influenza from wild birds to economically important poultry operations in the watershed.

Looking beyond the Bay region, USGS scientists at Patuxent coordinate the annual North American breeding bird survey as well as a continent-wide bird banding program to collect and analyze data about bird populations and migrations. They also maintain a bee laboratory that identifies and studies native bees, of which there are nearly 500 species in the Mid-Atlantic region alone. Scientists, birders and conservation advocates nationwide have spoken out against the threatened elimination of those efforts.

The Trump administration sought to cut the USGS in its first term, but Congress balked. Though some Republican lawmakers have expressed concern this time about the scale of the administration’s proposed cuts, it’s not clear whether there’s the same will to buck the White House. It’s been left mainly to Democrats to speak out.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-MD, reminded Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at a May budget hearing of the importance of the USGS to the Bay restoration effort.

“It provides very important science that all of the states use to help develop strategies to help Bay,” he said.

Van Hollen pressed Burgum for a pledge to maintain that science but later said he was less than reassured by the secretary’s response.

Erwin, the former USGS waterbird specialist, said he is “appalled” to think that all or nearly all of that ecological research could be shut down.

“My heart goes out to all those scientists,” Erwin said. “It’s not just a job. It’s a passion.”

“When I first started back in 1978,” he said, “Patuxent was considered the premier wildlife research facility in the world,” with field stations across the country. Initially hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he and other scientists there were shifted at one point to an independent federal biological research agency, then made part of the USGS.

“I’ve seen a pretty dramatic reduction through the years,” Erwin said, referring to the size of both staff and budget. “But now,” he concluded, “science is no longer a priority at all.”