Trump pushed for more citizen science. Then the cuts came

In 1997, countries around the globe debated whether or not to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. The idea that humans were altering the global climate was still very new — but now, a handful of citizen scientists had uncovered evidence that suggested something even more unsettling: the change wasn’t just coming. It had already begun.

Four months before countries had to decide, scientists at the British Trust for Ornithology published the results of a citizen science project they led. Analyzing observations from one thousand volunteers, they found that birds around the U.K. were laying eggs earlier than expected — a trend they attributed to climate change. 

The bird study directly influenced governments to sign the protocol by encouraging policymakers to recognize the immediacy of the problem, according to the 2016 book Citizen Science by Caren Cooper. “People cited that paper at the Kyoto Protocol discussions, saying, ‘We’re already seeing wildlife respond to climate change. It’s happening now.’ And so it increased the sense of urgency,” said Cooper, who studies participatory sciences and environmental resources at North Carolina State University. 

The Kyoto Protocol is just one of many examples of the meaningful impact citizen science — science projects that rely on observations from volunteer, non-academics — can have on scientific understanding and policy. And while the Trump administration seems to be publicly pushing for more citizen science, the federal funding cuts that they enact are stymieing citizen science programs.

In their efforts to deem academic research untrustworthy, right-wing politicians see citizen science as a replacement for government agency and university work. Former Trump administration officials wrote outright in Project 2025 that the Environmental Protection Agency “should embrace so-called citizen science,” and it’s up to “the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct.” Though President Donald Trump claims Project 2025 doesn’t represent his values, it aligns with many of his proposals.

Bolstering citizen science is advantageous for research in theory, but experts say that these shows of support are misleading. “What Project 2025 suggests isn’t wrong,” said Jennifer Shirk, who leads the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences. But she worries that officials may “further foment [existing scientific] mistrust by looking at ways to point out flaws and to undermine data,” rather than contribute to it.

Cooper has similar concerns. ”I think there is a lot to be said for democratizing science,” she said, “but my impression is that the current administration’s voicing of that is not in a way that builds more trust between science and society. And that’s very counter to participatory sciences. The current administration’s suggestions on that are missing the mark.”

Citizen science is a critical component of research in many fields, including microbiology, biochemistry, astronomy, ornithology, entomology and more. “Community science projects allow us to collect data in a way that would not be possible with even a large research team,” said Rosemary Malfi, director of conservation policy at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. “Collectively, community scientists are able to cover more ground and collect data more frequently,” she explained.

Specifically, volunteers provide projects with broad geospatial data. The site of observations is often as significant as the observations themselves. Research that requires a complete picture of distributions of biodiversity or water quality, for example, would not be possible without participants from varied locations, Cooper said.

But these projects have costs. Experts are needed to train volunteers, establish protocols, manage data and analyze results. People often have a misconception that citizen science is free, and so the more of it that’s done, the less need there is for professional scientists, Cooper said. She invoked the act of adopting a puppy in countering that idea: even if it’s free at first, “you’ve got to take it to the vet. You’ve got to feed it. You’ve got to love it,” and that requires resources.

Some projects, like those at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, are privately funded and therefore relatively insulated from Trump’s whims. But much of citizen science is federally funded. “There have been so many resources that have come out of federal agencies or federal funding,” Shirk said. She attributes the success of many citizen science projects to continued federal support. 

That’s why science funding cuts championed by the Trump administration are so devastating to the fields that rely on volunteer participants to gather data. Though none of the cuts are directly aimed at these projects, many affect them anyway. 

Cooper, for example, ran a bird observation program with Audubon Society that utilized citizen contributors with funds from a National Science Foundation grant. Because the project aimed to engage a wide range of volunteers, including people of color and people with disabilities, funding was severed after just one year of a four year proposal. “That one was cut, because it was based on frameworks of inclusion and equity,” she said.

She was excited about the project because those without similar inclusivity initiatives often mostly attract white, affluent participants who have advanced degrees. But reaching different communities is crucial to collecting a wide array of geospatial data. Because much of the U.S. is segregated by race and income, reaching diverse volunteers is integral to avoiding spatially biased results. 

“The data quality is inherently poorer if the data aren’t representative of a lot of different spaces,” Cooper said. “It means that we have data rich areas and data poor areas, and these data inequities are just from our not engaging appropriately.”

Shirk worries that the funding cuts will have a wide impact on the field of participatory science. Not only do they hamper individual projects, but they also threaten institutional frameworks and knowledge. “The loss of infrastructure for the field, particularly pertaining to [federal] agency budgets, programs and partnerships, is broad reaching,” she said.

For a long time, scientists have assumed that certain research programs and funding sources were a given, Malfi said, but that’s not the case anymore. “Whether any one person knows it or not, we have all benefited from these programs and we need to speak up for them. Like Joni Mitchell said, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.’”