Delete NOAA at our own peril

The agency's data gathering and reporting—about hurricanes, heat waves, torrential rains and other extreme weather events—save lives.

By Jeff Nesbit

Presidential adviser Elon Musk made the intentions of his White House creation— the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE— crystal clear this month at the World Governments Summit in Dubai: He would like to delete many of the federal agencies in Washington, D.C., that functionally run our national government.

"I think we do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind,” Musk told the Dubai audience via teleconference. “Because if you leave parts of them behind…it’s sort of like, if you don’t remove the roots of the weed, it’s easy for the weed to grow back. So, we have to delete entire agencies, many of them.”

One of those targets is NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And like the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk and DOGE are attempting to abolish by subsuming its core functions under the State Department, NOAA likewise is squarely in DOGE’s sights. And, like USAID, there is a defined path should Musk decide to “delete” the agency.

NOAA is not an independent agency. It is part of the Commerce Department. NOAA is the largest agency inside of Commerce and takes up about half of the Cabinet department’s $15 billion annual operational budget. Roughly a quarter of Commerce’s personnel are at NOAA.

DOGE operatives spent days at the agency this month, career staff say. And, based on the questions asked and briefing topics, DOGE appears intent on running the same sort of playbook that it has run on USAID—namely, that much of NOAA’s mission could be abolished or cut as its functions are subsumed by the larger Commerce Department, the career staff fears.

To be clear, no executive orders, memos, budget documents or announcements have been circulated to NOAA, staff say; the agency’s fate still hangs in the balance. Given the White House’s decision to appoint a NOAA administrator who is genuinely familiar with NOAA’s history and mission, there is hope among agency staff that it will be spared USAID’s fate.

In fact, it’s possible that Musk has decided that the next agency to delete might be a different federal agency. After DOGE teams spent days combing through personnel records and turning over budget rocks inside NOAA, they left and set their sights on the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Days later, President Donald Trump posted on social media that “FEMA should be terminated.”

Yet, the essential elements of the playbook meant to cripple or abolish the agency’s mission are well-known. They are laid out clearly in Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, that DOGE has followed closely as it’s visited each of the federal agencies Musk views as “weeds.”

As we’ve seen with the ongoing USAID fight, Project 2025 is serving as a roadmap for Musk and the DOGE team across federal agencies. And Project 2025 does not mince its words about its hopes for NOAA’s fate. The policy blueprint wants NOAA demolished and broken up into parts inside Commerce because it is part of a “climate change cabal.”

As one sign of its intent, the Trump administration has already ordered NOAA staff to search its existing grants for climate change-related keywords. But slowing or halting climate change research won’t satisfy those who would like to see NOAA “deleted” or abolished altogether.

“Break up NOAA,” Project 2025 says, and refers specifically to NOAA’s six main offices that private industry relies on for tracking weather and climate change impacts and ensuring the American public is protected from environmental pollution and hazards.

“Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” it says. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

That includes the 154-year-old National Weather Service, which private weather services and public broadcasters rely on for their foundational knowledge of dangerous tropical and winter storms. Dozens of local and national weather forecasters and research institutions rely almost exclusively on NOAA’s satellites, weather models, forecasts and ground instruments to drive their own weather outlooks and analyses.

The question looming over NOAA’s fate right now is this: Does Trump—and now, presumably, Musk and DOGE’s 20-something staff—believe that NOAA’s critical scientific research offices on weather, climate and environmental hazards make it a central part of a “climate change cabal” that must be disassembled, no matter the downstream consequences?

We don’t know yet. What we do know is that NOAA has been and should continue to be a vital federal asset to much of the infrastructure (both private and public) undergirding what we need to know about the weather.

NOAA is responsible for the teams that fly into hurricanes to measure their strength and determine where they might veer, and which American communities are in harm’s way. NOAA teams collect oceanic and atmospheric observations worldwide on a daily basis (an effort that is also being hampered by this White House’s “America First” orders).

And the agency provides critically important, free data about weather forecasts and satellite observations. This data gathering and reporting—about hurricanes, heat waves, torrential rains and other extreme weather events now being whipsawed by climate change—save lives.

Climate change and extreme weather events are now inexorably and permanently fused together. That isn’t alarmist, nor evidence of a conspiracy or a cabal. Countess peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that climate change is making these extreme weather events worse. NOAA’s job is to track this, research it and report it to the public.

That doesn’t make NOAA a central cast member in a “climate change cabal.” This critically important federal agency is simply doing its job, exactly as U.S. taxpayers demand and expect.

Leave NOAA alone, Mr. Musk. For all our sakes.

Jeff Nesbit ran public affairs at five Cabinet departments or agencies under four presidents and was former Republican Vice President Dan Quayle’s communications director.