White House Seeks Deep Cuts at NOAA
Internal budget documents leaked to the media Friday suggest that the Trump White House wants to cut funding for NOAA's National Ocean Service in half, move the National Marine Fisheries Service to the Department of the Interior, end the Sea Grant program for oceanographic research and education, and "eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes" - effectively ending NOAA's weather and ocean research program.
Current and former NOAA staffers gave copies of the OMB budget for NOAA to Science, Politico and the New York Times this week. Among other items, the programs to be eliminated would include:
- The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), NOAA's core research division
- The National Oceanographic Partnership Program and Sea Grant program
- The National Marine Fisheries Service, to be folded into Interior's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency
- The National Ocean Service's Integrated Ocean Observing System Regional Observations, Competitive Research and Coastal Zone Management Grants
- The National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science
Overall, the OMB's plan would cut NOAA's top line by $1.7 billion. OAR would be the hardest hit division. Its budget would be cut by $315 million, and the remaining $170 million would be repurposed for other programs. “At this funding level, O.A.R. is eliminated as a line office,” the OMB proposal suggests.
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) FY2026 budget is formally a suggestion to Congress; in theory, any final numbers would have to pass the House and Senate.
“I think it’s step one in the deconstruction of the agency,” former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad told Politico after reading the plan. “Any one of these are by themselves destructive enough. But taken together they foretell a much more calamitous outcome.”
Some of the biggest cuts were long foreseen: The dismantling of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research echoes the Heritage Foundation's well-known Project 2025 report, which described OAR as "one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry," proposed consolidating the office, and recommended "breaking up" NOAA altogether. OMB's top-line budget cut is also similar in scope to an earlier plan published in 2023 by the Center for Renewing America, founded by Project 2025 coauthor and current OMB director Russell Vought.
The OMB plan also includes specific cuts to NOAA's next-generation weather satellites, due to launch in the 2030s. OMB proposes eliminating individual sensors that (if installed) would track ocean color, atmospheric temperature, pollution levels and moisture content. Some of these factors are useful for storm prediction, but the data could also be repurposed to produce climate science. At the same time, parallel cuts that OMB proposes at NASA (reported Friday by Ars Technica) could eliminate a large swath of existing earth science satellite sensing capabilities as well.
The OMB's reported cuts also align with recent administration orders that canceled office leases for certain NOAA departments, heavily focused on the National Marine Fisheries Service. The lease cancelations affect local NMFS port offices in Alaska, California, Florida, Guam, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington and elsewhere, and many take effect in FY2025.
Inside NOAA, staffers told Axios that some operations have already been slowed by a requirement to have every contract approved by Commerce Department Secretary Howard Lutnick. NOAA is one part of his portfolio, but the secretary is also a key architect of President Trump's global tariff policy, and the Wall Street Journal reports that Lutnick has been occupied at the White House for much of his tenure to date. Dozens of NOAA contracts were awaiting his approval as of April 1, according to Axios.