On Friday afternoon, April 19, 1935, a vast dust cloud darkened the sky over Washington, D.C. and the East Coast as Hugh Bennett, the nation’s chief expert on soil conservation, declared to astonished senators: “This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about. There goes Oklahoma.” Legislators from the Great Plains states that day learned from Bennett that the “Dust Bowl” was partly human-caused due to homesteaders ripping up prairie sod to plant crops, leaving millions of acres of soil exposed to drought and wind. Days later, Congress adopted the Soil Conservation Act of 1935 and President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Bennett as Director of the new Soil Conservation Service (SCS). Through local soil conservation districts, SCS promoted widespread adoption of contour plowing, crop rotation, and planting cover crops to hold the soil in place after crops have been harvested. Another Dust Bowl has since been avoided, even during today’s ongoing Western drought.
Bipartisan support for science-based environmental policies reemerged a generation later with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the first Earth Day in 1970 (the writer was a participant). National momentum grew with adoption of the 1970 federal Clean Air Act and Water Quality Act of 1972, followed by a surge of federal and state environmental measures over the next several decades.
Beginning with the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit, the U.S. helped to jumpstart a global effort to confront the rising threat of climate change, culminating in the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement signed by 197 nations to limit emissions of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
But in 2017, the new Trump administration abruptly reversed course, declaring that climate science is a “hoax” and withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. President Joe Biden rejoined the accord when he took office in January, 2021, but Donald Trump withdrew once again at the start of his second term. Federal agencies have since been directed to purge references to climate science from their websites and to reject or cancel federal grants for climate-related projects.
Among a swarm of executive orders issued by Trump, one of the most bizarre is E.O. 14180 creating a “Council to Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency” (FEMA), signed on Jan. 24, 2025. Rather than reinforcing FEMA to confront worsening wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and floods, the order complains without evidence that FEMA has spent “well over a billion dollars to welcome illegal aliens.” The Council as appointed by Trump consisted of 12 Republican officials from Southern states, co-chaired by the secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense. Compliant with the administration’s “climate hoax” ideology, its 15-page “Final Report” issued May 7, 2026 nowhere mentions the word “climate” (which appears once in the report’s appendices).
Rather than bolstering FEMA, the report calls for a reduction of federal leadership and funding through “a renewed emphasis on locally executed, state or tribally managed, and federally supported emergency management” (disregarding that major climate disasters far exceed the resources and territorial jurisdiction of individual states, counties, local, and tribal governments). It also supports the long-discarded notion that the National Flood Insurance Program should be privatized: the program was created in 1968 because private insurers declined to provide flood insurance due to the uncertainty of risk to individual properties and the possibility of catastrophic losses that would bankrupt the insurer.
Today, global warming from rising levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is magnifying the intensity and frequency of climate-related disasters. And the costs to society are rising rapidly: Climate-Central (https://www.climatecentral.org/) reports that the U.S. suffered 23 billion-dollar climate disasters during 2025 with an estimated total cost of $116 billion, as compared with 11 billion-dollar disasters costing $32 billion a decade earlier in 2015. This acceleration of climate-related costs is not mentioned in the Council report. Nor is the human toll on physical and mental health incurred by residents of areas burned or flooded and the first responders who are endangered as they struggle to protect property and lives.
Like medieval inquisitors who maintained that the sun and stars revolve around the Earth, the President’s Council to Assess FEMA ignores scientific reality to perpetuate an outmoded and reckless faith in a world dependent on fossil fuels. That is the real hoax.
Rutherford H. Platt is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of “Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events.” He lives in Florence.