Could you explain why science is important to a malignant demon in 90 seconds? What about three short bullet points in an email? That’s the task facing scientists and others at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration right now, as DOGE and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have set about trying to fulfill the Project 2025 promise to dismantle the agency that studies the climate, provides weather data and forecasting, and generally keeps people safer.
“Lutnick’s position on every contract is ‘no’ and agency representatives have roughly a minute and a half to convince him otherwise,” one source at NOAA told Splinter. Lutnick is apparently focused on refusing contract renewals, while DOGE is intent on cancelling things outright, with a particular focus on high-dollar-value contracts without much consideration for why they cost a lot. They seem to be canceling things and then, maybe, with enough pushback within 24 hours, restoring them. Or not. “It really feels like a hostile private equity takeover.”
Contract cancelations and non-renewals seem particularly targeted at the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, also just known as NOAA Research. This focuses on longer-term climate and weather research, improving weather forecasting, and many other areas. One contract that helped keep certain labs inside OAR running smoothly was recently canceled, and then restored after a wasted day of internal anxiety and effort. “It’s completely unserious,” a source at NOAA said. But per another source, while the restoration was obviously a good thing, “Good lord there are a lot of other contracts in the same boat.”
The biggest bomb might come in the form of canceled cloud computing and web services contracts with Amazon Web Services, Google, and other providers. This will likely drive some OAR and other sites entirely dark; a source said that research.noaa.gov itself may be “borked,” because even if it isn’t fully hosted by AWS it links out to so much data and other information there that much function could be lost. That includes internal repositories of papers and technical data that scientists use all the time.
Canceling those contracts will affect work that improves hurricane forecasting and integrating observational data into weather forecasting; hurricane season officially starts June 1, for the record. Axios also reported that the main NOAA Research site may go dark, along with those for the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), the Climate Program Office, and others.
As far as Lutnick’s refusals go, some of which has previously been reported by Axios, Bloomberg, and others, there is a process for NOAA staff to resubmit contracts for a second look. Multiple sources agree that there is already an enormous backlog for those requests, however, slowing everything down, and that’s just for contracts — NOAA also issues grant funding, and there does not yet appear to be any particular process for asking the Commerce Secretary to review those at all.
The grants issue is particularly concerning because that’s how NOAA works closest with what’s known as its Cooperative Institutes. Those include places like the CI for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami (CIMAS), the CI for Modeling the Earth System at Princeton (CIMES), and the CI for Earth System Research and Data Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CIESRDS). Some of those grants will expire in June or even sooner; there are 16 CIs in total (this link, to the main CIs site, may also go dark soon), spread out around the country.
Though NOAA itself has already lost hundreds of people under the Trump administration, the biggest reductions in force, like the one decimating the Department of Health and Human Services this week, is still on the way. In the meantime, even the people below Lutnick evaluating NOAA contracts have little experience or understanding of what they are considering. Justifications from scientists and other staff need to focus on what Congressionally-mandated things will be impacted by a contract ending, and they are expected to be short.
“You get 3 bullet points or 90 seconds to justify yourself to someone with no background understanding,” a source said. “It’s the opposite of how science works!”
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