Announced at all-hands meeting on Friday the disbanding of its Social, Behavioral and Economic Science directorate

Apr 07, 2026

With everything going on in the world, talking about what is happening in the weather and climate enterprise at times seems to me very trivial, even as someone who has passionately spent their whole adult life working in it. However, I also know that flooding the zone with insanity so that individual aspects of it can slide by without much visibility is part of the strategy of those in power currently — so given that, I am going to continue to bring attention to what is happening with these issues.

Over the last few days, there continue to be more indications that the administration is not worrying about Congressional appropriations or authorizations in executing their planned cuts to federal science agencies. As I discussed in my post on the President’s FY2027 budget, part of the administration’s plans for the National Science Foundation (NSF) includes elimination of the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Science program.

Nature reported that on Friday NSF leadership announced in an all-hands staff meeting that the NSF SBE Directorate is being eliminated in response to the budget proposal, “but maintain SBE ‘grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, and all impacted employees will be transferred to other parts of the agency.’” As a reminder, SBE research is very important to the weather community as it helps meteorologists develop warning and forecast products that will best be utilized by the public and key users of weather information such as emergency managers.

Whether this announcement about the SBE Directorate indicates an open proactive action taken in direct contradiction to Congress’ appropriations language to not reduce any NSF Directorate by more than 5% in FY2026, or if the administration would frame it as preparatory administrative activities based on the President’s Budget, is unclear. Either way, it shows the type of unilateral activity that the administration can take (and has taken in other departments) to reorganize agencies in ways that will be difficult to reverse even if Congress does not “accept” the President’s Budget.

The administration is also using the same kind of “budget throttling” (my term, IDK what else to call it) with NSF SBE program grant awards that I talked about with NOAA and other NSF programs. In this graphic from Erin Wamsley on BlueSky, you can see that NSF is awarding grants at a small fraction of what it has awarded in previous years.

I worked for the federal government for nearly 35 years, most of that time in leadership positions, and had to deal with presidential budgets proposing major cuts to agencies and programs I worked for. As employees of the executive branch, we were required to message — and in some cases plan for the following year — based on the President’s Budget. However, we never actually executed anything until the Congressional appropriations were authorized – and if (as was the case nearly all the time) Congress did not accept the President’s Budget when that fiscal year arrived, we would execute based on the Congressional appropriations (which to be clear, the President also has to approve and sign for it to become law). I will not belabor all of the points I raised in my post last week, but it seems clear that at a minimum this administration is using every flexibility to enable it to execute based on its priorities and plans as much as possible versus Congress’.

As I talked about in my FY27 budget post, the President’s FY2027 budget does not even acknowledge the existence of an entire line office of NOAA, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR, or NOAA Research), aligning its “reality” of NOAA with its FY2026 budget even though Congress completely rejected the administration’s plans to shutter OAR and fully funded it in its FY2026 appropriations bill. This sort of behavior by an administration is unprecedented in my experience, and is concerning given the administration’s clear intent to try to implement its vision of executive branch reorganization as much as it possibly can. It is also of course ominous for other announced administration priorities such as the dismantling of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Congress is still quite a way from starting its FY2027 appropriations process. It will be very revealing to see how the administration proceeds with budget execution in the various science agencies in the coming weeks.

Programming note: I am attending and presenting at the National Tropical Weather Conference this week, so my posts may be a bit irregular.