Trump administration officials are recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times and several people with knowledge of the situation.
The proposal from the Office of Management and Budget would abolish the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office at NOAA, one of the world’s premiere Earth sciences research centers.
A budget allocation of just over $170 million, down from about $485 million in 2024, would hobble science as varied as early warning systems for natural disasters, science education for students in kindergarten through high school, and the study of the Arctic, where temperatures have increased nearly four times as fast as the rest of the planet over the past four decades.
“At this funding level, O.A.R. is eliminated as a line office,” the proposal states.
Programs that retained funding, including research into tornado warnings and ocean acidification, would be relocated to the National Weather Service and National Ocean Service offices.
The outline for the 2026 budget passback, which would need to be approved by Congress, suggests “significant reductions to education, grants, research, and climate-related programs within NOAA” and comes after the dismantling of other agencies like the National Institutes of Health and USAID, and the removal of mentions of climate change from federal websites.
Under the proposal, the total budget for the Commerce Department would be nearly $7.7 billion, a reduction of more than $2.5 billion from 2025 levels. According to the document, the budget would refocus on activities more in line with the Trump administration’s agenda, including enforcing trade laws and collecting scientific observations like ocean and weather data to support forecasting.
“This Administration’s hostility toward research and rejection of climate science will have the consequence of eviscerating the weather forecasting capabilities that this plan claims to preserve,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, the senior Democrat on the House Sciences Committee, said in an emailed statement.
NOAA, which takes up more than half of the Commerce Department budget, would receive just over $4.4 billion, a reduction of $1.6 billion from 2025.
“It’s not surprising, but it’s very disturbing,” said Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
That includes reducing the budget for the National Marine Fisheries Service by one-third. The office would be split from NOAA and moved to the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Grants that fund species recovery and habitat conservation would be eliminated.
Funding for National Ocean Service, a branch of NOAA, would be cut in half. Programs like the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, an office within the ocean service that studies corals, pollution, and the effect of climate change and sea-level rise on coastal communities, would not be funded.
The National Centers for Environmental Information, which archives climate data, would lose a quarter of its funding.
The proposal would also alter NOAA’s satellite and space programs.
It would gut the Office of Space Commerce and relocate the Space Weather Prediction Center to the Department of Homeland Security. A program called the Traffic Coordination System for Space that was set to take over the monitoring of satellite traffic from the Department of Defense, a kind of traffic police for outer space, would also lose funding. The passback suggests having such work done by the private sector.
The satellite program that provides data for weather forecasting and modeling would also be downsized. The longstanding relationship that helps NOAA acquire satellites through NASA would also be terminated.
Dr. Spinrad said the likelihood that this budget, as proposed by the White House, would pass Congress was low. “I don’t think it will withstand congressional scrutiny.”
The passback is part of balancing the federal budget, according to the document, which includes “eliminating the federal government’s support of woke ideology.”
Project 2025, a document that has been used as a blueprint for an overhaul of the federal government under the Trump administration, included a goal to break up NOAA and downsize its research arm.
“It begs the question, is the Trump Administration intentionally breaking our weather forecasting capabilities as an excuse to carry out the dangerous Project 2025 proposal to privatize the Weather Service?” Ms. Lofgren said in a statement.
Project 2025, which was published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy research organization, called NOAA Research “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
“It would take the U.S. back to the 1950s in technical and scientific skill,” said Craig McLean, chief scientist at NOAA under both the first Trump presidency and President Biden, of the proposed budget.
The agency has until noon on April 15 to appeal the proposal. And it has until April 24 to submit plans for many of the overhauls the passback suggests, even before the proposal has been addressed by Congress.
On Thursday, probationary government employees who had been fired in February, and then reinstated by a judge, received an email from the Department of Commerce firing them again after the decision was reversed by a higher court. A so-called reduction in force plan could slash an additional 20 percent of its work force in the coming weeks.
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