Editor’s note: O’Rourke ended her candidacy on March 23.
On an unseasonably hot October day, a small crowd gathered at Genesis Farm, a 226-acre nonprofit in Blairstown, New Jersey, to help pull up beets before winter set in. It was the farm’s annual harvest festival and for Megan O’Rourke, a former federal climate scientist running for Congress, a natural campaign stop. The air had that mix of soil and sweet plant smell—like you’ve leaned too close to something alive.
O’Rourke, after all, knows her way around a farm. At 46, she’s spent more than half of her life studying, teaching, researching, or otherwise advocating for sustainable agriculture, most recently at a small agency within the Department of Agriculture that supports food and farming research. Or at least it did. After President Donald Trump took office in 2025, taking aim at climate research and unleashing doge, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture was forced to freeze its funding and suspend accepting new grant applications. She quit NIFA in July and launched her campaign, in part to resist the policies that drove her from government.
At Genesis Farm, seven or eight festivalgoers gathered around O’Rourke. She’d dressed appropriately for the setting, in cuffed black jeans, hiking boots, and a salmon-colored Oxford shirt. Most of the group didn’t seem to know who she was. “You’re running for…” said one attendee, his voice trailing off. “Congress,” she answered warmly, brandishing a business card. She hopes to unseat Republican Tom Kean Jr., O’Rourke explained, the second-term congressman who she says “inherited” the seat from his ex-governor father. “I emphasize Junior,” she said. Then, like it always does with new faces, conversation hopped to credentials: she leaned into her wide–ranging résumé, which includes a tenured professorship at Virginia Tech, a congressional fellowship, and eight years as a civil servant.
There’s no doubt her race has big stakes. While the district narrowly went for Trump in 2024, with control of the House up for grabs, Kean is considered to be among the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, and there’s no shortage of Democrats gunning for him. As of March, at least eight had joined the contest, including a former Navy pilot, a marketing entrepreneur, an icu doctor, and a Biden-era Small Business Administration leader, who will first face each other in June. “It’s a bit of a crowded primary,” O’Rourke told the group. However things go, O’Rourke’s candidacy reflects a shift in how scientists are pushing back against Trump.
Since he returned to the White House, researchers—traditionally a politics-averse group—have organized “Stand Up for Science” protests, published letters of dissent from within agencies, rescued datasets erased by the administration, and carried on research that would have been abandoned. If elected, O’Rourke would be among the first women in Congress with a scientific PhD, but she is hardly the only scientist running in 2026. In December, 314 Action, a fund that backs Democratic candidates with science backgrounds, announced it was already working with nearly 100 campaigns—more than double what it says is typical. This shift, O’Rourke believes, is in part a response to Trump’s “assault” on science, which caused “a shock to the system.” “I think it took us a little while, including me, to even start thinking about becoming an activist, because we haven’t had to,” she says, adding that scientists are now figuring out “what should we do and how do we get organized?”
Growing up, O’Rourke was fascinated by food and where it came from. As the “poor kid” in class, she and her family relied on their church’s food pantry. Her father’s mental health issues and her mom’s long hours meant she and her three siblings typically had to fend for themselves, eating things like dry oatmeal, bread slices rolled up into a ball, or hot chocolate mix poured into a glass of milk. “It wasn’t that we went hungry, per se,” she tells me, “but nobody was feeding us.” She also loved the outdoors. Nearby her childhood house in Blairstown, in a forested wilderness now held by the Nature Conservancy that her family nicknamed “Dinosaur Mountain,” O’Rourke and her brother skipped rocks, fished, and picked berries to supplement their lunches.
Agriculture blended her interests in food and the natural world. As a master’s student in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University, adviser Ricardo Salvador recalls, O’Rourke was a quiet, steady presence. “Whenever she did engage,” he says, “you could tell that she had been observing, that she had been thinking, asking questions.” She went on to earn a PhD in agricultural ecology from Cornell University, researching insect pest population dynamics on nearby farms while running a small fruit and vegetable farm and raising three children with her husband, Aaron Rust, whom she met as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. After working as a climate change adviser at the usda’s Foreign Agricultural Service and an environment adviser at the now-dismantled US Agency for International Development, she landed a job at NIFA at the tail end of Trump’s first term. There, she oversaw the allocation of more than $170 million in agriculture research funds related to climate science.
After Inauguration Day in 2025, things turned south. She’d worked under three administrations, but Trump 2.0 and its executive orders targeting climate science were “just so beyond what I’d experienced,” -O’Rourke says. At NIFA, she recalls, DOGE and other Trump-friendly bureaucrats hunted out work they deemed counter to the administration’s priorities. The agency’s animal reproduction portfolio was flagged, O’Rourke suspects, over the word “reproduction” and its possible proximity to sex and abortion. Her publications on climate change were deleted from the usda’s website, and her projects funded by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act were terminated. At one point, with so much canceled, including all meetings related to the -National Climate Assessment, Rust recalls O’Rourke looked at her calendar and found it empty.
O’Rourke had read that her congressional district in the state’s northwestern reaches, New Jersey’s 7th, was among those Democrats hoped to flip. Considering a run, she did what any academic would do: study. She took trainings from the Democratic National Committee and Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. And she resigned from NIFA. Her calendar is no longer empty. The day I visited the harvest festival, she’d had at least two other events, including a local Democrats meeting. (To save time, she keeps a hairbrush and granola bars in her Prius.) “I work harder at this than I have ever probably worked at anything,” she says, “and I’ll compare that to getting my PhD with three little kids [while] running a farm.”
She’s earned key endorsements from science-minded Democrats like Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, an organic farmer, and former New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt, a plasma physicist. In February, more than 200 scientists across the country publicly announced their support. But so far, that hasn’t led to a windfall in financial support. While she reportedly raised $175,000 on her first day as a candidate, by March, O’Rourke had brought that to only $459,000—significantly less than her better-heeled primary opponents.
In biology, there’s a concept of an ecological niche—how organisms precisely fit into their environment. If the same idea applies in politics, O’Rourke occupies a distinct niche in the Democratic Party: She’s an active member of her Mormon church, a mother, and—as she’d say herself—more of a listener than a talker. When I asked her about political role models, she mentioned Washington state Blue Dog Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (a “rural Democrat,” “working-class,” and “willing to reach out across the aisle,” O’Rourke says), as well as New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury (who also earned a Cornell graduate degree) and New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim (like her, “dorky”)—two lawmakers who’ve been members of the party’s progressive caucus.
If she feels out of place as a scientist in politics, she doesn’t show it. Back at Genesis Farm, she got into the weeds with a farmer on cover crops and seed phenotypes while admiring two species of bees buzz through sunflowers. “I heard you talking about pollinator conservation,” an attendee wearing a flannel and no undershirt said to -O’Rourke, asking if there were anything the government could do to encourage pollinator–friendly gardening. On the way out, they posed for a photo. O’Rourke says doing science—hustling for grants, running a lab, and spreading ideas—is not all that different from campaigning. And, she suggests, more scientists should join her. “I never really wanted to be a politician,” she told me toward the end of my visit. “This is not what I thought I would do with my life.” But “now is the time that our country needs people to step up.”
