Eight US senators have called for an official investigation into claims that up to 50 federal officials have been moved to different jobs because of their stance on climate change, saying any suggestion that this had been done to force them to resign or silence them was “extremely troubling”.

The news came after one US government scientist in the Interior Department, Joel Clement, wrote an article in The Washington Post in which he accused the Trump administration of favouring “silence over science” after he was reassigned from his job helping communities in Alaska cope with the changing climate to an “unrelated job in the accounting office”.

“I am not an accountant – but you don't have to be one to see that the administration's excuse for a reassignment such as mine doesn’t add up,” Mr Clement said.

“A few days after my reassignment, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke testified before Congress that the department would use reassignments as part of its effort to eliminate employees; the only reasonable inference from that testimony is that he expects people to quit in response to undesirable transfers.”

He added that he believed he was being “retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities”.

In a letter to Mary Kendall, deputy inspector general of the Interior Department, the eight senators – all Democrats – wrote of “troubling newspaper reports of the arbitrary reassignment of as many as 50 Senior Executive Service employees”.

“Any suggestion that the Department is reassigning SES employees to force them to resign, to silence their voices, or to punish them for conscientious performance of their public duties is extremely troubling and calls for the closest examination,” they added.

“We believe that any reassignment of highly trained, highly competent senior executives within the Department from the positions in which they may best use their training and competence to accomplish the Department’s mission and best serve the public interest to sinecures where their talents are wasted would constitute a serious act of mismanagement, a gross waste of public funds, and an abuse of authority.”

The senators suggested that moving staff in this way might be against the law.

“The law establishing the SES requires that the SES be administered ‘to attract and retain highly competent senior executives’, to ‘protect senior executives from arbitrary and capricious actions’ and to ‘maintain a merit personnel system free of prohibited personal practices,’” they wrote.