The National Weather Service is preparing to deliver degraded forecasts. Scientists have been told to suspend all but essential travel. And a university-based researcher says their multimillion-dollar federal grant for climate modelling has been abruptly pulled.
This is the new reality inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US’s frontline weather and climate agency, according to interviews with current and former staff and research partners.
Six months into the new US administration, the impact of sweeping political changes is becoming clear. While official budget negotiations are still ongoing, a quiet dismantling is already in progress – one that staff say is threatening the agency’s ability to shield the public from the escalating threats of climate change, including floods, wildfires and hurricanes.
And the fallout won’t stop at the US border. NOAA’s research and data underpin the work of global institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization.
If America retreats, others will have to fill the void – or risk missing the early warnings of disasters to come. EU countries and academic institutes are already scrambling to hire fired NOAA staff in the hope of plugging the gap.
“It’s just chaos and uncertainty,” one current NOAA scientist with more than 15 years of experience at the agency told BBC Science Focus. “The constant uncertainty makes it really difficult to plan anything.”
Service cuts and lost research
Earlier this year, the National Weather Service (NWS), which is part of NOAA, reached an internal agreement with the union representing its employees to scale back operations across the country’s 122 weather offices. The move comes in response to widespread staffing shortages following a wave of early retirements and buyouts.
Public-facing forecasts are still being delivered – for now. But with the peak of wildfire and hurricane season approaching, cracks in the system may soon start to show.
The NWS has been authorised to hire meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians to fill 450 critical vacancies – but former employees warn that help may come too late.
“There is no question in my mind that public safety has been jeopardised by a rushed job-cutting process led by people who assumed that government roles like these in the NWS were expendable,” said Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who spent 35 years across various NOAA divisions before accepting an early retirement package this year.
Hiring and training, Gerard says, could take months, while the loss of institutional knowledge from departing senior staff may be permanent.
Even if staffing gaps are eventually filled, current employees warn that it may come at the expense of long-term preparedness. “What gets sacrificed is the research component and the ability to continue to improve our modelling, prediction and forecasting expertise,” a NOAA scientist said.
External collaborators are already feeling the fallout. A university-based researcher who works closely with NOAA told BBC Science Focus that their multi-million-dollar next-generation weather modelling project is in jeopardy after losing federal support.
“We’re already not perfect at what we do,” the researcher said. “And the climate is changing. That means more extreme events – and if we’re not evolving to match that, we’re going to lose lives, experience more property damage, and miss dangerous storms.”
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‘Let’s not use the word climate’
Internally, scientists have been ordered to halt all nonessential travel, including to conferences, a cornerstone of collaboration in any scientific field. As with many recent directives, the policy was reportedly communicated verbally, with no formal written guidance.
Multiple sources described a workplace where verbal orders are becoming the norm, and written records are scarce.
Scientists also described a growing reluctance to use the word ‘climate’ – a shift they say is driven by pressure from above.
“I haven’t personally been told, ‘don’t publish this’ or ‘don’t work on climate,’” the NOAA scientist said. “But it’s implicit. We see what’s coming out of the administration, from guidance around external funding, for instance, so then when we work with our colleagues externally, we’re like ‘let’s not use the word climate, let’s talk about this in a different way’.”
This self-censorship comes amid a broader crackdown on climate-related projects.
In April, the Department of Commerce pulled nearly $4m in NOAA funding from Princeton University, terminating three major cooperative agreements. These included efforts to model coastal inundation, sea-level rise, and predict droughts, fires and floods.
In a public statement, the Department criticised one of the awards to Princeton for promoting “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and fostering “climate anxiety.” Another was “no longer in keeping with the Trump administration’s priorities” because it “suggests that the Earth will have a significant fluctuation in its water availability as a result of global warming.”
The statement went on to describe changes to precipitation patterns and sea-level rise due to climate change as “alleged” impacts.
In May, NOAA’s Grants Management Division abruptly terminated the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative (NCRC), a University of Washington programme that worked to help rural communities and Tribes adapt to worsening flood and extreme heat.
The termination letter reportedly stated that the grant was being cut to “streamline and reduce the cost and size of the Federal Government” and because the NCRC no longer complied with “program goals or agency priorities.”
Separately, the White House has cut funding and fired staff working on the Sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), despite a legal requirement to produce the comprehensive climate report every four years. The report was set for publication in 2028, though its future is now uncertain.
“Some of it is just trying to play the semantics game to try and not draw attention to the work you’re doing,” the NOAA scientist said.
“As an example, we refer to ‘climate’ as anything beyond the weather scale. You could be talking about predictions in the months ahead, and traditionally, we referred to that as ‘climate’... but even with that, we don’t want to draw attention to it, so we don’t call it ‘climate’ anymore.”
Losing knowledge
NOAA has already lost around a fifth of its workforce since the new administration took office. More than 1,000 employees – many in senior leadership roles – accepted buyouts or early retirement packages earlier this year.
“It’s one thing when you lose experience by attrition like you normally do,” Gerard said. “It’s another thing when you basically lop out a significant portion of the experienced and senior people.”
Morale has plummeted. Staff say independent programmes are being restructured or eliminated with little warning or explanation, and even if funding is restored, much of the damage may already be irreversible.
“This is a research infrastructure built over five or six decades,” Gerard said. “It could essentially be terminated in a matter of a year.”
Carl Gouldman, who until recently led the US Integrated Ocean Observing System Office within NOAA, shares that concern.
“The people and partnerships that exist to innovate and create the new capabilities we need are at great risk, and they might not be able to put them back together,” he said. “Humpty Dumpty is broken, and you can’t put him back together.”
Negotiations over NOAA’s 2026 budget are still underway. The White House proposal would slash the agency’s funding by 40 per cent. Alternative versions in the House and Senate are more generous, but compromise is likely months away.
Gerard, however, is more concerned about what the administration might do on its own in the meantime. He pointed to public comments by Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who recently suggested the administration is “not cowing to a legislative branch’s understanding of its own authorities and powers.”
“There’s still time to reconsider this and think about what the impacts are,” Gerard said. “For a variety of reasons – climate change, the fact that the human footprint is expanding – more people are in harm's way. The need for these kinds of warnings and forecasts is only going to grow.”
NOAA did not respond to a request for comment.
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About our experts
Alan Gerard is a meteorologist with over 35 years of experience in providing warnings and forecasts, as well as leading research aimed at reducing the societal impacts of hazardous weather, water and climate events. For more than 20 years, he held senior leadership roles at NOAA, most recently serving as director of the Analysis and Understanding Branch at the National Severe Storms Laboratory until March 2025.
Carl Goulman is the early-retired director of NOAA’s US Integrated Ocean Observing System Office, with 25 years of leadership in the agency. While at NOAA, he was responsible for annual budgets ranging from $50-$200m.