February 5, 2025
3 min read
Trump Administration Shutters Climate Health Office
A climate office at the Department of Health and Human Services has been shuttered, and its staff was placed on administrative leave
An elderly man faints in front of the Supreme Court in June 2024 as temperatures in Washington, D.C., rose into the 90s Fahrenheit.
Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto via Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | A climate office at the Department of Health and Human Services has been shuttered, and its staff was placed on administrative leave, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.
The Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, established in 2021 by President Joe Biden, has helped spur the health sector to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It did that in part by raising awareness among health care nonprofits about renewable energy tax credits they could claim under the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s sprawling climate legislation.
Its closure, which hasn’t previously been reported, came as President Donald Trump’s sprawling effort to freeze grant funding and reduce the federal workforce has sent shock waves throughout government. One of the administration’s main targets has been programs that focus on expanding access to federal resources for minorities.
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The staff of the HHS climate office were placed on administrative leave on Jan. 22, the day after Trump signed an executive order ending programs dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the three people, who were granted anonymity to avoid retribution. The office had about eight people assigned to it. Web pages devoted to the climate office remained active for a few days after the executive order was signed, but nearly all of them are now offline.
Similar moves sparked outcry from public health officials earlier this week, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed materials from its website about preventing sexually transmitted diseases and providing gender-affirming care. The CDC also blocked access to its Social Vulnerability Index, which uses Census Bureau data to rank communities’ vulnerability to natural disasters.
Other websites that disappeared include the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Minority Health at HHS.
Spokespeople at HHS did not respond to requests for comment.
The changes come as the Senate is expected to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as health secretary in the coming days. Just five years ago, Kennedy published a book blaming Republicans in Congress for what he called a “climate in crisis,” but he has become more conservative on the issue since he launched a failed independent presidential bid in 2023. In August, he told Tucker Carlson, the far-right media personality, that he had been “expelled” from the environmental movement because he does not believe in “this carbon orthodoxy that the only issue is carbon.”
Throughout the presidential campaign, climate health advocates expressed concern about what might happen to the climate office at HHS if Trump won the election. But the civil servant leading the climate office, John Balbus, sought to calm those fears. In April, he said he was “optimistic” that the office’s work would “speak for itself.”
“We are fighting for going to the people who are the sickest and making them as equitably healthy as we can. I don’t think that’s a partisan issue,” he said at an event sponsored by Kaiser Permanente.
Balbus, a career staffer on loan to HHS from the National Institutes of Health, where he studied the health effects of climate change, is on administrative leave.
During the Biden administration, the climate office helped launch interactive online tools to inform the public about how extreme heat could harm their health. Another tracks heat-related emergency room visits. Those tools were still online Tuesday.
Among the pages that have disappeared is a voluntary pledge for hospitals, health systems, suppliers and pharmaceutical companies to commit to reducing their carbon emissions 50 percent by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. As of November, about 140 organizations had signed the pledge, according to a record of it kept by the advocacy group Health Care Without Harm.
“With the HHS Health Sector Pledge having been removed from the HHS website, Health Care Without Harm has stepped in to preserve it and the momentum it has generated in the healthcare sector,” the group said in a statement.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
