And additional thoughts about NOAA Research threats

Hi everyone, there have been some news stories today that relate to the meteorological world that I want to share with the Balanced Weather community and offer some thoughts on.

I want to start talking about the climate.gov website. In my NOAA piece from a week or so ago, I talked about the termination of the contract employees responsible for the NOAA and the federal government’s primary climate website climate.gov, and the likely demise of the site. Late last week I started noticing that some of the links that I have used in the past on climate.gov were going to redirects or “access denied” banners. Today when you try to go to climate.gov you are redirected to NOAA.gov with this banner at the top:

While some of the old climate.gov webpages are still accessible, it seems clear that the process is ongoing to phase out the main webpage and change how NOAA reports on climate topics. As I said in my earlier post about NOAA, climate.gov in my opinion has always been less about climate change and more about providing the public with a one stop, go-to resource for all information about our climate, including topics such as El Nino/La Nina, drought, seasonal forecasting, etc. Given that, climate.gov is a key public resource, and it would be disastrous to lose it completely. As of now, some of the recent key climate news such as the exceptional national and global warmth this spring are still available under the NOAA News and Stories page. I will be watching closely in the coming weeks for how climate science communication – and science communication in general – evolves with NOAA.

Turning to breaking news this evening, journalist Dan Garisto reported that the National Science Foundation (NSF) is going to be moved out of their current facility in Alexandria, VA to make room for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This was recently confirmed in a press release from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union that represents NSF employees. AFGE says they were notified this afternoon that HUD Secretary Scott Turner and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin will announce tomorrow that HUD will be taking over the NSF campus over the next 2 years. Per AFGE, “currently more than 1,833 NSF employees work in the building. Many were forced to relocate to Northern Virginia with very short notice and at great personal expense when return to work orders were given.”

HUD’s headquarters are currently located in the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in Washington, DC. Assuming this HUD relocation plan moves forward as outlined in the AFGE release, there is apparently no clear plan for where or how NSF employees might work going forward. Of course, as I discussed in earlier posts, NSF is targeted for massive cuts under the FY26 President’s Budget, with the agency being cut 55% overall, and the Geosciences directorate that funds atmospheric science research being cut 63%. While these are theoretically proposed cuts that require Congressional approval, this action by the administration to evict NSF would seem to reinforce OMB’s intent to act on as much of these cuts as possible through impoundment and executive action even before any Congressional budget action takes place.

The cuts to NSF are even more crucial to the weather community because they would come in the context of the administration’s proposed complete elimination of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), which would essentially eliminate all NOAA federal research labs and most of the agency’s funded research programs. USA Today journalist Dinah Voyles Pulver authored an article published today about the potential impacts of the elimination of OAR, which I have obviously talked about several times in earlier posts. I strongly encourage you to read her excellent piece, but I want to highlight these comments from her article from James Franklin, a retired NOAA colleague who was the chief of the forecast operations branch at the National Hurricane Center.

Franklin and others cited a 2024 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program has saved roughly $5 billion per hurricane per year in terms of pre-landfall protective spending and post-landfall damages and recovery.

“Hurricane response costs become greater when you have a poorer forecast,” he said. “That’s a lot of cost savings that we seem willing to give up here. We’re going to turn off all that potential savings by saying we don’t care if the forecasts don’t continue to get better.”

This reinforces a theme I brought up in my post last week about climate change when talking about the administration eliminating mitigation programs at FEMA that actually reduce the need for future spending on response and recovery. Research leads to better forecasts – and better forecasts lead to better preparation and response, meaning less money and resources needed for recovery. Obviously, better forecasts and warnings lead to reduced human suffering which is the ultimate benchmark in my opinion. Even keeping to the strict economics, though, these cuts to NSF and NOAA seem completely counterproductive, especially given the increased incidence of impactful weather and water events.