Most people, after suffering consequences for a bad decision, will alter their future behavior to avoid a similar negative outcome. That's just common sense. But many social circles have that one friend who never seems to learn from those consequences, repeatedly self-sabotaging themselves with the same bad decisions. When it comes to especially destructive behaviors, like addictions, the consequences can be severe or downright tragic.

Why do they do this? Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, suggest that the core issue is that such people don't seem able to make a causal connection between their choices/behavior and the bad outcome, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Psychology. Nor are they able to integrate new knowledge into their decision-making process effectively to get better results. The results could lead to the development of new intervention strategies for gambling, drug, and alcohol addictions.

In 2023, UNSW neuroscientist Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel and colleagues designed an experimental video game to explore the issue of why certain people keep making the same bad choices despite suffering some form of punishment as a result. Participants played the interactive online game by clicking on one of two planets to "trade" with them; choosing the correct planet resulted in earning points.

For each click in two three-minute rounds, there was a 50 percent chance of choosing the correct planet and being rewarded with points. Then the researchers introduced a new element: clicking on one of the two planets would result in a pirate spaceship attacking 20 percent of the time and "stealing" one-fifth of a player's points. Selecting the other planet would result in a neutral spaceship 20 percent of the time, which did not attack or steal points.

The result was a very distinct split between those who figured out the game and stopped trading with the planet that produced the pirate spaceship, and those who did not. None of the participants enjoyed losing points to the attacking space pirates, but the researchers found that those who didn't change their playing strategy just couldn't make the connection between their behavior and the negative outcome.

The team identified three distinct behavioral phenotypes as a result of their experiments, representing the varying sensitivity of people to the adverse consequences (punishment) of their actions. Sensitives easily make the connection between their choices and the outcomes and can adapt their behavior to gain rewards and avoid punishment. Those who fail to make the link are either Unawares—people who, once given further information or clues, can re-evaluate and change their behavior—and Compulsives, i.e., people who still persist in making bad decisions despite suffering consequences.

Expanding the pool

This latest study builds on that earlier work, using a variation of the same experimental online game: After a few rounds, the researchers told all the subjects which planet was linked to which ship and also which ship triggered the point losses. "We never directly tell them what the best strategy is; we just reveal how each action leads to particular cues and 'attack' (the point-loss outcome)," dit Bressel told Ars. "The reason being our studies have reliably shown all behavioral phenotypes, including Compulsives, are valuing cues and outcomes normally—and are totally aware of cue-attack relationships."

They also expanded the pool of participants beyond the Australian psychology students who were subjects in the 2023 study, sampling a general population from 24 countries of different ages, backgrounds, and experiences. And the researchers conducted six-month follow-ups in which subjects played the same game and were asked afterward whether they thought their choices and strategies were optimal.

The resulting phenotype breakdown was roughly similar to that of the 2023 study using just Australian students. About 26 percent were Sensitives, compared to 35 percent in the earlier study; 47 percent were Unawares, compared to 41 percent in 2023; and 27 percent were Compulsives, compared to 23 percent in the prior work. Those behavioral profiles remained unchanged even six months later. And the poor choices of the Compulsives could not be attributed simply to bad habits. The follow-up interviews showed that Compulsives were well aware of why they made their choices.

Cognitive-behavioral trajectories of behavioral phenotypes. Credit: L. Zeng et al., 2025

"The thing they seemed to specifically struggle with is seeing the link between their actions and its consequences," said dit Bressel. "Basically, lots of people (our Unaware and Compulsive phenotypes) don't readily learn how their actions are the problem. They fail to recognize their agency over things they are highly motivated to avoid. So we give them the piece of the puzzle they seemed to be missing. Correspondingly, simply telling people how their actions lead to negative outcomes completely changes the behavior of most poor avoiders (Unawares), but not all (Compulsives)."

The researchers admit it's a bit perplexing that so many Compulsives still persisted in making bad choices, even after receiving new information. Is it that Compulsives simply don't believe what the researchers have told them?

"There's maybe a little of that going on," said dit Bressel. "We ask them which actions they thought led to attacks and how they value each action, and they do strongly update their beliefs/valuations after the information reveal but not as much as the Unawares. So, Compulsives are a little less on board about the relative values of actions than other phenotypes. But we've shown this still doesn't fully account for how poorly they continue to avoid."

Better interventions needed

That's something the scientists are keen to explore further. "We showed Compulsives are very aware of how they're behaving, and also think their behavior is optimal—even though it really wasn't," said Jean-Richard Dit Bressel. "This suggested a key failure point is between recognizing the relative values of actions and forming a corresponding behavioral strategy."

Compulsives, in other words, exhibit deficits in cognitive-behavioral integration. "It's like they're thinking, 'Yeah, sure, Action A is good, Action B is bad... instead of a 50-50 split, I'll do 60-40,'" said Dit Bressel. "They really should be going cold turkey and doing 100-0. An implication of the trajectory analysis we did is that no amount of action belief updating would get them to behave optimally. We need a way to improve how those beliefs translate to perceptions of what's optimal."

What might be the underlying cause of this persistent bad decision-making? "We don't know, but the fact most people have the same profile at retest suggests this is a kind of trait: a stable cognitive-behavioral tendency," said Dit Bressel. "It could be related to genetics, but we don't have the data for that. We know there are environmental factors that contribute to the Compulsive profile: It's significantly more likely to emerge if the Action→Punisher relationship is infrequent, i.e., people will be poor avoiders and ignore helpful information if punishment probability is low, even if the punishment is severe. But this would be a case of trait-x-environment interactions. My neuroscientist side would love to explore what's going on in the brain and map what contributes to adaptive vs maladaptive decision-making."

This could help drive more effective public health messaging, which is typically focused on providing factual information about the risks of compulsive behaviors, whether we're talking about smoking, drinking, eating disorders, or gambling, for instance. The results of this study clearly demonstrate that for Compulsives, information is not sufficient to change their self-sabotaging behavior. One of Dit Bressel's lab members is now investigating better interventions for different profiles of decision-making, particularly for Compulsives.

"We definitely haven't cracked the case yet," said Dit Bressel. "There's a body of work that says early over late information intervention might do the trick, but we've shown Compulsives in low probability punishment scenarios are impervious to early information. If the issue is they can't infer the winning strategy with Action→Punisher, maybe explicitly outlining the winning strategy will make more of a difference. Or maybe some potent combination of prompts. We have ideas, but the proof will be in the pudding."

Then again, "It could be the case that no amount/type of information will be enough to really sway 'that friend,' and that something far more involved would be needed," he said. "But most people will have a least some response to helpful information, so my suggestion in the absence of a full answer is to just be a good friend and give that friend the info/advice they seem to need to hear (again). It won't go the distance for everyone, but it's cheap and you'd be surprised at how many people need what seems obvious pointed out to them."

Nature Communications Psychology, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00284-9 (About DOIs).

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A massive review of over 160,000 people's step counts has revealed that meaningful health benefits begin far below the popular 10,000-step myth. The new study found that health benefits start at as low as 2,500 daily steps, with the biggest gains capping around 7,000. "People hitting 7,000 daily steps had a 47% lower risk of dying prematurely than those managing just 2,000 steps, plus extra protection against heart disease, cancer and dementia," reports The Conversation. From the report: The findings come from the biggest review of step counts and health ever done. Researchers gathered data from 57 separate studies tracking more than 160,000 people for up to two decades, then combined all the results to spot patterns that individual studies might miss. This approach, called a systematic review, gives scientists much more confidence in their conclusions than any single study could. So where did that magic 10,000 number come from? A pedometer company called Yamasa wanted to cash in on 1964 Tokyo Olympics fever. It launched a device called Manpo-kei -- literally "10,000 steps meter." The Japanese character for 10,000 resembles a walking person, while 10,000 itself is a memorable round number. It was a clever marketing choice that stuck. At that time, there was no robust evidence for whether a target of 10,000 steps made sense. Early research suggested that jumping from a typical 3,000 to 5,000 daily steps to 10,000 would burn roughly 300 to 400 extra calories a day. So the target wasn't completely random -- just accidentally reasonable. This latest research paper looked across a broad spectrum -- not just whether people died, but heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, depression and even falls. The results tell a fascinating story. Even tiny increases matter. Jump from 2,000 to 4,000 steps daily and your death risk drops by 36%. That's a substantial improvement. But here's where it gets interesting. The biggest health benefits happen between zero and 7,000 steps. Beyond that, benefits keep coming, but they level off considerably. Studies have found meaningful benefits starting at just 2,517 steps per day. For some people, that could be as little as a 20-minute stroll around the block. Age changes everything, too. If you're over 60, you hit maximum benefits at 6,000 to 8,000 daily steps. Under 60? You need 8,000 to 10,000 steps for the same protection. Your 70-year-old neighbor gets 77% lower heart disease risk at just 4,500 steps daily. The real secret of why fitness targets often fail? People give up on them. Research comparing different step goals found a clear pattern. Eighty-five per cent of people stuck with 10,000 daily steps. Bump it to 12,500 steps and only 77% kept going. Push for 15,000 steps and you lose nearly a third of people.

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Nearly 150 employees of the National Science Foundation (NSF) sent an urgent letter of dissent to Congress on Tuesday, warning that the Trump administration's recent "politically motivated and legally questionable" actions threaten to dismantle the independent "world-renowned scientific agency."

Most NSF employees signed the letter anonymously, with only Jesus Soriano, the president of their local union (AFGE Local 3403), publicly disclosing his name. Addressed to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, the letter insisted that Congress intervene to stop steep budget cuts, mass firings and grant terminations, withholding of billions in appropriated funds, allegedly coerced resignations, and the sudden eviction of NSF from its headquarters planned for next year.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the letter revealed "a covert and ideologically driven secondary review process by unqualified political appointees" that is now allegedly "interfering with the scientific merit-based review system" that historically has made NSF a leading, trusted science agency. Soriano further warned that "scientists, program officers, and staff" have all "been targeted for doing their jobs with integrity" in what the letter warned was "a broader agenda to dismantle institutional safeguards, impose demagoguery in research funding decisions, and undermine science."

At a press conference with Lofgren on Wednesday, AFGE National President Everett Kelley backed NSF workers and reminded Congress that their oversight of the executive branch "is not optional."

Taking up the fight, Lofgren promised to do "all" that she "can" to protect the agency and the entire US scientific enterprise.

She also promised to protect Soriano from any retaliation, as some federal workers, including NSF workers, alleged they've already faced retaliation, necessitating their anonymity to speak publicly. Lofgren criticized the "deep shame" of the Trump administration creating a culture of fear permeating NSF, noting that the "horrifying" statements in the letter are "all true," yet filed as a whistleblower complaint as if they're sharing secrets.

"The Trump administration has shown that it will retaliate against anyone who dares to place their civic duty and their oath to the Constitution above the president's mission to dismantle everything that has made this country great," Lofgren said, criticizing Trump as pushing his "very narrow worldview."

Lofgren thanked NSF workers "for their bravery and their patriotism" upholding their constitutional oath and speaking out against the Trump administration.

The NSF workers are hoping she can take "immediate action" to "restore jobs, release funding, and protect the legal rights of federal workers," Kelley said.

But there may not be much that Lofgren can do with Republicans maintaining majorities in both houses of Congress and unwilling to push back on Trump's apparent power grab. Shortly after the press conference, Lofgren told Politico’s E&E News that "she’s not confident the letter will influence Trump administration policies."

"This administration does not care about science," Lofgren said.

China recruiting discarded US scientists

While NSF workers band together to resist politically motivated compromises to their agency's integrity, they plan to document any retaliation and continue demanding accountability to keep the public informed of what's happening at the institution, Soriano said.

But in their letter, they confirmed they are organizing in the dark, noting that there isn't even an "identified destination" planned for relocating NSF headquarters next year, an uncertain move they fear "will be deeply disruptive to NSF operations, morale, and employee retention."

If Congress is unwilling or unable to defend federal workers posted in legally mandated roles at NSF or billions in congressionally appropriated funding for critical science research, they also fear Trump's moves will result in "irreversible long-term damage" to "one of our nation’s greatest engines for scientific and technological advancement."

Reports seem to back up one of NSF workers' biggest concerns—that China will recruit discarded scientists—noting China immediately moved to woo top scientists Trump fired earlier this year.

In March, it was revealed that China had launched a targeted campaign particularly designed to lure talented artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge science researchers, and Fast Company reported that the effort was ramped up in April. The FBI has already sounded alarms over China's talent recruitment programs, Fast Company noted, which the law enforcement agency fears "may serve as mechanisms to extract intellectual property and sensitive research" from the US and other countries, potentially impacting both US national security and the economy. In June, Nature released a report detailing China's efforts to "attract the world’s top scientific talent," hoping to capitalize on any US losses.

"Put simply, America will forfeit its scientific leadership position to China and other rival nations," NSF workers predicted.

Whether Congress intervenes or not, some scientists are not giving up their dreams of advancing US research to keep America at the forefront of science. At least one US science advocacy nonprofit, the Union of Concerned Scientists, is working to keep any disbanded science advisory committees (SAC) together.

Those committees help government scientists stay on top of the latest research, and the nonprofit's efforts to help continue their work could ensure that the public and future administrations stay informed on scientific advancements, no matter what political agenda Trump pushes while in office. They released a toolkit in May "to help scientists convene independent SACs" that maintain best practices and continue to field public input.

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Belief in conspiracy theories is often attributed to some form of motivated reasoning: People want to believe a conspiracy because it reinforces their worldview, for example, or doing so meets some deep psychological need, like wanting to feel unique. However, it might also be driven by overconfidence in their own cognitive abilities, according to a paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The authors were surprised to discover that not only are conspiracy theorists overconfident, they also don't realize their beliefs are on the fringe, massively overestimating by as much as a factor of four how much other people agree with them.

"I was expecting the overconfidence finding," co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University, told Ars. "If you've talked to someone who believes conspiracies, it's self-evident. I did not expect them to be so ready to state that people agree with them. I thought that they would overestimate, but I didn't think that there'd be such a strong sense that they are in the majority. It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that's been observed."

In 2015, Pennycook made headlines when he co-authored a paper demonstrating how certain people interpret "pseudo-profound bullshit" as deep observations. Pennycook et al. were interested in identifying individual differences between those who are susceptible to pseudo-profound BS and those who are not and thus looked at conspiracy beliefs, their degree of analytical thinking, religious beliefs, and so forth.

They presented several randomly generated statements, containing "profound" buzzwords, that were grammatically correct but made no sense logically, along with a 2014 tweet by Deepak Chopra that met the same criteria. They found that the less skeptical participants were less logical and analytical in their thinking and hence much more likely to consider these nonsensical statements as being deeply profound. That study was a bit controversial, in part for what was perceived to be its condescending tone, along with questions about its methodology. But it did snag Pennycook et al. a 2016 Ig Nobel Prize.

Last year we reported on another Pennycook study, presenting results from experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory. That study showed that the AI interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs, even two months later. The secret to its success: the chatbot, with its access to vast amounts of information across an enormous range of topics, could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual. "The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies, that they're the result of various psychological motives and needs," Pennycook said at the time.

Miscalibrated from reality

Pennycook has been working on this new overconfidence study since 2018, perplexed by observations indicating that people who believe in conspiracies also seem to have a lot of faith in their cognitive abilities—contradicting prior research finding that conspiracists are generally more intuitive. To investigate, he and his co-authors conducted eight separate studies that involved over 4,000 US adults.

The assigned tasks were designed in such a way that participants' actual performance and how they perceived their performance were unrelated. For example, in one experiment, they were asked to guess the subject of an image that was largely obscured. The subjects were then asked direct questions about their belief (or lack thereof) concerning several key conspiracy claims: the Apollo Moon landings were faked, for example, or that Princess Diana's death wasn't an accident. Four of the studies focused on testing how subjects perceived others' beliefs.

The results showed a marked association between subjects' tendency to be overconfident and belief in conspiracy theories. And while a majority of participants believed a conspiracy's claims just 12 percent of the time, believers thought they were in the majority 93 percent of the time. This suggests that overconfidence is a primary driver of belief in conspiracies.

It's not that believers in conspiracy theories are massively overconfident; there is no data on that, because the studies didn't set out to quantify the degree of overconfidence, per Pennycook. Rather, "They're overconfident, and they massively overestimate how much people agree with them," he said.

Ars spoke with Pennycook to learn more.

Ars Technica: Why did you decide to investigate overconfidence as a contributing factor to believing conspiracies?

Gordon Pennycook: There's a popular sense that people believe conspiracies because they're dumb and don't understand anything, they don't care about the truth, and they're motivated by believing things that make them feel good. Then there's the academic side, where that idea molds into a set of theories about how needs and motivations drive belief in conspiracies. It's not someone falling down the rabbit hole and getting exposed to misinformation or conspiratorial narratives. They're strolling down: "I like it over here. This appeals to me and makes me feel good."

Believing things that no one else agrees with makes you feel unique. Then there's various things I think that are a little more legitimate: People join communities and there's this sense of belongingness. How that drives core beliefs is different. Someone may stop believing but hang around in the community because they don't want to lose their friends. Even with religion, people will go to church when they don't really believe. So we distinguish beliefs from practice.

What we observed is that they do tend to strongly believe these conspiracies despite the fact that there's counter evidence or a lot of people disagree. What would lead that to happen? It could be their needs and motivations, but it could also be that there's something about the way that they think where it just doesn't occur to them that they could be wrong about it. And that's where overconfidence comes in.

Ars Technica: What makes this particular trait such a powerful driving force?

Gordon Pennycook: Overconfidence is one of the most important core underlying components, because if you're overconfident, it stops you from really questioning whether the thing that you're seeing is right or wrong, and whether you might be wrong about it. You have an almost moral purity of complete confidence that the thing you believe is true. You cannot even imagine what it's like from somebody else's perspective. You couldn't imagine a world in which the things that you think are true could be false. Having overconfidence is that buffer that stops you from learning from other people. You end up not just going down the rabbit hole, you're doing laps down there.

Overconfidence doesn't have to be learned, parts of it could be genetic. It also doesn't have to be maladaptive. It's maladaptive when it comes to beliefs. But you want people to think that they will be successful when starting new businesses. A lot of them will fail, but you need some people in the population to take risks that they wouldn't take if they were thinking about it in a more rational way. So it can be optimal at a population level, but maybe not at an individual level.

Ars Technica: Is this overconfidence related to the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect?

Gordon Pennycook: It's because of Dunning-Kruger that we had to develop a new methodology to measure overconfidence, because the people who are the worst at a task are the worst at knowing that they're the worst at the task. But that's because the same things that you use to do the task are the things you use to assess how good you are at the task. So if you were to give someone a math test and they're bad at math, they'll appear overconfident. But if you give them a test of assessing humor and they're good at that, they won't appear overconfident. That's about the task, not the person.

So we have tasks where people essentially have to guess, and it's transparent. There's no reason to think that you're good at the task. In fact, people who think they're better at the task are not better at it, they just think they are. They just have this underlying kind of sense that they can do things, they know things, and that's the kind of thing that we're trying to capture. It's not specific to a domain. There are lots of reasons why you could be overconfident in a particular domain. But this is something that's an actual trait that you carry into situations. So when you're scrolling online and come up with these ideas about how the world works that don't make any sense, it must be everybody else that's wrong, not you.

Ars Technica: Overestimating how many people agree with them seems to be at odds with conspiracy theorists' desire to be unique.  

Gordon Pennycook: In general, people who believe conspiracies often have contrary beliefs. We're working with a population where coherence is not to be expected. They say that they're in the majority, but it's never a strong majority. They just don't think that they're in a minority when it comes to the belief. Take the case of the Sandy Hook conspiracy, where adherents believe it was a false flag operation. In one sample, 8 percent of people thought that this was true. That 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them.

So they're way off. They really, really miscalibrated. But they don't say 90 percent. It's 60 percent, enough to be special, but not enough to be on the fringe where they actually are. I could have asked them to rank how smart they are relative to others, or how unique they thought their beliefs were, and they would've answered high on that. But those are kind of mushy self-concepts. When you ask a specific question that has an objectively correct answer in terms of the percent of people in the sample that agree with you, it's not close.

Ars Technica: How does one even begin to combat this? Could last year's AI study point the way?

Gordon Pennycook: The AI debunking effect works better for people who are less overconfident. In those experiments, very detailed, specific debunks had a much bigger effect than people expected. After eight minutes of conversation, a quarter of the people who believed the thing didn't believe it anymore, but 75 percent still did. That's a lot. And some of them, not only did they still believe it, they still believed it to the same degree. So no one's cracked that. Getting any movement at all in the aggregate was a big win.

Here's the problem. You can't have a conversation with somebody who doesn't want to have the conversation. In those studies, we're paying people, but they still get out what they put into the conversation. If you don't really respond or engage, then our AI is not going to give you good responses because it doesn't know what you're thinking. And if the person is not willing to think. ... This is why overconfidence is such an overarching issue. The only alternative is some sort of propagandistic sit-them-downs with their eyes open and try to de-convert them. But you can't really convert someone who doesn't want to be converted. So I'm not sure that there is an answer. I think that's just the way that humans are.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2025. DOI: 10.1177/01461672251338358  (About DOIs).

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Soon after President Donald Trump took office in January, a wide array of petrochemical, mining, and farm industry coalitions ramped up what has been a long campaign to limit use of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assessments of the health risks of chemicals.

That effort scored a significant victory Friday when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced his decision to dismantle the agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD).

The industry lobbyists didn’t ask for hundreds of ORD staff members to be laid off or reassigned. But the elimination of the agency’s scientific research arm goes a long way toward achieving the goal they sought.

In a January 27 letter to Zeldin organized by the American Chemistry Council, more than 80 industry groups—including leading oil, refining, and mining associations—asked him to end regulators’ reliance on ORD assessments of the risks that chemicals pose for human health. The future of that research, conducted under EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System program, or IRIS, is now uncertain.

“EPA’s IRIS program within ORD has a troubling history of being out of step with the best available science and methods, lacking transparency, and being unresponsive to peer review and stakeholder recommendations,” said an American Chemistry Council spokesperson in an email when asked about the decision to eliminate ORD. “This results in IRIS assessments that jeopardize access to critical chemistries, undercut national priorities, and harm American competitiveness.”

The spokesperson said the organization supports EPA evaluating its resources to ensure tax dollars are being used efficiently and effectively.

Christopher Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who served as EPA assistant administrator in charge of ORD during the Biden administration, defended the quality of the science done by the office, which he said is “the poster case study of what it means to do science that’s subject to intense scrutiny.”

“There’s industry with a tremendous vested interest in the policy decisions that might occur later on,” based on the assessments made by ORD. “What the industry does is try to engage in a proxy war over the policy by attacking the science.”

Among the IRIS assessments that stirred the most industry concern were those outlining the dangers of formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, arsenic, and hexavalent chromium. Regulatory actions had begun or were looming on all during the Biden administration.

The Biden administration also launched a lawsuit against a LaPlace, Louisiana, plant that had been the only US manufacturer of neoprene, Denka Performance Elastomer, based in part on the IRIS assessment of one of its air pollutants, chloroprene, as a likely human carcinogen. Denka, a spinoff of DuPont, announced it was ceasing production in May because of the cost of pollution controls.

Public health advocates charge that eliminating the IRIS program, or shifting its functions to other offices in the agency, will rob the EPA of the independent expertise to inform its mission of protection.

“They’ve been trying for years to shut down IRIS,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists and lead author of a new study on Trump administration actions that the group says undermine science. “The reason why is because when IRIS conducts its independent scientific assessments using a great amount of rigor… you get stronger regulations, and that is not in the best interest of the big business polluters and those who have a financial stake in the EPA’s demise.”

The UCS report tallied more than 400 firings, funding cuts, and other attacks on science in the first six months of the Trump administration, resulting in 54 percent fewer grants for research on topics including cancer, infectious disease, and environmental health.

EPA’s press office did not respond to a query on whether the IRIS controversy helped inform Zeldin’s decision to eliminate ORD, which had been anticipated since staff were informed of the potential plan at a meeting in March. In the agency’s official announcement Friday afternoon, Zeldin said the elimination of the office was part of “organizational improvements” that would deliver $748.8 million in savings to taxpayers. The reduction in force, combined with previous departures and layoffs, have reduced the agency’s workforce by 23 percent, to 12,448, the EPA said.

With the cuts, the EPA’s workforce will be at its lowest level since fiscal year 1986.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, EPA has taken a close look at our operations to ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback,” Zeldin said in the prepared statement. “This reduction in force will ensure we can better fulfill that mission while being responsible stewards of your hard-earned tax dollars.”

The agency will be creating a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions; a report by E&E News said an internal memo indicated the new office would be much smaller than ORD, and would focus on coastal areas, drinking water safety, and methodologies for assessing environmental contamination.

Zeldin’s announcement also said that scientific expertise and research efforts will be moved to “program offices”—for example, those concerned with air pollution, water pollution, or waste—to tackle “statutory obligations and mission essential functions.” That phrase has a particular meaning: The chemical industry has long complained that Congress never passed a law creating IRIS. Congress did, however, pass many laws requiring that the agency carry out its actions based on the best available science, and the IRIS program, established during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, was how the agency has carried out the task of assessing the science on chemicals since 1985.

Justin Chen, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, the union representing 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said the organizational structure of ORD put barriers between the agency’s researchers and the agency’s political decision-making, enforcement, and regulatory teams—even though they all used ORD’s work.

“For them to function properly, they have to have a fair amount of distance away from political interference, in order to let the science guide and develop the kind of things that they do,” Chen said.

“They’re a particular bugbear for a lot of the industries which are heavy donors to the Trump administration and to the right wing,” Chen said. “They’re the ones, I believe, who do all the testing that actually factors into the calculation of risk.”

ORD also was responsible for regularly doing assessments that the Clean Air Act requires on pollutants like ozone and particulate matter, which result from the combustion of fossil fuels.

Frey said a tremendous amount of ORD work has gone into ozone, which is the result of complex interactions of precursor pollutants in the atmosphere. The open source computer modeling on ozone transport, developed by ORD researchers, helps inform decision-makers grappling with how to address smog around the country. The Biden administration finalized stricter standards for particulate matter in its final year based on ORD’s risk assessment, and the Trump administration is now undoing those rules.

Aidan Hughes contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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The Federal Communications Commission is ditching Biden-era standards for measuring progress toward the goal of universal broadband deployment.

The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband.

Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.

No focus on broadband affordability

Carr's proposal, which was released on Thursday and is scheduled for a vote on August 7, criticized the previous administration's approach. Carr intends to focus the next FCC inquiry on the statute's "is being deployed" phrase rather than looking at whether broadband has already been deployed. Carr's proposal said:

To further realign our section 706 inquiry with the statute's plain language, we intend to focus our inquiry on whether advanced telecommunications capability "is being deployed," rather than whether it already has been deployed, as was the focus of the 2024 Report. We believe that the prior Report's binary interpretation of the threshold for issuing a passing or failing grade in the ultimate section 706 finding effectively read the "reasonable and timely" language out of the statute. That interpretation seemingly found anything short of 100% was insufficient to warrant a passing grade and thus disregarded Congress's use of the present progressive tense in "is being deployed." Moreover, we believe that assessing the progress at which advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed would provide far more—and more helpful—information to Congress and the public than an overly simplistic inquiry into whether or not 100% of Americans already have access to such capability.

Carr also doesn't want the FCC to investigate "extraneous" matters such as whether broadband is cheap enough to be affordable.

"The Commission in the 2024 Report departed from the way that the section 706 inquiry had historically been conducted by for the first time reading several extraneous universal service criteria into the section 706 statutory inquiry based upon its interpretation of Congressional intent. We propose to reorient the section 706 inquiry back to the plain language of the statute and eliminate this expansion," the Carr proposal says.

A footnote indicating which extraneous material will be removed said the 2024 report "for the first time incorporated the universal service goals of deployment, adoption, affordability, availability, and equitable access to broadband throughout the United States as the metrics for conducting the section 706 inquiry." Carr objected to the use of words like "affordability" and "adoption" when the 2024 report was released, saying, "those terms appear nowhere in Section 706."

The Carr FCC's proposal points to a Supreme Court ruling that limited the ability of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. Given that ruling, "we believe it is most prudent to strictly adhere to the statutory text," the proposal said.

The Biden-era FCC didn't get very far in analyzing broadband prices. Former Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, who led the FCC under Biden, wanted to expand the commission's use of pricing data. An FCC inquiry in September 2024 sought comment on how the FCC could add more pricing data to its annual analysis, noting that the March 2024 report lacked "granular price information, especially for rural areas, limited the analysis to overall patterns of affordability."

Scrapping long-term gigabit goal

The most recent Section 706 report, released in March 2024 after a 3–2 vote, also raised the FCC's Internet speed benchmark to 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds. The previous benchmark of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream had been in place for nine years.

Under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC additionally set a "long-term speed goal" of 1Gbps download speeds with 500Mbps upload speeds. Carr's proposal would abolish that long-term goal.

"As part of our return to following the plain language of section 706, we propose to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500Mbps established in the 2024 Report," Carr's plan said. "Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in section 706, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers."

Fiber networks can already meet a 1,000/500Mbps standard, and the Biden administration generally prioritized fiber when it came to distributing grants to Internet providers. The Trump administration changed grant-giving procedures to distribute more funds to non-fiber providers such as Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network.

Carr's proposal alleged that the 1,000/500Mbps long-term goal would "appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner," as it "may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds."

100/20Mbps standard appears to survive

When the 100/20Mbps standard was adopted last year, Carr alleged that "the 100/20Mbps requirement appears to be part and parcel of the Commission's broader attempt to circumvent the statutory requirement of technological neutrality." It appears the Carr FCC will nonetheless stick with 100/20Mbps for measuring availability of fixed broadband. But his plan would seek comment on that approach, suggesting a possibility that it could be changed.

"We propose to again focus our service availability discussion on fixed broadband at speeds of 100/20Mbps and seek comment on this proposal," the plan said.

If any regulatory changes are spurred by Carr's deployment inquiry, they would likely be to eliminate regulations instead of adding them. Carr has been pushing a "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative to eliminate rules that he considers unnecessary, and his proposal asks for comment on broadband regulations that could be removed.

"Are there currently any regulatory barriers impeding broadband deployment, investment, expansion, competition, and technological innovation that the Commission should consider eliminating?" the call for comment asks.

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