The Forbidden C-Word: How US Scientists Learned to Stop Saying 'Climate

At a federal agricultural research lab in Illinois, scientists have a name for the word they're no longer allowed to say. They call it "the forbidden C-word." Not a profanity. Just climate.

One Memo, One Hundred Banned Words

Ethan Roberts has worked for the US federal government for nearly a decade. He survived Trump's first term. He says nothing prepared him for this one.

The signal came last March, in the form of an internal memo from upper management at the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The directive: avoid submitting any contracts or agreements containing any of 100-plus newly prohibited words and phrases. Roughly a third were directly tied to climate science — "global warming," "climate science," "carbon sequestration" among them. The rest swept up clean energy, pollution remediation, water infrastructure, and DEI-related terminology.

Roberts, union president at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois, met with his colleagues to figure out a response. Their conclusion: swap the words and keep working. Across the agency, "climate change" became "elevated temperatures." "Carbon emissions" became "soil health." "Warming impacts" became "extreme weather."

The numbers tell the story with uncomfortable clarity. Grist analyzed grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — which funds roughly a quarter of all US university research. The result: NSF grants mentioning "climate change" in their titles or abstracts fell from 889 in 2023 to just 148 last year — a 77% drop in a single year. Over the same period, the phrase "extreme weather" began appearing more frequently in new proposals. Scientists aren't just having their grants cut. They're rewriting their own language before anyone asks them to.

"It Feels Dirty, But It's Practical"

Trent Ford, the state climatologist for Illinois, now frames his funding proposals around "weather extremes" and "weather variability." He's candid about the discomfort. "On principle, if we're studying climate change, to not name climate change feels dirty," he says. But the calculation is straightforward: grants that avoid the phrase while obviously studying its effects are sailing through. Grants that include it are not.

Ford's own experience captures the whiplash of the moment. In late 2024, his team submitted an NSF proposal to study how climate conditions affect Midwestern agriculture. Following the norms of the Biden era, they included a line about engaging a diverse group of farmers. By the time the proposal reached NSF reviewers under the new administration, that same language had become, in Ford's words, "a death sentence." The NSF liked the research but asked the team to remove the diversity language and confirm they'd speak to "all American farmers." They revised and resubmitted. The grant was approved last April.

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Four months. The same sentence went from required to disqualifying in four months.

Not everyone found a workaround. An anonymous researcher at the Agricultural Research Service described how DOGE eliminated entire programs at the agency — including a hydroponics initiative that, as the researcher put it, "really didn't have anything to do with climate change." It had simply been labeled as climate research during the Biden years to secure funding. "Anything with 'CC' in front of it was eliminated," the researcher said. "That came back to bite them."

The Funding Exodus

As federal money dries up, researchers are going elsewhere. Dana Fisher, a professor at American University and director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, has secured private funding for her climate communication research and is actively pursuing grants from overseas institutions — a strategy she's used before. During the George W. Bush administration, she received funding from the Norwegian Research Council to study how US city and state climate action influences federal policy. When she mentioned this to Congressional contacts, the reaction was bewilderment. "They're like, 'Huh?'" she recalled. "I was like, 'Well, that's what happens when there's a Republican administration.'"

Austin Becker, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies port resilience to storms and flooding, started dropping "climate" from his framing during Trump's first term. "Everything that was 'climate' just became 'coastal resilience,'" he says. And it stayed that way. The linguistic adaptation, once made, tends to stick.

Ford ultimately gave in to pressure from colleagues to avoid the phrase — not out of ideological agreement, but out of financial necessity. "Getting a grant could be the difference between a graduate student getting a paycheck and us having to let them go," he said.

Censorship, or a Funder's Prerogative?

There's a genuine tension here worth sitting with. Funders have always shaped research priorities. The NIH emphasizes disease. DARPA funds defense applications. Researchers routinely frame proposals to match what a funder cares about. In that sense, the Trump administration's pressure is a difference of degree, not of kind — a funder asserting its preferences.

But the counterargument is harder to dismiss. When the funder is the federal government, and when the words being removed describe a physical phenomenon documented across decades of peer-reviewed science, the act of erasure carries different weight. "Extreme weather" describes events. "Climate change" describes causes. Swapping one for the other doesn't just change the packaging — it changes the causal frame of the research itself.

The downstream effects are still unfolding. Many climate projects at USDA research divisions are stuck in funding purgatory, their fate potentially hinging on a word or two. Roberts puts it plainly: "Clever word usage, and controlling the scope of how the research is presented, allows for scientists to keep doing the work. There's no one going around hunting these people down. Not yet, anyway."

That last phrase — not yet — is doing a lot of work.