The Trump administration’s fiscal-year 2026 budget request submitted on Monday would eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s entire climate research portfolio, dissolving the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and shuttering every federally funded meteorological, oceanographic and atmospheric laboratory. A single line in the proposal reads “Total, Climate Research: $0.”
Facilities on the chopping block include the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey, the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma and the Global Monitoring Laboratory network that measures greenhouse gases. The plan also defunds the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii, whose Keeling Curve has traced the rise of carbon-dioxide concentrations from 313 parts per million in 1958 to above 430 ppm this year.
Miami’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and its Hurricane Research Division would close, cutting scientific support for NOAA’s hurricane-hunter aircraft. The agency projects flight hours for the reconnaissance fleet would fall by roughly one-half in 2026, a reduction scientists warn will erode forecast accuracy. A 2024 National Bureau of Economic Research study estimated advances in hurricane prediction save about $5 billion per storm.
The proposal coincides with the unannounced removal of congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment reports and other climate information from federal websites. While the White House says the data will be housed at NASA, searches have so far produced only dead links, raising questions about compliance with the 1990 Global Change Research Act.
Congress retains authority over appropriations and is expected to scrutinize the request, but administration officials have indicated they may pursue additional rescission powers. Until lawmakers act, hundreds of researchers and decades-old climate and weather monitoring programs remain in limbo.
NOAA FY26 eliminates OAR as a Line Office. It's no longer on the org chart.
Ongoing and future weather research activities will be moved to NWS. Climate research will be zeroed out across the agency.
These proposals would kill @CIRA_CSU and @UWCIMSS.
Critical tools like RAMMB Slider, experimental hurricane imagery, and advanced satellite products would vanish, gutting vital public weather resources. This would be a huge loss for the entire weather community.
It's hard to adequately summarize how destructive NOAA's 2026 proposed budget released on Monday is for hurricane forecasting, but I crammed all I could into today's newsletter. I encourage everyone with interests along the coast to read it carefully.
The official NOAA “budget request” to Congress for fiscal year 2026 zeroes out all climate research. 💸
While I have no issue with that per se (the “science is settled” after all), the budget also eliminates all weather and air chemistry research, as well as research
