By Christopher Flavelle
The Trump administration has terminated a cross-agency group created to help local officials protect their residents against extreme weather and natural disasters.
The Community Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems was created by the Obama administration in 2015 within the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. Its chairman, Jesse Keenan, told members at a meeting Monday that its charter was being dissolved and that meeting would be its last.
“It was one of the last federal bodies that openly talked about climate change in public," Keenan said in an email to Bloomberg News. “I can say that we tried our best and we never self-censored!”
A spokeswoman for NIST, Jennifer Huergo, said in an email Tuesday that the decision to end the panel was made by staff within the institute’s Community Resilience Program, who "conducted an assessment of the panel and its mission and determined that a national workshop would be a more effective and efficient way to support the goals of the program." She said the decision was made "without influence of any NIST political leadership."
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