In 2008, the US Embassy in Beijing started regularly tweeting about the air quality in the city, which was gearing up to host China’s first Olympic Games. Two times a day, the embassy automatically published current pollution levels measured by an air quality monitor installed on its roof in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency. The data contradicted the figures published by the local government, angering local officials and eventually spurring China to clean up the air in its capital city. But on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the US State Department told WIRED that the program is abruptly ending due to budget constraints.
The project eventually became part of a broader, highly successful US government initiative known officially as DOSAir, which measured pollution levels in about 80 cities where US diplomatic missions are located around the world. Scientists and researchers have credited it with helping clean up the air in dozens of countries, preventing up to 895 premature deaths and saving $465 million in medical costs per median city annually, according to a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2022.
For now, individual embassies can still run their air monitors, the State Department spokesperson said, but they will no longer send data back to the agency. Historical statistics will continue to be available online, but there’s no estimated date when real-time data transmissions will resume, they added.
“In many countries where these instruments were placed, it was the first air quality data ever,” says Daniel Westervelt, a research professor at Columbia University’s Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “That going away is going to hinder research and hinder the advancement of our understanding of the exposure of air pollutants to human health.”
Sixteen years ago, when the US embassy began sharing air quality data in Beijing, Twitter had not yet been blocked in China. Graham Webster, a research scholar at Stanford who lived in the country at the time, remembers seeing tweets from the US Embassy occasionally go viral when its pollution monitoring bot designated the air quality in the city as “crazy bad,” indicating a hazardous pollutant known as PM2.5 had reached extremely high levels.
The State Department program soon became a source for data that challenged the official air quality reports released by the Chinese government. “It allowed the Chinese public to view a comparison between the outside observers and the official statistics,” Webster says. “I think it’s an example of how good, quality data that people trust can make things difficult for a political regime where information is tightly controlled.”
At first, the local government in Beijing fervently opposed the initiative. At one point, the Chinese deputy minister of environmental protection publicly called the American air quality readings unlawful and said the US was “intervening in China’s domestic affairs.”
But even though Beijing officials publicly opposed it, a former US diplomat who ran the air quality monitoring program in its early years tells WIRED that many of them expressed appreciation for the program behind closed doors, because it gave them information they could use to protect their own health, too. (They asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media.)
The State Department’s air quality program eventually became an example of a smart, efficient diplomacy that boosted American soft power while bringing about real-world changes. “I’ve never seen an initiative of the US government have such an immediate, dramatic impact in a country,” Gary Locke, a former US ambassador to China, told the Washington Post back in 2013. The project was so successful that it was featured on the website of the National Museum of American Diplomacy.
Before it was suddenly killed, State Department officials, researchers, and the public could view the international air quality data collected from US embassies on AirNow, a database maintained by the EPA, as well as on ZephAir, an app designed by the State Department to help US diplomats abroad. The former webpage has been made unavailable; the app showed that at least half a dozen embassies stopped reporting regular data in the middle of Tuesday before the function was completely disabled on Wednesday, according to tests performed by WIRED.
Westervelt, who describes the DOSAir as “a bedrock of international air quality work,” says he previously received grants from the State Department to help expand the program in Africa. He says he became worried about its fate when he learned last week that his grants had been terminated along with thousands of others at the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development.
Diplomatic Triumph
By the end of 2011, the air monitoring program was having its big moment of public recognition in China. Pollution got so bad in Beijing that the city had to close its airport. The State Department’s bot was blasting “crazy bad” readings on Twitter again, but the official Chinese government figures said the air was only “slightly polluted.”
The Chinese public, however, decided to trust the US embassy’s number. Many people voiced their disappointment on social media and pushed the government to take action to clean up the air. It became “an environmental awakening akin to the London Fog,” says the former US diplomat. In a twist that’s almost incomprehensible today, the Chinese government even officially adopted the US State Department’s method for reporting air quality. It also made significant efforts to clean up air pollution, and collaborated with the EPA on climate and environmental issues.
The DOSAir program was welcomed in many other countries as well, especially those that didn’t have an existing infrastructure to collect air quality data, says Westervelt. In some cases, local governments used the high-quality data collected at US embassies to calibrate readings on their own lower-cost air monitors.
For these countries, ending support for the air quality monitoring program could hinder their progress cleaning up the air, says Westervelt. “You can’t really mitigate the air pollution problem unless you have quantitative evidence,” he explains. “Losing it is a pretty big blow.”
Clear Economic Winner
Over the past month, the Trump administration has slashed funding and staff across the federal government as part of a cost-cutting initiative led by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But the air quality monitoring program isn’t very expensive for the US State Department to maintain. Westervelt estimates it costs just tens of thousands of dollars a year because most of the monitoring equipment has already been purchased, and the main expenses are associated with maintenance.
The program demonstrated how relatively low-cost information technologies could be used to spur substantial reductions of air pollution, says Akshaya Jha, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University who co-authored the 2022 study. When a US embassy began publishing the readings in a city, he says, it often raised public awareness about pollution and put pressure on the host country to take action to clean up the air. Jha found that local Google searches for the term “air quality” steadily increased after monitors were installed. Air pollution levels, estimated by satellite measurements, also dropped.
In the long run, Jha’s research also found that the program actually saves money for the State Department, which is required to pay diplomats extra compensation for living in more hazardous environments. “Our estimates indicate that the monitors save the median embassy roughly $34,000 a year in this kind of hardship payments,” Jha says.
Even beyond the hardship compensation, creating a world where fewer people are dying from diseases linked to air pollution would reduce the need for things like costly medical treatments. “In terms of benefits of this program relative to its costs, It’s a clear winner,” Jha says.