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In another move from the Trump administration aimed at disrupting climate science, the Commerce Department has ordered NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to search grants for climate-change-related terms, signaling that it may work to cancel that funding. Its a move that could threaten a wide array of projectsincluding infrastructure work on bridges and roadsand leaves researchers uncertain about the future of their work. NOAA is one of the worlds leading climate science agencies, and it funds work on everything from atmospheric studies to wildfires to fishery recovery. NOAA also has funding available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for habitat restoration, coastal resilience, and weather forecasting. The Trump administrations directive to search grants for climate terms includes words like climate, climate science, carbon, environmental quality, and pollution. This follows the move from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to search NOAA databases for DEI content. But terms like diversity could come up in discussions about ecological or biodiversity, researchers sayand climate terms are ubiquitous in everything the agency works on. Youre going to have a hard time finding grant awards that dont mention climate change, simply because of its role in all of these areas of science, says Douglas Price, whose work has focused on grant funding and climate research. It speaks to the blunt-force approach that’s being taken across the government right now. Infrastructure projects are tied to climate science By singling out climate-related terminology, all types of NOAA-funded work could be under threat. That includes infrastructure projects that have to take climate impacts into considerationbasically, anything you build, Price says. Anything that uses concrete, steel, asphalt, you have to be looking at extreme heat and extreme precipitation events. If youre going to exclude climate change from the planning and engineering of any sorts of projects, youre making them vulnerable to climate extremes that were seeing with regularity now. Whether in a tiny, coastal New England town or a major city like New York, infrastructure like roads, bridges, rail lines, and tunnels must consider climate threats. What are the new temperature extremes that we’re going to see? What is the new baseline for 100-year storms? What are the flooding extremes were going to see and how do we size storm sewers? Price says. Infrastructure projects are meant to last decades, so we cant build new bridges, for example, only for the climate extremes were currently experiencing; we have to think about the projected extremes well see in 50 years. Already, our current infrastructure is at risk. One environmental nonprofit worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears that his organization could be targeted by the administration, is concerned about this directive affecting existing agreements. His nonprofit uses funding that comes from other organizations via NOAA grants. One recent project involves designing and building two bridges to replace undersized culverts. When culverts are too small, the water flowing through them is stronger, which enhances erosion, blocks fish from passing through, and risks washing out structures. These culverts increase the risk of road failure and are barriers to spawning migration for salmon species, the worker says. These projects all explicitly mention climate change and habitat diversity. These phrases are in there because NOAA guidance is to design road crossings to account for anticipated changes due to climate change. Overall, ignoring climate impacts doesn’t stop them from happeningit just stops us from being prepared. By banning certain terms, Price says, You’re blindfolding yourself and walking into a strange room, and you know that there are lots of sharp objects in that room you can stumble into, but youve chosen to not look for them. A matter of life and death for at-risk communities Other NOAA-funded work is more on the nose when it comes to climate change, like mitigation efforts or environmental justice projectsboth specifically on Trumps radar for cuts. This isnt work being done in some lab that has implications for far into the future. Its being applied almost immediately to problems that we face, Price says. Grants help connect research institutions with vulnerable communities and the government agencies that can provide them resources. That could mean communicating flood risks to coastal communities or ensuring that the recovery efforts for the Los Angeles wildfires arent leaving less-wealthy communities behind. Or take an impact like extreme heat, which poses special risk for communities with lots of elderly residents or people with disabilities. If we cant understand those risks and where the vulnerabilities are, and if we cant help policymakers come up with ways of getting support to those communities, more people will die when we have extreme heat events than would otherwise, he says. This holds true for any extreme weather event. The main reason we want to understand climate change and that we want to increase resilience to impacts is because those impacts often are life-and-death matters to people, Price adds. These things arent abstract. They arent a game. Were honestly very concerned about peoples lives in the work that we do. A cloud of uncertainty for researchers A larger issue with targeting specific terms like climate or diversity is that it removes them from crucial context. You can’t talk about statistics without talking about bias; you cant talk about IT security without talking about privilege; you can’t talk about any population of humans, animals, or bacteria without talking about population diversity, Price says. Sifting through the results requires a certain understanding of these topics, one that the nonprofit worker doubts young DOGE workers have. The administrations approach isnt necessarily meant to be productive or exact. Instead, Price notes, its a way of creating a political climate where these topics feel threatened, and if you’re involved with these things, you’re at risk. With agency-level communication largely shut down and ever-changing orders, its difficult to know how this will all proceedwhether grants will actually be cut short, whether the courts will step in, whether researchers need to think about working with Congress. Theres a large cloud of uncertainty around how all of this is being done, he says. That means many researchers and their institutions are still looking for the best pathway to defend their work. But for climate researchers, antagonism isnt totally new. Climate scientists are quite used to being attacked poltically, Price says. Its just that now the attacks are focused on a particular vulnerability in science in general, which is the way that it is funded by the federal government.
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KitchenAid just unveiled its color of the year, a retro, comforting Butter yellow. While most people are aware of Pantones color of the year program (hello, Mocha Mousse), fewer might be clued in to the fact that the beloved appliance company KitchenAid has been running its own version of the concept since 2017. Each year, KitchenAid picks a trendy new hue to outfit a line of its iconic stand mixers. In 2023, the pick was an electric pink Hibiscus, followed by a powdery Blue Salt in 2024. Now the company is all-in on its nostalgic buttery hue. The new mixer retails online for $499.99. [Photo: KitchenAid] A team of analysts from KitchenAids parent company, Whirlpool, work year-round to identify culturally relevant colors for new products. The color of the year program is a way to highlight that workand, conveniently, it taps into the consumer demand for colorful cookware that has helped brands like Our Place and Le Creuset amass loyal followings. Brittni Pertijs is a color, material, and finish design manager at Whirlpool. She says her team has had their eye on yellow for color of the year since 2019, when mustard first started becoming a popular hue. The main goal with the color of the year program is to look at the drivers of social cultural trends and filter those through the KitchenAid brand lens, Pertijs says. Then, we forecast how people may want to feel in the year of launchin this case, those feelings were comfort and optimism. From there, we look at our color tracking to identify which tones seem to be emerging and which align best with interior design trends. [Photo: KitchenAid] Butter yellow is an apt choice, given that the soft, retro hue is having something of a modern-day revival. Back in December, Pinterest predicted that 2025 would see a resurgence of youthful primary colors in interior design. In January, the platform spotlighted butter yellow as one of its five colors of the year, given that searches for butter yellow on the site were up 115%, while butter yellow nails saw interest spike by 1,835%. Pertijss team identified their perfect butter yellow shade by collecting a range of potential samples, including a vintage butter knife found in an antique shop. The final hue is somewhat brighter than plain butter, but its just right to evoke the warm and fuzzy feelings of your grandmas 1960s-era kitchen. Butter is so comforting, yet indulgent, Pertijs says. The soft color has just enough energy to spark that feeling of joy. We literally wrote a love letter to Butter as we were building our inspiration around this years selection.
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Young software engineers from Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continue to infiltrate U.S. government agencies with the stated goal of eliminating what the Trump White House deems wasteful (or woke) spending. Theyre already on the ground at the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And theyre spreading further every day. DOGE has also said it aims to modernize government systems, which implies altering the code within those government systems. That could bring members of the organization face-to-face with something theyve potentially never seen before: COBOL, or common business-oriented language. COBOL was developed in the 1950s by a private-public partnership that included the Pentagon and IBM. The goal was to create a universal, English-like programming language for business applications. In the decades since, private-sector businesses have moved away from the language. The code is difficult and costly to maintain, and was built for batch processing, which means it doesnt integrate well with more modern cloud-based and real-time applications. But its a totally different story in Washington, D.C. Indeed, despite a number of modernization pushes in recent decades, the language is still widely used within government mainframe systems that manage all kinds of government financial transactions, from tax payments and refunds to Social Security benefits to Medicare reimbursements. The systems, if maintained correctly, are extremely reliable. COBOL acts as the glue that holds the components of the mainframe together, the code that orchestrates its work with apps and databases, as one expert told me. The mainframes themselves are loaded with redundancy and fault-tolerance features so they never break down. COBOL-based mainframe systems are also still widely used in regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare. Some people worry that Musks young engineers might blunder into the COBOL code base and make changes without understanding the full effects. Normally, any changes to the code underlying government systems has to follow a set of detailed business requirements written by other agency staffers. Any delays or downtime in these systems has direct effects on real peoples lives. Its also very possible that software engineers and others within the agencies will impress upon Musk and his DOGE advisers the importance of respecting established norms. But Musk and his people are, if anything, unpredictable. Should the DOGE staffers attempt to rewrite sections of the COBOL code, it could lead to unintended consequences, including major disruptions to critical government services. And unintended consequences are very possible, if not probable. Itll break and then well figure out what to fix In a way, the COBOL language symbolizes the disconnect of worldviews of the players in the DOGE drama. Maintaining the COBOL code is a process of translating new policies or regulations into detailed business requirements, translating the requirements into computer code, arduously testing the code in a safe environment, putting the final product into production, and documenting its purpose in the system. Since COBOL hasnt been part of the computer science curriculum since the 1990s, the people who do this work are usually older, and their numbers are diminishing. Musk and the DOGE staff, most of whom are young software engineers from Silicon Valley circles, are used to a very different move fast and break things process, says Don Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, which helps governments modernize complex services and products. You look at the way, for example, the early Tesla full self-driving software was put together, and we have a culture in the tech industry of, Let’s hack it together, let’s get something that works well enough, and then it’ll break and then we’ll figure out what to fix, says Hon, who has helped troubleshoot and modernize state and federal government systems, including Medicaid and logistics at the Defense Department. To be sure, that philosophy has yielded a lot of success for entrepreneurs like Musk in the past, Hon says. But that sort of calculated risk means something very different for government systems on which hundreds of millions of people rely. Engineers whove spent their entire professional life developing consumer-facing software may not be equipped to draw a correct risk profile for implementing changes to a government payments system. You’ve got someone who might say, What’s one missed Social Security payment or what’s one missed Medicaid payment, because we can fix it later, right? Hon says. What’s one missed federal payment that the states then disperse weekly to, for example, a service provider for social services? (DOGE did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.) The COBOL software is brittle. If, for instance, the code is updated with a new policy that conflicts with an existing one, the whole system can crash. Some systems dont have automated testing routines, so software engineers must program tests by hand and go through the time-consuming task of testing new code before it gets implemented. This is complicated by the fact that some parts of the code arent properly documented, so people whove not yet seen itsuch as DOGE engineersmay not know what the code was written to do. Without whistleblowers from inside the agency, it may be hard to know if the DOGE people are attempting to alter system code. Earlier this month the Trump administration and the Treasury Department claimed that Musk and his cadre of DOGE operatives have merely read only access to government computer systemsand will make no changes to government systems or operations without the express consent of the president. But in a recent court filing, the highest-ranking DOGE point person at the Treasury Department, Thomas Krause, admitted that another DOGE staffer at the department, Marko Elez, had indeed been granted read and write access to the code, allowing him to alter it. (Krause said this access was given by accident.) Krause also said in the same court filing that his job is to understand how the agencys end-to-end payment systems and financial report tools work, [and] recommend ways to update and modernize those systems. This implies an intet to alter system code. Such an effort could easily touch the COBOL code working within the mainframe systems. In the court filing, Krause said hes been working closely with Treasury staffers to find ways of advancing Trumps and Musks objectives while still respecting the agencys data privacy and security guidelines. But DOGE officials already pushed out the Treasurys highest-ranking career staffer, David Lebryk, after he refused them access to the agencys payment systems. Krause likely can dispatch any internal objector with one phone call if they dont comply with DOGEs wishes. But the DOGE team may think twice before firing the veteran staffers who speak COBOL and know where the bodies are buried. In the end, COBOLs incomprehensibility and brittleness may be features, not bugs.
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