It’s right there on page 674 of the Project 2025 Fascism Bible: “Break Up NOAA.” According primarily to reporting from The Guardian, as well as from sources inside or associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that blatantly illegal effort may now be underway.
Apparently, staffers associated with Elon Musk’s fake government dismantling department, DOGE, stormed into NOAA’s building on Tuesday, maybe just kind of brushing past security. They were looking for access to IT systems and more, according to The Guardian, and there is at least some evidence they got it: while it is entirely possible it is just a coincidence, NOAA’s site for the Keeling Curve, the long-running measurement of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere done at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, was down or gone entirely as of Wednesday morning. (Keeling Curve data is still available via the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography site, for the record — they maintain the data while NOAA runs the observatory. Of course, the UCSD site was built with help from National Science Foundation funding, so who knows at this point.)
UPDATE (10:40 am Wednesday): Splinter has heard that the outage was likely related to scheduled maintenance. We have further confirmation that DOGE personnel did in fact ask for and receive access to internal NOAA systems, however, with an eye in particular on oceanic and atmospheric research, the National Ocean Service, and DEIA-related content.
If such outages or other DOGE-related destruction start to spread, things could get dark in a hurry. NOAA’s weather monitoring systems, the National Hurricane Center, and plenty more are acute, critical parts of everyday life at this point, not to mention the longer term potential damage to climate research, fisheries management, and many other things.
“This is all totally batshit and people need to know what’s going on,” one source inside NOAA told Splinter. Leadership of some teams there held meetings earlier on Tuesday and tried to reassure staff about their status, though that was apparently hours before the DOGE weirdos showed up.
Meanwhile, Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs to be the NOAA administrator. You may remember him from what was perhaps the dumbest single moment of Trump’s first term, when the risk map for Hurricane Dorian was altered with a sharpie to include Alabama; Jacobs, who served as acting administrator but was never confirmed the first time around, was eventually cited for misconduct for that incident. “I find it very unfortunate that he would be renominated because that means there’s no consequence for just ignoring the science,” one former deputy director told NPR. Of course, that’s kind of the point: the willingness to sell out one’s principles in support of the king’s whims is the best way to get a job in Trump’s world.
As with all the ongoing chaos across the government, this will all ripple out to the thousands of non-government entities that rely on their relationships with federal agencies; Splinter has heard from multiple such organizations that are deeply intertwined with everything from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to both NOAA and NASA, and the feeling at those seems grim as well. Said one such source: “I must admit I’m terrified.”
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