New Weather Act Reauthorization bill once again rejects much of the cuts and reorganization Trump Administration has outlined for NOAA

Feb 26, 2026

Since I started doing this Substack nearly a year ago, I have gotten a lot of questions from friends and acquaintances asking how I come up with something to write about every day. To be honest, that is usually not my problem — usually my issue is that I have so much that I could write about that I am not sure where to start. Today is one of those days, as I literally have about a dozen topics I would like to cover. I will start today by hitting the ones that seem to me to be the most important and time sensitive.

Senate Commerce Committee to consider Weather Act Reauthorization bill

So let’s start with something that is good news. Yesterday, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee issued a press release announcing that committee leadership — including committee chair Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and ranking member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) — had formally introduced the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Reauthorization Act of 2026 (thanks to my colleague Clark Evans for posting about this on BlueSky last night and raising awareness). This bill would codify into law Congress’ direction for NOAA weather operations and research — and would again be a dramatic rebuke of administration plans for NOAA outlined in OMB’s FY2026 budget.

The initial Weather Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Trump in 2017. The development and passage of the bill was led by Oklahoma GOP congressman Frank Lucas, who at the time was vice-chair of the House Science Committee. Rep. Lucas became chair of the committee in 2023, and then led the effort to pass a new weather focused reauthorization bill.

Authorization bills such as the Weather Act are different from appropriations bills in that they do not specifically appropriate money to the executive branch agencies. Rather, they provide the Congressional direction and legal authority for the various programs and priorities of the executive agencies which appropriations bills then actually fund. As such, authorization bills are important mechanisms for Congress to set the direction and priorities for executive agencies.

Typically, authorization bills cover a period of about 5 years, which meant by 2023 a new bill was needed. Rep. Lucas worked with other House and Senate members to develop a bipartisan bill which passed the House in April 2024 and was working its way through the Senate when the 118th Congress ended after the November 2024 election. Hence, it was never passed by the upper chamber or signed into law. The meteorology world has been waiting to see when and how Congress would proceed with a new reauthorization effort.

The committee press release outlines a comprehensive list of priorities contained in the new Weather Act Reauthorization, many of which appear to be similar to what was in the 2023 bill. I have not yet had time to go through the entire 326 page bill in detail — but will do so and I am sure will have more to share after that. However, a few key items I do want to highlight after reading the press release and skimming the bill.

First, this bill is another clear rejection of the administration’s declared plans to eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR, NOAA Research) and its affiliated cooperative institutes (CI). Right at the top of the bill, OAR and the CIs are fully reauthorized — and interestingly enough, the bill includes the US Weather Research Program (USWRP), Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI), and tornado/next generation radar research (i.e., Phased Array Radar) in the OAR authorization. These three programs were moved from OAR to the National Weather Service with the passage of the appropriations bill for FY2026. Whether or not the inclusion of these programs under OAR is an oversight or actual intent for the programs to be back within OAR is obviously unclear.

Another very important and interesting part of the bill is the formal establishment of a NOAA RadarNext program “to develop a plan to replace the Next Generation Weather Radar system of the National Weather Service,” i.e., a plan to replace the current NEXRAD (WSR-88D) Doppler weather radar network. In another rejection of administration priorities, the act directs NOAA to include phased array radar as part of the RadarNext program including “development of a phased array radar to test and determine the specifications and requirements for such replacement.” As you may remember, in August the administration canceled the long running OAR project at the National Severe Storms Laboratory to develop and procure a new experimental phased array radar that would be used for the purpose outlined in this new bill, as well as for other PAR research.

The RadarNext section also sets a deadline: “the Under Secretary shall take such actions as may be necessary to ensure the plan developed under this subsection is fully implemented and executed by not later than September 30, 2040.” Bluntly, the problem with this is that we do not have until 2040 to make a new radar network happen. You can read more in this post from back when the new PAR instrument was canceled by the Trump Administration, but the gist is that while updates have happened over the decades, at its core NEXRAD is based on 1980s technology which is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and even obtain parts for. The network has been suffering increasing downtime in recent years, and studies have shown that those failures will only become more problematic as we head into the 2030s. I heard a lot of discussion at the recent American Meteorological Society about the sense that the state of the NEXRAD network is a looming crisis — and in my opinion it needs to be clearly communicated to Congress that this is not an issue we have until 2040 to fully tackle.

On a more positive note, the radar section also directs NOAA to further efforts to partner with private and academic sector entities developing new supplemental radar networks and utilize those networks’ data to help fill radar data gaps. It also has a specific section directing NOAA to focus on identifying “data voids in under observed areas of the United States” and filling those voids. I plan to have a full post dedicated to data gaps in the next few weeks.

Obviously, the introduction of a bill is just the beginning of a long legislative process. This bill — along with a similar reauthorization bill for NASA — is scheduled for a markup committee hearing on March 4th, and we will likely learn more about the bill then.

Trump Administration eliminates FEMA preparedness office

In an article published earlier today, Bloomberg outlined how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has eliminated the Individual and Community Preparedness Division (ICPD) of the agency. As outlined in the article…

A small, low-budget FEMA program, ICPD reached millions of Americans through educational materials and training sessions on how to prepare for and respond to natural disasters. It provided guidance ranging from checklists to identify key personal documents to keep safe during a crisis to formal training on how to locate and rescue people in certain situations before help arrives.

Per Bloomberg, ICPD had a staff of 18 employees and a budget of about $11 million. Some ICPD projects have been continued under new divisions or names, including (thankfully) the longtime Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) which educates and trains volunteers in local communities about disaster preparedness for threats in their specific area. However, many other ICPD projects have been canceled. Bloomberg cites one example:

Shortly after Trump took office, FEMA issued an agency-wide order for staff to stop communicating with outside partners, disrupting the division’s work, former staffers say. For example, the division had to halt a pilot program to, among other things, train teachers and staff across public schools in Atlantic City, New Jersey to prepare students for emergencies.

“We were working with their school system, with their emergency management department, with their policy department,” said Brann (note: Samantha Brann, former chief of the ICPD National Preparedness Programs Branch), “and just stopped talking to them.” As a result, city officials, which had already hired a part-time employee to help, paused the work indefinitely, said Atlantic City’s fire chief and office of emergency management coordinator Scott Evans. “To do something to this level on our own would take years and funding,” he said. “We don’t have the expertise like FEMA has and the resources that FEMA has.”

FEMA spokesperson Victoria Barton said the ICPD was shutdown as part of the administration’s effort to root out “ineffective programs that waste taxpayer money and create bureaucratic red tape.” As a longtime federal employee, I am more than onboard with the idea of rooting out inefficiency in the government, and perhaps there are some ways in which ICPD could have been made more effective. Instinctually, though, I find it hard to believe that eliminating such a small group focused on preparedness is in any way productive or more efficient. It is a well known aspect of emergency management that investments in preparedness and mitigation payoff many times their investment in saving future needs in response and recovery — not to mention saving lives.

Furthermore, the administration keeps harping on the idea of moving emergency management responsibility from the supposedly overly bureaucratic FEMA to states and municipalities. However, that is not going to happen by magic — as the Atlantic City emergency manager says, municipalities do not have the resources or expertise to stand-up major emergency management programs. Having these programs at FEMA enables a small group of experts to be able to provide benefits and services to many states, counties and cities without duplicating them across all of those entities.

I am certainly not saying there are not many ways that our national emergency management system could not be drastically improved and better organized — but randomly eliminating programs and personnel at FEMA is not the way to do it. Having a comprehensive examination of the system by experienced emergency managers and government officials and empowering them to develop a plan based on expertise — not politics — is the way to do it. Meanwhile, the report from the group that was appointed by the Trump Administration to examine FEMA remains delayed and apparently stuck in political wrangling within the administration. I truly do not think the public in general appreciates the crucial role that emergency management play in this country — these issues have the potential to deeply impact our society and millions of lives in the coming years, and hopefully they will get the kind of attention they deserve.

Storm Prediction Center changing their probabilistic products

Starting on March 2nd, the NWS Storm Prediction Center will change the way in which they depict probabilities of “significant” severe hazards using a new concept called “conditional intensity groups” (CIGs). Per the SPC webpage discussing the change (which I encourage you to check out), CIGs can be thought of as “intensity levels.” SPC will draw areas on their outlooks for CIGs 1, 2 and 3, and the probability for increasing levels of severity will increase with each CIG level.

There are signs in the long range weather pattern that severe thunderstorm activity may be ramping up starting sometime next week, so there will probably be opportunities right off the bat to see how this new process works. To help explain these changes, I will be doing a video interview with University of Oklahoma research scientist Dr. Sean Ernst, who has led much of the social science research that has been a part of the development and evaluation of this new probabilistic approach. That interview will be Friday afternoon at 2 pm, and paid subscribers of Balanced Weather will have the opportunity to participate live (e-mail to follow). I will be making the interview available publicly on Substack and YouTube sometime Friday evening or Saturday.