Donald Trump has insisted that he’s worked “harder” than any of his predecessors on environmental issues, despite the fact that he’s spent the past three years all but personally taking a blowtorch to the world’s glaciers. “The United States under President Trump’s leadership and policies has made the air, water, and environment cleaner,” an administration spokesperson said last year. But the president and his White House have given ample evidence to the contrary, from his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord to his and Steve Mnuchin’s mockery of teen climate activist Greta Thunberg.

In the latest example of the Trump administration’s reckless climate change denialism, a Trump Interior Department staffer has reportedly been sneaking misleading and debunked claims into the agency’s scientific reports to give the impression that “increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial” and there is a “there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming,” according to the New York Times. Known within the administration as “Goks uncertainty language”—in reference to staff to Indur M. Goklany, a staffer in the office of the deputy secretary—the misleading material has been embedded in at least nine significant reports, including “environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries,” the Times's Hiroko Tabuchi writes.

In Interior Department emails, she adds, “Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it ‘may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;’ climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately. The final language states inaccurately that some studies have found the earth to be warming, while others have not.” This is, as the Times notes, a big deal; such reports factor heavily into the department’s decision-making on policies impacting land and water. “Highlighting uncertainty is consistent with the biggest attacks on the climate science community,” Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor of paleoecology and plant ecology at the University of Maine, told the Times. “They’re emphasizing discussions of uncertainty to the point where people feel as though we can’t actually make decisions.”

The embedding of such misleading information is one of many attacks by the Trump administration on science—and comes amid a broader assault on expertise, whether coming from the intelligence community or the press. Trump has spent his first term rolling back environmental regulations, appointing fossil fuel company executives to environmental positions, and fostering a sense of uncertainty about the facts on climate change. Such deception could further erode public trust in the administration, including its scientific assessments that should, in theory, be apolitical. The Trump administration's fraught relationship to science has recently come to the forefront in its disorganized response to the coronavirus, with Trump’s mixed messages and self-serving politics helping create confusion at a moment in which the public is seeking answers.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

— After acquittal, Trump plots revenge on Bolton and other impeachment enemies

— Behind the scenes of Trump’s secret birther implosion

— Why Bernie’s message and media machine could be potent against Trump

— With accused wife-murderer Fotis Dulos on life support, a look inside the grim end of a perfect couple

— The hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry now has the Chicago Tribune by the throat

— The most deranged moments from Trump’s post-acquittal press conference

— From the Archive: If Donald Trump is the political equivalent of a pathogen, who’s responsible for letting him wreak havoc in the national bloodstream?

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.