Twenty-five pages into a nearly 400-page document, inside a long table titled FY 2026 Proposed Operating Plan, there sits a subhead: Climate Research. Below it are three categories, including “Climate laboratories and cooperative institutes,” “Regional climate data and information,” and “Climate competitive research.” Look to the right in the table, and a distressing symmetry emerges: first, the FY 2024 enacted amounts for these activities inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including around 300 employees and close to $220 million; then, those same exact numbers for 2026, but surrounded by parentheses indicating reductions. The result, in a bottom line labeled “Total, Climate Research”: zero employees, zero dollars.
This is the NOAA budget justification posted to the Department of Commerce’s website on Monday. It is as grim as a Project 2025-led destruction of the agency as one might imagine. Overall, NOAA’s budget would drop by around 30 percent, down to about $4.5 billion; it would cut thousands of jobs, reducing the workforce by about 18 percent. It would end climate research entirely.
And not just climate research; a few pages back from that table you’ll find the list of “terminations” — it’s just after the even longer list of “decreases.” Just to take a few things on the chopping block: Coastal zone management grants, National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, Marine Sanctuaries Construction, species recovery grants, basically all of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research including Weather Laboratories and the National Sea Grant College Program, and plenty more. Toward the bottom of the list, just for good measure, it axes NOAA’s Office of Education.
This is a budget for an agency that the budgeters do not want to exist. One NOAA employee highlighted to Splinter some of the cuts to forecasting improvement that appear to fly in the face of actual, stated administration priorities, demonstrating its overall “carelessness.” It would shutter a research center that houses the best of the country’s hurricane modeling, an enterprise that has helped save $5 billion per major US hurricane since 2007 alone.
The budget document lands just days after the last of the Cooperative Institute contracts actually did get approved, sneaking past Secretary Howard Lutnick’s desk apparently on their way to the guillotine. There’s no question where it would leave the country — waiting for the next storm, and the vastly warmer climate of the future, in the dark.
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