The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the nation’s atmospheric research programs could set U.S. forecasting back a generation or more, a cadre of retired federal hurricane, weather and ocean scientists warns.
The budget proposed by the White House for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is almost half what it was a year ago, and eliminates all funding for the agency’s Office of Atmospheric Research, the division that coordinates and conducts weather and climate research across the nation.
“It will stop all progress” in U.S. forecasting, said James Franklin, who retired in 2017 as chief of the National Hurricane Center’s forecast specialists.
Abolishing that research will be “a generational loss” of any progress that would have been made over the next 10 years or more, Franklin said. “We’re going to stagnate and we’re not going to continue to improve as we go forward.”
The atmospheric research office, also referred to as NOAA Research, underpins much of the agency’s work and scientific advances, whether it’s more accurate forecasting or tracking tsunamis or plumes of chemicals or wildfire smoke, said Franklin and others working to persuade Congress to save the programs.
They say defunding the research program would carry great costs − forecast improvements have saved as much as $5 billion per storm − and put lives at risk when forecasts fall short.
Dozens of private weather forecasters, TV meteorologists and scholars have expressed similar concerns in social media, broadcasts, blogs and newsletters, saying the degradation of forecast accuracy will affect farmers, aircraft pilots and passengers and millions of other Americans, whether they know it or not.
The NOAA cuts, combined with other proposed cuts and a host of canceled grants and contracts across the federal government is being viewed by many scientists and scholars as a sweeping assault on science in the U.S.
White House budget would be 40% less for NOAA
The White House proposed an estimated direct program budget of $3.5 billion for NOAA, roughly $2.3 billion lower than the current year, an almost 40% reduction.
The 2026 line item for NOAA Research is blank, compared to an estimated $608 million in 2025. The only office under the NOAA umbrella slated to see an increase is the National Weather Service, which could see a $71 million increase to its direct program budget, with an estimated total of $1.3 billion.
In a June 5 hearing on Capitol Hill, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick defended the cuts, saying NOAA is “transforming how we track storms and forecast weather with cutting-edge technology.” USA TODAY reached out to the Commerce Department and NOAA for comment about Lutnick’s remarks to Congress, but did not receive a response.
Former senior NOAA officials say transformative work will cease if the budget cuts are approved, particularly when combined with extensive cuts already made to staffing, research, grants and cooperative programs with dozens of universities.
The cuts, including those by the Department of Government Efficiency and Office of Management and Budget, show little practical knowledge of how the nation’s weather system operates, said Craig McLean, a former NOAA chief scientist and former assistant administrator for research.
He compares the administration cuts to dismantling a car engine, then trying to put it back together without parts whose purpose you don’t understand.
Conservatives propose reining in “climate change alarm”
Many of the steps taken so far reflect the recommendations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which proposed dismantling NOAA and privatizing weather service operations, specifically targeting the agency’s work on climate monitoring and climate change.
Project 2025 stated NOAA’s six main offices – including its divisions for research, satellites, ocean service, fisheries and marine and aviation operations – form “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
In a budget document, the White House has stated some of NOAA’s research and grant programs “spread environmental alarm.” In mid-June, a team of at least a half dozen people who wrote and produced Climate.gov, a website that supports science education and explains complicated science and weather to the public, was terminated.
Agency veterans say the administration’s campaign against climate research fails to acknowledge the role climate plays in daily weather, and mischaracterizes how NOAA research supports daily forecasts for all kinds of extreme weather.
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NOAA research extends far beyond the well-documented changing climate, said Alan Gerard, who recently retired from the agency’s Severe Storms Laboratory. For example, he said the cuts could “be disastrous” for improving tornado warnings.
Experts say budget cuts put national research network in peril
NOAA Research’s network of nine laboratories, 16 cooperative institutes and other partnerships with universities collect and share weather data, then use it to develop new forecast models, new tools and better techniques to save lives, Gerard said.
The division’s work is credited with modeling and forecasting advances that support both the hurricane center and the weather service, including vast improvements in forecasting hurricane track and intensity.
John Cortinas, a former deputy assistant administrator for science with OAR, cited a list of forecast-improvement projects now underway. For example, the storms laboratory is developing “the next generation of radars,” to improve tornado forecasting, Cortinas said. “But if the White House cuts go as proposed, that lab’s gone, that ends.”
The Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory is working on the next generation of offshore buoys.
The Global Systems Laboratory developed a national weather forecast model and conducts fire-weather and wildfire research. Cortinas said it’s now working to improve prediction of hyperlocal extreme rainfall events like those that caused massive flooding last summer in Minnesota and earlier this year in Kentucky.
Several projects are rooted in the Weather Research and Forecast Innovation Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump during the early days of his first term in 2017. A Congressional Research Service report released on June 10, 2025 noted NOAA has not publicly released details on the proposed budget, and stated the available documents do not discuss how NOAA plans to meet the responsibilities it has been assigned.
Balloon launches have far-reaching forecast impacts
Franklin started his 35-year career at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory, which includes the Hurricane Research Division. He has spoken often about strides being made to improve forecasting and voiced frustration over hurdles that still exist in forecasting hurricane intensity.
Over the past decade, NOAA has shaved the margin of forecast track error by 27% at 36 hours out and 18% at 72 hours out. In 2024, the hurricane center set a record for the most accurate forecasts in its history, according to a preliminary analysis by the center and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.
“The 5-day forecast of hurricane track is as accurate as the 3-day forecast was 20 years ago,” Rick Spinrad, NOAA’s former administrator told USA TODAY.
Franklin fears the budget cuts would jeopardize those improvements. For example, he points to weather balloon launches that have been restricted or discontinued at some weather service offices. The offices are grappling with staffing shortages after the administration fired some probationary employees and offered incentive-based retirements to shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy.
It may be hard to conceive that data collected from balloons launched in the Great Plains could affect hurricane forecasts on the East or Gulf coasts, but they can and do, said both Franklin and Gerard.
The launches provide crucial information about moisture and prevailing winds in large systems crossing the country that could steer or interact with approaching tropical systems, Franklin said. “If they pass through an area with less balloon coverage, the forecast might change a bit and get degraded.” The larger the area with missing data, he said, the greater the risk of error in a hurricane landfall forecast.
Experts say better forecasts save money and lives
Franklin and others cited a 2024 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program has saved roughly $5 billion per hurricane per year in terms of pre-landfall protective spending and post-landfall damages and recovery.
“Hurricane response costs become greater when you have a poorer forecast,” he said. “That’s a lot of cost savings that we seem willing to give up here. We’re going to turn off all that potential savings by saying we don’t care if the forecasts don’t continue to get better.”
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change, hurricanes and disasters for USA TODAY. Reach her at dpulver@usatoday.com or dinahvp.77 on Signal.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Massive NOAA cuts could put forecasts in peril, lives in danger
