White House outlines plan to gut NOAA, smother climate research

White House outlines plan to gut NOAA, smother climate research

The Trump administration wants to effectively break up NOAA and end its climate work by abolishing its primary research office and forcing the agency to help boost U.S. fossil fuel production, budget documents show.

The move, outlined in a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget, carries forward President Donald Trump’s broader goals of slashing federal spending, gutting climate research and unleashing U.S. energy production.

But it also represents a dramatic shift in NOAA’s mission.




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.

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.

The changes were outlined in a budget proposal shared this week with POLITICO’s E&E News by three current and former agency employees. The memo broadly calls for a shakeup within the Commerce Department, where NOAA is housed, to help balance the federal budget.

“Reaching balance requires: resetting the proper balance between Federal and State responsibilities with a renewed emphasis on federalism; eliminating the Federal Government’s support of woke ideology; protecting the American people by deconstructing a wasteful and weaponized bureaucracy; and identifying and eliminating wasteful spending,” the memo says.

The OMB document — called a “passback” memorandum because it notifies agency officials of what to expect in the forthcoming fiscal year — also indicates NOAA’s operations, research and facilities (ORF) budget would be cut by 38 percent, from $4.8 billion in 2025 to $3.47 billion in 2026.

The 12-page memo calls for radical changes to NOAA’s marine resource protection responsibilities by shifting all enforcement of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and other NOAA-specific endangered species functions to the Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency.

“I think it’s step one in the deconstruction of the agency,” former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in an interview Friday morning. “Any one of these [actions] are by themselves destructive enough. But taken together they foretell a much more calamitous outcome.”




Requests for comment from OMB and NOAA were not answered in time for publication, though the document was confirmed as authentic by multiple sources within NOAA.

The document reflects OMB Director Russ Vought’s proposal in Project 2025, the conservative policy handbook, to break up NOAA and dramatically shrink its mission while ending its work on climate.

Vought wrote in Project 2025 that NOAA should be disassembled because it is the “source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said the “preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

The OMB document outlines a plan to break up NOAA’s space weather mission and move it to the Department of Homeland Security. It ends NOAA’s office of education and virtually all of its climate portfolio. It also proposes a transfer of the Traffic Coordination System for Space to a nonprofit or a private sector partner, which could be a boon for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It eliminates some climate monitoring functions of satellites now under development.

It does preserve current funding levels for the National Weather Service, while calling for a major streamlining of the agency.

The document also outlines a significant shift in the mission of the remnants of NOAA that will survive. That does not include any work on climate change, according to the document.

“Passback eliminates functions of the Department that are misaligned with the President’s agenda and the expressed will of the American people,” the document states. It forces “significant reductions to education, grants, research, and climate-related programs within NOAA.”

Spinrad, who served under the Biden administration, said such a letter is common practice following an OMB budget review. While labeled as “pre-decisional,” Spinrad said ‘passback’ memo decisions are rarely amended or changed.

“NOAA’s hands are pretty much tied at this point,” Spinrad said. “They’re allowed to put in a protest on a passback [memo]. It’s usually just whispers in the wind. The question now is will Congress step up and restore some of these programs.”

Among the blueprint’s most “insidious” actions, Spinrad said, is the planned dissolution of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which is at the very core of the agency’s climate, weather and oceans science mission.

The document also makes clear the White House’s intent to zero out “all funding for climate, weather and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes housed primarily at major research universities.”

It also eliminates funding for some of NOAA’s highest-profile coastal protection and management initiatives, including the Sea Grant program that allocates millions of dollars annually for education and research at 34 colleges and universities on the saltwater coasts and Great Lakes.


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“It’s devastating. It’s idiotic and abusive,” Andrew Rosenberg, the former deputy director of NOAA Fisheries under the Obama administration, said in a telephone interview.

Rosenberg said the wholesale shift of NOAA Fisheries’ regulatory responsibility to the Fish and Wildlife Service will leave huge gaps in scientific knowledge and result in greater harm to marine mammals and fragile ecosystems such as coral reefs.

“You don’t want to separate the science from the regulatory [responsibilities], because making protected species decisions at the regional or deputy director level requires that you be able to call up a science center and get critical information about the status of a species,” Rosenberg said. “If you move these functions over the FWS, you’ve destroyed that connection.”

The shift also will “create enormous problems for the fishing industry,” Rosenberg said, which has long worked with NOAA to establish quotas and other regulations governing commercial and recreational fisheries.

“As much as they might not like [NOAA Fisheries’] actions sometimes, they’re going to be really worried that the [Fish and Wildlife Service] only cares about protecting species and doesn’t care about the fishing industry,” he said.

The memo also has significant consequences for a planned Earth-observing satellite system known as the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) program.

GeoXO is the next stage of an ongoing environmental satellite mission known as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, a collaboration between NOAA and NASA. The program, which has operated for five decades, provides observations of space weather, solar activity, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, including data valuable for weather, climate and other environmental research. The final GOES satellite launched last year, and the GeoXO program is expected to begin in the early 2030s.

NASA has so far acted as an acquisition agent for the GeoXO system, collaborating with NOAA to secure contracts for equipment, instruments and launch services for the program. But the OMB document directs NOAA to terminate NASA’s role in the project. The memo also suggests that the program should implement a “major overhaul” aimed at reducing its life cycle costs by half.

The memo would also significantly reduce the scope of GeoXO’s observation capabilities, directing the program to focus exclusively on weather data and de-scoping instruments aimed at monitoring certain aspects of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans — information valuable for climate scientists.

The blueprint also ends support for Regional Climate Data and Information, Climate Competitive Research and the National Oceanic Partnership Program. Seven other NOAA programs will be shifted from OAR to the National Ocean Service and National Weather Service.

The document also shifts some of NOAA’s priorities toward fossil fuel production.

It orders NOAA Fisheries to “prioritize permitting and consultation activities in order to support Administration priorities and unleash American energy.”

It eliminates habitat conservation and restoration, species recovery efforts and interjurisdictional grants.

The OMB document suggests that the process of eliminating all of NOAA’s climate research is now well underway.

The proposal runs counter to a pledge made by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in his confirmation hearing, when he vowed not to break up NOAA.

“I have no interest in separating it,” Lutnick told senators. “That is not on my agenda.”