If you’ve ever avoided a hurricane, ducked a tornado, evacuated ahead of a wildfire, or merely relied on a weather forecast to take an umbrella to work, you likely have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to thank. As America’s—and indeed the world’s—leading weather and climate watchdog and the parent organization of the National Weather Service (NWS), NOAA runs a standing army of personnel and hardware on and off the planet to keep an eye on the Earth’s often stormy temperament. The agency owns or operates 13 weather satellites; manages more than 200 deep-water buoys; and gathers weather and climate information from a storm of data provided by no fewer than 10,600 state, local, and federal governments, as well as universities and private companies nationwide.
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But NOAA is now threatened. As the Associated Press and others have reported, the agency’s already stretched workforce of 13,000 people is facing a deep cut of more than 1,000 of those employees mandated by the Trump Administration—a move that follows an earlier purge of about 1,300 in late February. The personnel reductions not only imperil NOAA’s ability to carry out its core chore of tracking and warning about upcoming severe weather events, they also hamper its ability to conduct basic research into climate change—carried out to help humanity better prepare for the sweeping environmental upheaval already evident in a steadily warming world.
“NOAA does a lot of work with climate,” says Keith Seitter, former executive director of the American Meteorological Society and currently a professor of environmental studies at the College of the Holy Cross. “That’s critically important in terms of planning for our future, knowing how to adapt to the changing climate, and understanding what we need to get ready for. In all of those things, NOAA is a really key player.”
The current cuts to NOAA were equal parts ill-timed and foreseeable. Project 2025, the conservative manifesto whose policies are increasingly being adopted by the Trump Administration, includes a section on page 674 of the 900-plus page document headed “Break Up NOAA.” On the next page the agency is described as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
But NOAA and others are right to be alarmed. Recent months have seen climate-linked wildfires in Los Angeles and elsewhere; an increase in so-called atmospheric rivers—long, narrow bands of airborne water vapor that lead to local flooding and are growing worse in a warming world; and, in other spots in the U.S. and elsewhere, increasing droughts. Last year was also the first in which the world crossed the threshold of 1.5°C of warming over pre-industrial levels that the Paris Climate Accord declared a benchmark to be avoided, lest the planet tip into irreversible climate catastrophe. Environmentalists warn that the Earth is running a fever and, with the latest NOAA firings, we’ve begun sacking the doctors.
“These layoffs put us at significant risk,” says Alice Hill, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They actually increase the risk to Americans if we consider how best to prepare for the worst extremes that climate change brings about. The first step in resilience or adaptation is early warning.”
Read more: L.A. Fires Show the Reality of Living in a World with 1.5°C of Warming
When it comes to weather and climate, it’s not just NOAA that’s been slashed; NASA is bleeding too. In a March 10 email to reporters, the space agency announced that in response to federal instructions to reduce its workforce, it was shuttering the office of technology, policy, and strategy, and the office of the chief scientist—a move that affects climate studies.
“NASA does cutting edge research and science,” says Hill. “It observes sea level rise from space. It’s got the best global surface temperature analysis. All of that contributes to our understanding of how climate change is unfolding, and with that understanding, decision-makers can make choices that leave people safer.”
Some of the NASA cuts could also hit American corporations in the pocketbook. According to Hill, studies show that 74% of Fortune 100 companies “routinely use NASA Earth Science data to support business operations, logistics, and risk management.” Some of those decisions involve grounding airplanes and bringing cargo vessels into safe harbor well ahead of dangerous storms.
It’s the cuts to NOAA, however, with the agency’s exclusively earthy portfolio—as opposed to NASA’s literally other-worldly one—that are likely to do the most damage. Seitter cites not just the firehose of climate and weather data that NOAA collects, but the way it’s computed and modeled as one more vital service that could be at risk.
“All of that data needs to be quality controlled, verified, and then assimilated into these massive weather prediction models,” he says. “NOAA is responsible for all of that work, and that’s not insignificant. It’s a huge part of the investments that are made in NOAA every year.”
Jeopardize those prediction models and you jeopardize both lives and treasure. Rice points to Chamber of Commerce estimates showing that every $1 spent on climate resilience and preparedness saves $13 in damages and cleanup costs.
Cuts to NOAA will lead to a domino effect across the agency’s entire org chart. It’s not just the NWS that’s nested within NOAA. The agency oversees five other smaller departments, including the Office of Marine and Aviation operations, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the National Ocean Service.
“There is the ocean side of NOAA,” says Seitter, “and those are the folks that monitor fisheries and work with communities to make sure that we have adequate fish reserves for feeding our country. That may be less dramatic compared to severe weather, but those are also really important functions.”
NOAA also works with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), another institutional function that could be hurt by staffing cuts. “[FEMA] coordinates with people in the National Weather Service and other folks in NOAA to make sure that they’re using their facilities in the best possible way, that they’re pre-positioning their assets so that they can take advantage of having the right stuff in the right places before [a] storm hits,” says Rice.
Read more: Mass Layoffs at NOAA Spark Concerns Over Weather, Climate Research
Cutting the workforce that makes any of this possible hurts the world beyond the U.S. Most countries don’t have the sweeping satellite and buoy technology that America takes for granted. Which means they must rely on U.S. data and forecasting to brace and prepare for extreme weather events. And, Rice points out, the more sophisticated AI becomes, the more meteorology will rely on it to predict and track storms—one more development that will require American innovation and initiative. “NOAA would be in a great position to be leading the charge for better AI in terms of a public good for weather forecasting,” she says.
All of the losses that come with slashing NOAA’s staffing and budget will do precious little to achieve the ostensible goal of the White House and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. Eliminate NOAA’s entire 13,000-person staff and you have cut just 0.43% of the federal government’s three million-strong workforce. As for pocketbook savings, NOAA’s $6.6 billion annual budget represents just 0.097% of the $6.75 trillion Washington spent in fiscal year 2024. Compare that to the cost of climate change: In 2024 alone the U.S. experienced 27 weather or climate disaster events, each with losses exceeding $1 billion. Predicting extreme weather events, preventing catastrophic losses of life and property, and better understanding the climate trends that pose such a danger to humanity are a whole lot cheaper than cleaning up the mess—and tending to the dead—after a disaster strikes.
