News Brief | Trump is taking aim at forest and wildfire research just as the West is poised to burn

||| FROM NPR |||

SEATTLE — Few public universities get more federal research funding than the University of Washington. 

So, as President Trump has already canceled or suspended about a quarter of all funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes for Health, the atmosphere on this leafy Seattle campus is tense.

“We have a wildfire crisis in the West [and] in the United States,” says Ernesto Alvarado, a fire ecologist and associate professor at the school.

But the Seattle smoke lab is now on a list of 56 out of 90 research stations identified for closure. It’s part of the Trump administration’s controversial Forest Service reorganization, which includes relocating its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Utah and consolidating regional offices into individual state facilities.

All of this has Morgan Varner worried. He was a fire behavior scientist at the Seattle smoke lab until 2019.

“There’s a haphazard to it that I think is troubling from a scientist standpoint,” Varner says..

Nervous, he says, as these lush Pacific Northwest woods — once thought immune from major fires — could be flammable or at least choked in smoke in a matter of weeks.

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