One way Donald Trump may try to differentiate his second term from his first is by slashing the federal work force and budget and consolidating and restructuring a host of government agencies.
For people who care about weather and climate, one of the most concerning proposals on the table is to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint for the administration crafted by conservative organizations, claim erroneously that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and should be “broken down and downsized.” An arm of Mr. Trump’s team, the Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, wants to eliminate $500 billion in spending by cutting programs whose funding has expired. That could include NOAA.
With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress to invest in its future.
NOAA was established via executive order in 1970 by President Richard Nixon as an agency within the Department of Commerce. Currently its mission is to understand and predict changes in the climate, weather, ocean and coasts. It conducts basic research; provides authoritative services like weather forecasts, climate monitoring and marine resource management; and supports industries like energy, agriculture, fishing, tourism and transportation.
The best-known part of NOAA, touching all of our daily lives, is the National Weather Service. This is where daily forecasts and timely warning of severe storms, hurricanes and blizzards come from. Using satellites, balloon launches, ships, aircraft and weather stations, NOAA and its offices around the country provide vital services like clockwork, free of charge — services that cannot be adequately replaced by the private sector in part because they wouldn’t necessarily be profitable.
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For most of its history, NOAA has largely avoided politicization especially because weather forecasting has been seen as nonpartisan. Members of Congress from both parties are highly engaged in its work. Unfortunately, legislation introduced by Representative Frank Lucas, Republican of Oklahoma — a state with a lot of tornadoes — that would have helped NOAA to update its weather research and forecasting programs passed the House but languished in the Senate and is unlikely to move forward in this session of Congress. However, in 2025 there is another opportunity to improve the agency and its services to taxpayers and businesses. While there are already multiple efforts at NOAA to improve weather modeling, observation collection and marine management, Congress has piled more responsibilities on the agency, and the funding has not kept up. NOAA is spread thin, with a backlog of maintenance and upgrades that will probably take years to get through without significantly more sustained budget support.
As we enter a new world of artificial intelligence, NOAA needs significantly more computational resources to improve weather models rapidly. Otherwise, the United States risks becoming more dependent on similar institutions in Europe. Plain and simple, NOAA weather modeling and climate analysis efforts do not have the funding in the current institutional structure to keep up with our European friends. And because the military relies on NOAA’s infrastructure, the risks of and damage from extreme weather and climate events are a national security concern as much as an economic one. With a bigger budget, NOAA could offer increased value for taxpayers and boost the entire U.S. economy. What would that look like?
First, we need to have a serious conversation about further upgrading the agency’s aging systems like radars; observations, including balloons and buoys; research aircraft; satellites; and supercomputers. There is also an opportunity to build a state-of-the-art weather and climate prediction capability for the nation. That would involve modernizing emergency communication systems for future disasters instead of reacting to the most recent one. Though accurate weather forecasts, combined with effective watches and warnings, have reduced human deaths from extreme weather, still too many Americans are seemingly caught off guard by weather disasters. NOAA could help fix this.
NOAA also needs to lead a new center that would coordinate disjointed efforts scattered across the government, academia, the military and the private sector. Given the Department of Government Efficiency’s interest in speed and consolidation, it could recommend that Congress establish this premier weather forecasting agency as a bipartisan win for the American people.
We are in a golden age of technological advancement in understanding and predicting what is happening in the atmosphere and the oceans, and NOAA is uniquely well positioned to lead the way. Instead of jettisoning decades of expertise, we need an all-hands-on-deck NOAA modernization strategy to meet a rapidly changing climate. Building a weather-ready nation for the future will require hard work, but Americans of all political stripes should back NOAA to lead the way.
