Image: The National Weather Service providing meteorological support to crews battling the McKinney Fire near Montague, CA in 2022. Photo credit to the National Weather Service.
What NOAA Does
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the backbone of climate and weather research and information in the United States. Its annual budget is under $7 billion, and the value of the weather information that it shares with the public is estimated to be over $100 billion annually. That means the American taxpayer gets a more than fourteen-fold return on investment. (Now that’s government efficiency, contrary to the claims of DOGE and its sympathizers about eliminating government bloat.)
NOAA’s activities undergird one third of the U.S. GDP. The agency provides accurate, in-depth information 24/7 about weather and climate conditions to citizens, farmers, fishermen, emergency planners, local governments, and other institutions. Departments within NOAA include the National Weather Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and other crucial information and operations offices.
Project 2025 aimed to dismantle the scientific institution because it conducts critical research into our changing climate. The extreme right wants to disassemble the agency and privatize the weather service, forcing the public to pay twice for the meteorological information they rely on and already fund through their tax dollars. Trump has already begun to execute the Project 2025 playbook for NOAA, putting the safety of the public at risk.
The American Meteorological Society says that Trump and Musk’s efforts to eliminate free and accurate weather and climate information “are likely to cause irreparable harm and have far-reaching consequences for public safety, economic well-being, and the United States’ global leadership.”
What Trump and Musk Have Done To NOAA
- DOGE informed NOAA that it should expect to lose 50 percent of its workforce, and 30 percent of its budget. (CBS News, 2/5/25)
- NOAA lost 6 percent of its workforce in a day. The Trump administration fired 600 NOAA workers, including 100 in the Weather Service. The DOGE buyout caused the Weather Service to lose another 170 employees. (Washington Post, 3/1/25)
- Trump imposed a $1 limit on government credit cards, blocking NOAA scientists from being able to carry out basic functions of their jobs. (Wired, 3/3/25)
- DOGE announced that it intends to cancel the leases of two critical NOAA weather forecasting centers. Endangered facilities include the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in Maryland, whose modeling center runs the computer models used for daily weather forecasting, and a radar operations center in Oklahoma which warns people around the country about dangerous weather. (Axios, KSWO, 3/4/25)
Who Will Be Harmed?
- Anyone who could be affected by extreme weather like heat waves, hurricanes, blizzards, tsunamis, tornadoes, and floods. Trump and Musk’s indiscriminate firings targeted the people responsible for issuing crucial warnings about extreme weather events around the country. That includes workers at the nation’s two tsunami warning centers. (PBS, The Splinter)
- Anyone who eats crops grown in America. NOAA provides crucial weather information to farmers, helping them protect their crops from inclement weather and maximize yields. (Reuters)
- Anyone who eats fish. Trump and Musk fired large swaths of people at the National Marine Fisheries Service, which oversees commercial fisheries, helps maintain stable fish populations, and provides critical information to fishermen. (Washington Post)
- Anyone in the Midwest who drinks water or has a dog. Musk fired the head of the team that monitors algal blooms in the Great Lakes Watershed and notifies water treatment plants in time to prevent people and their pets from being poisoned. (The New Republic)
- Anyone who goes to the beach. NOAA provides information for coastal residents from tide and surf forecasts to algal bloom, tsunami, and oil spill monitoring. (Tampa Bay Times)
Who Stands To Gain?
- Private companies could capitalize upon the vacuum created by the loss of a public option for freely available weather information in order to create subscription and other paid models to access that information. They could potentially capitalize upon extreme weather to extract further profit the way that some utilities make windfall profits off of extreme weather events. But the intricate partnership between public data and private weather services that currently exists benefits both parties. Private weather companies have generally not endorsed calls to fully privatize the weather business. (NPR)