Cuts to U.S. weather and climate research could put public safety at risk » Yale Climate Connections
One month into the new Trump administration, firings of scientists and freezes to U.S. research funding have caused an unprecedented elimination of scientific expertise from the federal government. Proposed and ongoing cuts to agencies like the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, could hobble efforts to keep Americans safe during and after disasters. Meanwhile, slashed funding for climate research risks blindfolding the U.S. as the dangers from climate change escalate in the coming years and decades, scientists warn.
Mass layoffs at FEMA
When Hurricanes Helene and Milton – both made more destructive by climate change – devastated the Southeast last fall, workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, oversaw the government’s effort to rescue survivors and aid the recovery. FEMA has been key, too, in bolstering the country’s long-term resilience efforts, such as elevating flood-prone homes and installing drainage works.
But mass layoffs of probationary employees – a civil service classification that typically encompasses new hires but can also include military veterans, longtime employees who’ve switched positions, or those who were hired on a fast track or work with a disability – and sudden departures within the deferred resignation program put in place by Elon Musk’s DOGE unit have led to a loss of about 1,000 of FEMA’s 25,000 employees. The Washington Post reported that one of the agency staffers fired was a 15-year employee and a chief for the National Flood Insurance Program. According to the Washington Post, another wave of firings is expected, targeting employees who work in climate-related diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Such cuts could result in slower disaster responses, longer waits for payouts, and reduced implementation of resilience efforts, ultimately increasing the risk of damage from climate change-enhanced extreme weather. In addition, firings could hamper efforts to update the agency’s significantly outdated flood maps, which are critical for determining flood risk and insurance rates.
President Donald Trump has vowed to essentially dismantle FEMA, shift disaster money to states, and privatize the National Flood Insurance Program – all core suggestions of Project 2025, a plan for Trump’s second term that calls for the elimination of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, gutting of the National Weather Service, and axing the National Flood Insurance Program.
Potential cuts at the National Weather Service
The National Weather Service is overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. NOAA scientists and meteorologists are bracing for hundreds of firings, the Boston Globe reported.
“There’s a lot of already critically understaffed local field offices,” Bradley Colman, a former longtime NOAA meteorologist and the 2023 president of the American Meteorological Society, told the Boston Globe. “You’re risking simply not having the bodies to fill the seat … that the right people won’t be there at the right time and in the end that puts people’s property and lives at risk.”
Project 2025 calls for the commercialization of the National Weather Service, or NWS, claiming that “Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.”
To support this claim, Project 2025 cites a 2020 AccuWeather press release. In reality, most private forecasting firms and broadcast meteorologists rely heavily on the weather modeling carried out by the National Weather Service, and the insights from NOAA’s online forecast discussions and other products provide value to the entire weather enterprise as well as interested citizens.
Public opinion polls consistently rank the National Weather Service at or near the top for high approval ratings among federal agencies, including in this Economist/YouGov survey from February 2025. Although funding for climate change research has gone through major ups and downs in Congress, the National Weather Service has traditionally gotten strong bipartisan support, including from emergency managers across the political spectrum.
One recent study found that the National Weather Service provided a 73:1 return on investment.
The last major restructuring of the National Weather Service – a massive modernization effort that took place in the 1990s – reduced the number of National Weather Service offices from 256 to 122 and the number of staff from about 5,100 to about 4,700, a roughly 9% cut.
That restructuring involved a careful, yearslong planning process, and nearly all of the job cuts took place through attrition – retirements and other voluntary departures. Along the way, the National Weather Service dramatically increased the share of its staff made up of meteorologists from about one-third to about two-thirds.
In a 2012 retrospective report, the National Academies concluded: “The $4.5 billion national investment in the Modernization and Associated Restructuring (MAR) was both needed and generally well spent. Overall, the MAR was successful in achieving major improvements for the weather enterprise.”
As opposed to a careful, multiyear effort, the current process involves cuts to federal science agencies being made in a matter of days at the behest of non-subject-experts, with the potential for serious impacts. With severe weather and hurricane season both approaching, the National Weather Service is already short-staffed; as of late 2023, it was down about 5% from its funded staffing target.
Slashed research funding
The administration has also moved to block scientific research funding across government agencies. The National Institutes of Health – the world’s largest funder of scientific research – awarded $35 billion in grants in 2024. Although a recent executive order that devastated university funding by slashing indirect costs paid by NIH was temporarily halted by a judge, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has figured out a technical workaround to continue to deny NIH research funds, as reported by Nature Thursday. Russ Vought, the new director of OMB, is one of the authors of Project 2025.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”
Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation – which supports basic scientific research at thousands of U.S. institutions – has lost more than 10% of its staff and may face additional staff losses and cuts.
Large cuts at NIH and the National Science Foundation would devastate U.S. higher education, forcing thousands of layoffs and ending the education of thousands of graduate students.
In the long term, the elimination of resources for scientific research could leave U.S. residents more vulnerable to disasters. The National Science Board, in a report issued in 2006 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, found it would be cost-effective to increase hurricane research funding by $300 million per year, compared to the $20 million in annual funding that existed at the time.
The administration is also moving to decimate the research that municipalities, states, and others rely on to prepare for the escalating consequences of climate change. New Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has ordered the dismantling of NIH’s Climate Change and Health Initiative, which, according to its website, “aims to stimulate research to reduce health threats from climate change across the lifespan and build health resilience in individuals, communities, and nations around the world, especially among those at highest risk.” Its annual budget is $40 million.
Is it possible that crucial climate models or data could simply vanish? Most of the climate model code is held in distributed archives and thus probably not vulnerable to deletion. But budget cuts could eliminate the scientists needed to maintain the models.
In the words of NSF program director Raleigh Martin, “Science is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Unfortunately, the science goose is being strangled and those golden eggs are being lost. Our society will be poorer, sicker, and weaker as a result.”
Loss of climate webpages
Many government webpages that have the word “climate” in them have been removed in recent days, particularly at EPA, where on Jan. 27, all information about climate change was removed from its homepage and other prominent areas of its website, burying it deep in sections that are harder to find. A purge of climate webpages at NOAA has not yet occurred, and the climate.gov and Climate Prediction Center websites remain up. We’ve been downloading key government publications that we use, such as the Billion-Dollar Climate Disasters page, NOAA’s Global Warming and Hurricanes page, and the 2022 U.S. Sea Level Change report.
What you can do
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When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down?
What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm?
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