NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson helps map the ocean floor to find hazards to shipping.
Editor’s note, February 27, 4:50 pm ET: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has begun to lay off probationary employees, according to a source inside the agency not authorized to speak to the press. Laid-off staffers were told that “you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs,” according to an email obtained by Vox.
The story below, published on February 21 before the announcement, explains how the Trump administration has been preparing to cut staffing at NOAA and what that means for weather forecasting and climate research.
The weather forecasts you see on TV or the severe storm alerts you get from your apps are powered by a federal science agency that’s in line for some of the most drastic cuts proposed by the Trump administration so far.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employs about 12,000 staffers around the world, more than half of which are scientists and engineers. NOAA operates 18 satellites and 15 ships and has a budget of $6.8 billion. Their job is to study the skies, the seas, the fish, tracking how they’re changing and predicting what will happen to them. NOAA’s work is essential for aviation, fishing, climate research, and offshore oil and gas exploration, particularly when it comes to modeling weather.
“You and your family and friends depend upon NOAA people even if you are unaware of what they do,” Jane Lubchenco, who led NOAA under President Barack Obama, wrote to Vox in an email.
Staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been targeting probationary employees for job cuts across the federal government. There are around 216,000 workers with this status, close to 10 percent of the total federal workforce. Thousands of workers have already been fired across the federal government across divisions like the National Park Service and the Department of Energy. About 75,000 staffers accepted deferred resignation offers.
But the potential cuts at NOAA go beyond that. CBS News reported that NOAA employees were told to prepare for staffing to halve and for budgets to shrink by 30 percent. One source inside the agency who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press told Vox that some weather offices at NOAA would be eliminated entirely.
“There’s going to be some interruptions and declines in the quality of service because we’ll have offices that are understaffed. That’s a big risk for the weather service,” said Timothy Gallaudet, who served as acting administrator for NOAA during President Donald Trump’s first term. “Our weather satellites, they’re vital for public safety, and any interruption to their maintenance and operation could be a problem too.”
Though it performs valuable jobs, NOAA is at the intersection of the broader push to shrink the government, an ideological fight over climate change, and possibly a personal grievance with the president himself.
The cuts could have far-reaching consequences for the US economy and the safety of Americans as extreme weather lands on increasingly populated areas. “NOAA does great things that are affecting every American, every day, in a positive way,” Gallaudet said. With the drastic cuts some in the Trump administration want at the agency, “everything would slow down and potentially stop.”
Why the main climate and weather agency is in line for deep cuts
While NASA looks out to the stars, NOAA keeps an eye here on Earth. But unlike NASA, NOAA is not a stand-alone agency. It’s under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce, currently led by Howard Lutnick, former CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who was confirmed on February 18.
The Commerce Department’s mission is to facilitate trade and economic growth in the US, so it may seem odd that it runs a science agency, particularly one that accounts for 60 percent of its budget. However, historically NOAA’s research was performed with commerce in mind, particularly the fishing industry and maritime trade. Even today, NOAA’s work mapping the sea floor and ocean currents in real time around ports ensures safe travels for shipping, which contributes $5.4 trillion to the US economy each year. The agency’s management of fisheries supports the nearly $10 billion fishing sector. NOAA’s forecasting work through the National Weather Service is essential for farmers, event planners, and for generating life-saving alerts ahead of extreme weather events. NOAA also conducts basic science research around climate change.
These functions have drawn the ire of some within the Trump administration. Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda produced by the Heritage Foundation, specifically calls for climate change to be systematically removed from government policymaking. In Project 2025 training videos obtained by ProPublica, an official from Trump’s first term says a future conservative president “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
NEW: PROJECT 2025’s never-before-published training videos urge future appointees to “eradicate” every mention of climate change.The fight against climate change, the videos say, is really a ploy to “control people.”Watch below 👇Then read our story: https://t.co/KxkyIoBJFm pic.twitter.com/9bQTous3xz— Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) August 11, 2024
It makes sense then that NOAA would be a ripe target. Project 2025 calls for NOAA to “be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” It describes NOAA’s six main offices acting as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity.” As for the National Weather Service, it should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
Across the government, many of the specific objectives laid out in Project 2025 are already getting checked off the list. However, during his confirmation hearing, Lutnick said he disagreed with the Project 2025 proposal to dismantle NOAA.
Trump also had a direct run-in with NOAA during his first term. In 2019, Hurricane Dorian reached Category 5 strength and was heading toward the Gulf Coast. Trump posted on Twitter that Alabama was one of the states most likely to be hit, but the National Weather Service’s Birmingham office responded that there would be no hurricane impacts on the state.
In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already category 5. BE CAREFUL! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 1, 2019
Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. #alwx— NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) September 1, 2019
Then, during an Oval Office briefing on September 4, 2019, Trump presented a National Weather Service map of Hurricane Dorian’s path with what looked like a loop drawn on in marker to encompass southern Alabama. The episode, dubbed Sharpiegate, led to some in-fighting within NOAA as career staff pushed back against political appointees who wanted the agency to confirm Trump’s statements. NOAA’s acting chief scientist at the time, Craig McLean, was forced out of his post.
McLean told Vox the affair was part of a broader political effort to make science bend to Trump’s agenda. “When the Trump people first arrived [during the first term], they were pressing me to change the direction of the climate program,” McLean said. “The frustration was that the Trump people couldn’t get that done. The climate program survived and continued to assert scientific truths that are evident. But now I’m expecting them to just come in with a blunderbuss and a sledgehammer and start whacking programs. So that’s what concerns me. Climate is a big target.”
NOAA does have room for improvement
Former NOAA officials said there are some long-running friction points at the agency that deserve scrutiny and could benefit from some strategic reorganization, cuts, and privatization.
The big issue is simply that NOAA is under the wrong department. “The political appointees in the Department of Commerce did not have a good appreciation for what NOAA does,” Gallaudet said. “That was the biggest pain point, to be honest with you. They really just didn’t understand us well. Whenever we had direct access to the White House, that’s when we got our initiatives forward.”
It’s unlikely that NOAA will get moved out of the Commerce Department anytime soon, but having top political officials who grasp NOAA’s mission and its value to the American public could smooth over the bureaucratic wrangling.
NOAA could also benefit from teaming up with the private sector. Private weather forecasting is now a $10 billion industry in the United States, but fully commercializing the National Weather Service is something that some of these companies oppose. AccuWeather, a company providing weather forecasting services, specifically came out against the Project 2025 proposal and said it could not replace everything NOAA does. “The authors of ‘Project 2025’ used us as an example of forecasts and warnings provided by private sector companies without the knowledge or permission of AccuWeather,” wrote AccuWeather CEO Steven R. Smith in a statement last year.
But by working with companies like AccuWeather, NOAA can expand the reach of its forecasts and get important alerts into the hands of more people likely to be affected by severe weather and tailored to businesses that have the most at stake. Gallaudet noted that NOAA is constantly amassing gobs of weather metrics that inform local meteorologists, app developers, and farmers, but this collection is getting unwieldy. Private companies can help the agency automate the data collection and optimize its analysis software. Machine learning tools developed by tech companies could also help NOAA improve its forecasts.
Another problem is that NOAA’s wide-ranging research portfolio unwittingly overlaps with science projects at other agencies, like NASA, the Department of Energy, and the US Geological Survey (USGS), creating unnecessary redundancies.
“I went on a dive trip off North Carolina to some shipwrecks when I was at NOAA — unofficially, it was my recreational event — and I met a USGS biologist diving with me. It turns out he worked on sturgeon,” Gallaudet said. “We had two [sturgeon] labs at NOAA. Our sturgeon scientists had never spoken with USGS sturgeon scientists. There’s not many sturgeon in the country! You’d think our scientists would collaborate and be more efficient, but no.”
On the other hand, there are research areas where NOAA could still invest more, particularly in social science. While meteorologists are extending their lead time on weather predictions, how people parse and act on this information is emerging as a limitation. An early tornado warning doesn’t help much if recipients don’t immediately seek shelter, or if they try to squeeze in a last-minute grocery run. Getting people to heed warnings and take precautions is a critical challenge.
“The people at the Department of Commerce, both Democrat and Republican administrations, told us NOAA doesn’t do social science, which showed their gross ignorance and I would say callous rejection of the importance of the mission,” McLean said. “During my tenure we worked very hard to open the gate and start spending in the social sciences to understand how people are responding to these forecasts and the tools that we use to make the forecast.”
And staying ahead of the practical impacts of climate change needs to be a high priority for the agency. For instance, as average temperatures rise, fish stocks are migrating toward the poles, forcing the fishers to adapt. “Today’s Maine lobster will be Canadian lobster tomorrow,” McLean said. As weather reaches greater extremes and more people and property are in harm’s way, disasters are becoming extraordinarily more expensive. It’s prudent to invest in the tools to monitor and predict these events, and dismantling them will leave the country vulnerable to more costly catastrophes in the future.
