Can Bipartisan Support in Congress Save NOAA From White House Cuts? – Inside Climate News

To understand the bipartisan support that has emerged in Congress for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it only takes a glance at the list of stakeholders who have been lobbying to save the embattled agency from the Trump administration’s budget knife.

Those who fish the oceans and those who ship goods over their waves, officials who maintain dams and those who manage drinking water systems, the insurance industry and a slew of universities from red and blue states alike have all made the case for maintaining NOAA funding this year.

On Sept. 10, members of the House Appropriations Committee made clear that they heard this message, rejecting the White House proposal to eliminate NOAA’s research arm and cut the agency’s budget by one-third. Instead, the legislators approved a fiscal year 2026 spending bill that includes a modest trim—about 6 percent—and directs the agency to avoid closure of any of its laboratories or cooperative research institutes. The Senate, meanwhile, is set to consider a budget bill that would maintain the current funding level at NOAA: about $6.1 billion.

In any other year, such Congressional unity would be a roadblock to the Trump administration’s drive to slash NOAA and its climate science research. This year, it may only be a speed bump.

Steps that the Trump administration already has taken to cut NOAA staff and limit spending in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, could hobble the agency going forward, no matter what Congress decides for FY 2026, according to close agency observers and former staff.

“It’s almost as if they’re trying to get a head start on implementing” the plan for big cuts at NOAA, said John Potts, who served as the agency’s budget director before retiring in February after a 34-year career there. “Congress obviously has not enacted a bill, and in the ‘marks’ (current bill drafts) for the most part they’ve rejected those cuts. To try to start implementing components of that [plan] now is a bit of a cart-before-the-horse.”

NOAA, one of the smaller government agencies but one with a unique role in climate science, has become a testing ground for the Trump administration’s theory—repeatedly voiced by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—that the president has broad power to withhold, delay or cancel funds that Congress has appropriated. Controversy over that notion looms over the process for funding the government in FY 2026, which begins Oct. 1. 

The federal government could shut down if Congress does not pass a budget or a continuing resolution, a measure to extend operations under the current budget. The White House has asked Congress to pass such a stopgap, but because the administration already is failing to spend appropriated funds, Democrats see this as part of a plan to starve agencies like NOAA. 

It “makes it clear the White House wants to be able to continue stealing from American communities for another four months,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

For NOAA, the past eight months have brought the loss of about 2,200 staff and a slew of projects that have been slowed or are under threat, including those to improve precipitation prediction, to gauge ocean conditions and to track increases in both temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Separating Climate From Weather?

The Trump administration maintains that its $4.5 billion budget plan for NOAA in FY 2026—a 30 percent cut from the last budget enacted under the Biden administration—will advance the agency’s critical missions, while cutting programs it views as ideological. 

“This robust funding level empowers NOAA to deliver the world’s best science and services while aligning with the Administration’s commitment to depoliticizing science, innovating with new technologies, and restoring rigorous, gold-standard research,” said a NOAA spokesperson in an email. “By eliminating wasteful spending tied to ideological initiatives and inefficient green policies, the FY26 budget request provides ample resources to advance our mission while cutting through bureaucratic bloat and agenda-driven programs that dilute NOAA’s impact.”

The biggest cut the White House proposed was elimination of NOAA’s $668 million Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), with some of its functions transferred to other offices and others ended altogether. This proposal would put into action the recommendation of the conservative blueprint for the administration, Project 2025, which Trump denied knowledge of on the campaign trail but which Vought helped to write. Project 2025 called for disbanding OAR, which it called “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism.”

Industries that are navigating changing temperature, sea level and storm conditions see NOAA’s work quite differently. 

“The insurance sector would not view the research agenda related to climate as alarmist,” said Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, one of the stakeholders that has been voicing support for a robust NOAA. “All indications are that it’s factual information based on observing systems that the government provides—satellites, ships that drop transponders into the water, drought monitoring locations. All those things we view as non-political.”

For the insurance industry, which relies on past events and experience to determine its rates for protecting households and businesses against disaster damage, the notion that NOAA’s climate work can be eliminated while its weather work continues makes little sense.

“It’s hard to make a distinction between weather and climate, in the sense that climate is just weather over time for a geographic area,” Nutter said. “Are we seeing a shift in the pattern of tornadoes in the middle part of the country, or severe convective storms? Is there a change in the intensity of hurricanes? The long-term trends are pretty critical to understanding the exposure to insured properties on a forward-looking basis.”

NOAA’s supporters argue it is just as critical for the agency to continue long-term tracking of the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—work that was still ongoing as of August but would be especially at risk in the president’s budget plan.

Noting that NOAA’s record of CO2 concentration in the atmospheric dates back to 1958, Potts said, “To have an interruption in that record would really be disruptive to NOAA and the entire scientific community’s ability to continue to be able to monitor and understand change in the climate and what it means in both long-term and short-term predictions.”

Dam Safety Project Loses Momentum

One example of how the Trump administration has already stymied NOAA’s work on both weather and climate has been the halting of a Congressionally directed project that was underway to update estimates of probable maximum precipitation (PMP)—data that is used to help dam operators prevent and prepare for floods. 

State agencies and other entities that oversee dam safety spent years pushing for NOAA to take up work on a tool that would help better predict the frequency and extent of extreme rainfall amid rising global temperatures. Finally, in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and the following year’s bipartisan budget bill, Congress passed legislation and provided funding for NOAA to launch such a project. An important first step concluded last fall, when the National Academy of Sciences produced a report on the steps needed to modernize maximum precipitation prediction, which the expert panel said was necessary to protect communities that live near the nation’s 16,000 high-hazard dams and 50 nuclear power plants.

NOAA was working on the project, using the NAS report as its roadmap, until this past spring, when the Trump administration paused all funding from the infrastructure bill and began a series of staff cuts and induced retirements that cut the agency’s workforce by some 20 percent. The PMP project came to a grinding halt.

“It’s been really crippling, honestly, because we just had all this momentum, and then all of a sudden, the rug was pulled out from under us,” said Bill McCormick, a retired Colorado dam safety official who serves as chair of the extreme precipitation subcommittee of the Association of Dam Safety Officials. Currently, he said, the NOAA group has been working to fulfill the direction from Congress with diminished staff and resources. “They’re looking for ways to begin to execute the plan,” McCormick said.

Former NOAA staffers say the situation is much the same throughout the agency. In the office that deals with ocean acidification, staffers “are facing this struggle of trying to carry out the legislative mandate for the program, while dealing within the restrictions that have been placed on them top–down,” said Sarah Cooley, an ocean scientist who was named to direct the program one year ago. Cooley was forced out of the agency early this year along with hundreds of other “probationary” employees who were in their posts for less than a year.

With less than one month left in the current fiscal year, numerous pending grants that would be drawn on the 2025 budget still have not been awarded, Cooley said. Some of the grant money, for example, was meant to identify needs and help communities that are being affected by the harm that ocean acidification, a consequence of increased carbon in the atmosphere, is doing to shellfish. But in a departure from past practice, all grants must get sign-off at the top levels of the Department of Commerce, the larger agency in which NOAA resides. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a former Wall Street bond broker, confirmed to Congress in June that he is personally reviewing all NOAA grants in excess of $100,000.

As Disasters Ravage Communities, Consensus Builds

Republican leaders in Congress have taken pains to voice support for the president and his agenda for NOAA, even while rejecting his planned budget cuts.

“Working alongside President Trump, we are charting a course of recovery, growth, and reinforcing our standing on the world stage,” said Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), who heads up the appropriations subcommittee in charge of the NOAA budget, after the full committee voted to approve the $76.8 billion “Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies” budget bill, which includes NOAA funding.

Rogers mentioned the disasters that devastated his own state this year—major flooding in February and April, and a tornado that killed 19 people along a 60-mile path in May—and the ferocious flash flooding in Texas’ Hill Country in July that killed 135 people.

“The deadly natural disasters in Kentucky, Texas and other states this year have gravely reminded us that we must equip the National Weather Service with better emergency warning systems to keep the American people safe,” Rogers said. He sponsored an amendment, approved by voice vote, that included language reaffirming Congress’ support of NOAA’s modernization of precipitation maximum prediction and calling for the work to be given sufficient funding in FY2026.

Also approved by voice vote: an amendment sponsored by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) in support of NOAA’s research. Although the Republican leadership’s press release on the bill said simply that her amendment “supports NOAA weather work,” the language was a direct rejection of the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and its climate work. 

“The Committee recognizes the critical mission of [NOAA] and the important contributions of its laboratories and cooperative institutes,” it said. “The Committee directs NOAA to maintain these capabilities and to avoid closures, consolidations, or eliminations, given their essential role in advancing weather forecasting, climate science, and oceanographic research.”

The NOAA FY 2026 funding bills the appropriations committees approved still must be voted on by the full House and Senate and then must be reconciled before reaching the president’s desk. Democrats are so far resisting the White House’s call for a continuing resolution, but that resistance could fade: Neither party wants to be blamed for causing a government shutdown.

Some NOAA supporters are looking to meteorologist Neil Jacobs, Trump’s pick to head up the agency, to bridge the differences between the White House and Congress over the agency’s future. Although Jacobs is still working in an acting capacity—his name is one of many hung up in the contentious confirmation process this year—a bipartisan agreement has been reached to get his vote scheduled.

Kevin Kelly, a lobbyist who represents an array of NOAA stakeholders, including universities, said that the near-term outlook for the agency is for funding to stay level—which is a positive for agency supporters.

“Flat funding is the new ‘up,’ right?” he said. “I think there is a bipartisan consensus that we need a strong weather enterprise. Hopefully, Dr. Jacobs, once he gets confirmed, will build the team and the consensus … and then get buy-in from the White House behind that consensus.”