There’s been no shortage of federal departments, agencies, and other initiatives the Trump administration has targeted for cuts in the president’s first year back in the White House (which is also the target of some major demolition work).

Not even “technocratic” agencies charged with gathering vital data have escaped Trump’s radar. His firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, for instance, has some worried about future jobs reports. Trump is also targeting climate and weather departments, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS).

Organizations that rely on this data in their operations or to make key business decisions told CFO Brew they’re turning to alternative data sources and investing more resources in gathering and backing up data.

“We’re just going to have to find more creative ways of trying to get the right data to validate our models,” Kamil Kluza, co-founder and COO of Climate X, which provides global climate data risk data to companies like banks and asset managers, told us.

Working out alternatives is “not ideal, because that means extra development and R&D time on our end,” but it probably won’t change the end product for customers, Kluza said. He added that the federal program cuts should only impact forecasting accuracy in the short term.

How are organizations adapting to a lack of government data?—AZ

In 2025, the sustainability department isn’t the cool kid on the block anymore. The IRA tax credits are no longer fueling a boom in climate tech investment. Net zero and climate transition plans are no longer a staple of press releases, unless it’s about rolling them back. And ESG is just another string of letters—many investors don’t even know what they stand for.

“The tourists are gone,” as Mark Gudiksen, managing partner at Piva Capital, told CFO Brew. But that just leaves one place for sustainability practices to go—into a real business unit that can drive value for the company. And that means they’re going to start knocking on the CFO’s door.

Next steps. “Rigor and accountability is what [sustainability leaders] wanted,” Karimah Hudda, founder and chief catalyst at Illumine.Earth, said in a session on how ESG leaders can shift their role from compliance to strategic value at Trellis Impact 25 in San Jose last month. “We wanted to become part of the business.”

Even if government-regulated sustainability disclosures have stalled in the US, regulation is coming from Europe (albeit watered down), California, and Australia. According to Jessica Hyman, chief sustainability officer at Atlassian, her sustainability team plans to lean on the CFO and accounting teams’ expertise in mandatory reporting.

“I haven’t done mandatory reporting before,” she said during the Trellis Impact session. “I’ve been playing in the voluntary sustainability space. The accounting team has spent a lot of time there, and they probably have business processes and expertise.”

For more on the relationship between sustainability teams and finance, click here.—JK

The labor market is feeling the sting of AI investment and corporate belt-tightening.

US-based employers have laid off nearly 1.1 million people through October, a 44% increase over all of 2024, and the highest level of job cuts for the period since 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when employers cut 2.3 million jobs by October, according to a report released Thursday by outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

There’s no shortage of ways to describe how dire these October and year-to-date jobs cuts were. They came both from massive layoffs at individual firms (see: Amazon) as well as an uptick in total companies cutting jobs. October’s roughly 153,000 job cuts were the most layoffs for the month since 2003. They were also “the highest total for a single month in the fourth quarter since 2008,” according to Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Like in 2003, a disruptive technology is changing the landscape,” he said in a statement.

“Some industries are correcting after the hiring boom of the pandemic, but this comes as AI adoption, softening consumer and corporate spending, and rising costs drive belt-tightening and hiring freezes,” Challenger said. “Those laid off now are finding it harder to quickly secure new roles, which could further loosen the labor market.”

Weak consumer spending is playing out in quarterly earnings. McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a Nov. 5 earnings call that the restaurant franchise is seeing “a bifurcated consumer base,” with foot traffic in its restaurants from low-income customers “declining nearly double digits in the third quarter, a trend that’s persisted for nearly two years,” CNBC reported.

How bad are job losses?—AZ