Trump Team Looks to Drastically Cut NOAA Staff and Budget

CLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration is looking to halve the NOAA workforce, say two former officials of the agency, a member of Congress and a congressional staff member.

The draconian cut, they say — which would reduce the number of NOAA employees from about 12,000 to 6,000 — threatens to cripple an agency that provides climate and weather information across the U.S. economy.

“The goal is to just crush [it] with a hammer, hard blows, and shrink that federal workforce,” said Craig McLean, who served as the assistant administrator of NOAA Research until he retired in 2022 after a 40-year career at the agency. “There really isn’t any consideration about what the mission impact is.”

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NOAA’s products include the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center. It manages the nation’s fisheries. Its free streams of data are widely used by scientists, governments and businesses around the globe. NOAA also is one of the world’s leading climate science agencies, which has long made it a target for conservatives and the fossil fuel industry.

The changes under consideration suggest the Trump team may be following the Project 2025 conservative policy proposal for NOAA. The document, written as a playbook for a second Trump administration, calls for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized” largely because of its climate change research.

The looming cuts to NOAA’s workforce are being communicated to agency staff verbally, say congressional sources and former NOAA officials. That’s intended to avoid putting it in a written memo or email that can be leaked.

But the officials cautioned that — while the proposal to halve the workforce has been discussed — it also could be an intimidation tactic to pressure more employees to take up the administration’s offer to resign early, which expires Monday.

The proposal also calls for a 30 percent reduction in NOAA’s budget.

McLean said mass cuts at the agency would have a ripple effect across the U.S. economy.

NOAA conducts ground-breaking climate research but it also provides invaluable information to a variety of U.S. business interests, he said. McLean said NOAA’s products “benefit the finance community, the reinsurers, real estate, transportation, agriculture and all these different industries.” It also helps the oil and gas sector.

Losing that data or even compromising it because of staff shortages would be devastating, he said.

“The products that NOAA generates are not just so that I know whether my tractor is going to get wet tomorrow and I got to cover it before I plow the field, but what should I be planting next year, and what is this coming season going to do for me,” he said. “All that stuff is all based on NOAA outlooks, forecasts, oceanography and atmospheric sciences.”

McLean was demoted from his position as acting chief scientist at NOAA in the first Trump administration after he launched an investigation into senior NOAA officials following the “Sharpiegate” scandal. His inquiry was to examine whether they adhered to proper scientific integrity rules.

That scandal, which involved Trump’s current nominee to run NOAA, was when Trump used a marker on a hurricane map to publicly support his false claims that a hurricane was going to devastate a swath of the South that was not actually under threat.

Climate and weather are key pillars of NOAA, but the agency also plays a significant role in managing the nation’s commercial fisheries, which at times has pitted the agency against the energy industry.

That includes a fight to block oil and gas drilling in a swath of the Gulf of Mexico that threatened the endangered Rice’s whale. That legal battle is still winding its way through the courts, though it’s unlikely the Trump administration will continue to support the suit.

NOAA also has repeatedly debunked Trump’s false claim that whales were dying as a result of the installation of offshore wind turbines.

The desire to carve up NOAA — as outlined in Project 2025 — isn’t shared across Trump world. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, and Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick to head the department, pledged during his confirmation hearing not to break up the agency.

Neither the White House nor NOAA officials responded to a request for comment.

On Friday, House Natural Resources ranking member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) called for an investigation into what he described as the “illegal actions” of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a quasi-official auditing team being run by Trump ally and tech mogul Elon Musk. In particular, he called for a probe into any plans to cut staffing levels in half.

DOGE representatives have fanned across the federal government in an effort to identify fraud and waste, or programs that don’t align with the priorities of the new Trump administration. The group in particular has targeted programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

DOGE officials last week visited NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. DOGE officials did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to his calls for a broader probe into DOGE, Huffman wants an examination of the potential “conflicts of interest between Elon Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and Starlink, and the mission and activities of NOAA.”

SpaceX launched a NOAA weather and climate satellite in June.

The Trump administration is deploying a multipronged approach to remove as many federal employees as possible. Last week, the Office of Personnel and Management issued a memo that requires every agency to submit a list of “all employees who received less than a ‘fully successful’ performance rating in the past three years.”

Career officials at multiple agencies, including NOAA, now are being targeted as part of a broader plan to root out those who are harder to fire because of government and union protections.

It’s part of the Project 2025 conservative policy playbook that created a new classification for federal employees known as “Schedule F,” which makes it easier for them to be dismissed and replaced by those loyal to Trump.

Project 2025 may offer a road map to the administration’s plans for NOAA. It called for NOAA to be dismantled and said the “preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

Under the plan, National Weather Service data would be commercialized. The National Hurricane Center, which tracks the effects of climate change on extreme storms, would be forced to issue reports that are “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

Already, some NOAA scientific studies have been canceled and staff who worked on diversity, equity and inclusion have been put on leave. DOGE members have been connected to internal systems and are likely monitoring communications within the agency, said Andrew Rosenberg, who served as a senior official at NOAA during the Clinton administration.

The speed in which NOAA is now being threatened means that critical services are at risk of going offline, he said. And key employees could be fired before there’s time to challenge the legality of such a move.

“The Musk approach is, ‘Hey, I’ll break it and if somebody says afterwards you shouldn’t have broken that, I’ll say, oops,’” Rosenberg said. “Once they destroy the agencies, they’re not going to be able to put them back together again, no matter what a judge says.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.