FILE PHOTO: A person holds a sign as activists attend a protest against cuts to government agencies by tech billionaire Elon Musk and his young aides at the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), outside the SpaceX's facility in Hawthorne, California, U.S., March 1, 2025. REUTERS/David Swanson/File Photo
A former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, issued a dire warning Friday over the Trump administration's plans to effectively gut the agency, Politico reported on Friday.
The plan, outlined by the Office of Management and Budget under Russ Vought, calls for shutting down the primary research arm of NOAA altogether and redirecting its mission to promote fossil fuels.
"NOAA has long served as the nation’s preeminent climate and weather agency, and the new marching orders would downsize those functions in the pursuit of a 'leaner NOAA,' the memo says," reported Daniel Cusick, Chelsea Harvey, and Scott Waldman. "It calls for a sharp spending cut at the agency. NOAA would get about $4.5 billion in its next budget, down from roughly $6.1 billion in its 2025 enacted budget. Key to the cutback is the elimination of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which facilitates studies of the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, climate, weather patterns and other Earth systems."
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Ex-NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad laid down the dire stakes of this decision in an interview with Politico: “I think it’s step one in the deconstruction of the agency. Any one of these [actions] are by themselves destructive enough. But taken together they foretell a much more calamitous outcome.”
In addition to climate research, NOAA is vital to the entire ecosystem of weather forecasting, providing the early-warning data that even private weather reporting services incorporate into their own models. Experts have warned that cuts at the agency could worsen the tracking of deadly storms and lead to excess deaths from natural disasters.
Vought was a key architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 agenda, which called for dismantling the civil service and reshaping the federal government to suit the GOP agenda. The dismantling of NOAA was a key plank of Project 2025, which called it a source of "climate alarmism" and proclaimed the "preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded."
When Trump was on the campaign trail, he denied any affiliation with Project 2025, even though many of its authors worked for his previous administration. Now that he is in office once again, large portions of the blueprint are being put into practice.