The Trump administration has launched an assault on America’s weather and disaster response infrastructure, implementing massive budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) while advancing plans to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) entirely by the end of 2025.

These sweeping changes align closely with the conservative Project 2025 blueprint.

The administration’s proposed 2026 budget for NOAA would slash the agency’s funding by more than 25% overall from its current level of roughly $6 billion. The budget completely eliminates NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), cutting research funding by close to 75% and ending all federal support for climate and weather research programs.

The cuts have already resulted in the departure of approximately 800 NOAA employees since February 28, representing about 10% of the agency’s workforce through mass firings and voluntary retirements. If the full budget proposal is approved by Congress, NOAA would lose an additional 2,000 of its 12,000 full-time employees, an 18% reduction in total staffing.

Under the proposed budget, more than two dozen world-class weather and climate research facilities across the United States would be permanently closed:

• Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory (Miami, Florida) – Home to the Hurricane Research Division responsible for maintaining the nation’s top hurricane forecasting models
• National Severe Storms Laboratory (Norman, Oklahoma) – The facility that developed breakthrough radar technologies for tornado and severe weather warnings
• Global Monitoring Laboratory locations – Including the historic Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since the 1950s
• Four Boulder, Colorado laboratories – Chemical Sciences Lab, Global Systems Lab, Physical Sciences Lab, and Global Monitoring Lab

The staffing reductions have already begun affecting daily operations. Nearly half of the National Weather Service’s 122 field offices are operating with staffing levels at least 20% below normal, with several offices no longer maintaining 24-hour coverage. Some offices have reduced routine weather balloon launches (critical for atmospheric data collection) due to personnel shortages.

The proposed cuts come despite substantial evidence of NOAA’s economic value. Research shows that improvements to hurricane forecasts alone from 2007 to 2020 provided an average savings of $5 billion per hurricane , an amount larger than NOAA’s entire proposed 2026 budget. The Weather Service’s $1.3 billion annual operating budget costs each American approximately $4 per year, compared to the $800 billion annual defense budget.

If passed, 

What Goes

1. Research & Grants. More than $1 billion in competitive and earmarked funding would disappear. OAR’s eight research labs close; Sea Grant’s 34 university programmes lose all federal support; the Coastal Zone Management Grants, Coral Reef grants and multiple NMFS habitat funds end.
2. Regional Science Capacity. IOOS regional observing systems, National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science and several cooperative institutes are slated for termination, along with staff reductions that hit field offices from Miami to Seattle.
3. Climate Portfolio. All line-item climate research, including Regional Climate Data & Information and Climate Competitive Research, ends, though climate-related satellite observations remain funded.

What Stays—and Grows

• Radar Next. A new multiyear project to replace the aging NEXRAD network begins with a $0.5 million down-payment and $16.2 million in PAC start-up funds.
• GeoXO & NEON. Despite overall cuts, the request adds $100 million to reshape the GeoXO geostationary programme and $46.5 million to launch the first Near Earth Orbit Network (NEON) satellites, relying heavily on commercial partnerships.
• NWS Modernisation. An extra $10 million moves the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) to the cloud, while $10 million more migrates OAR’s high-performance computing to NWS.

President Trump has accelerated his timeline for dismantling FEMA, announcing plans to phase out the agency by December 2025, immediately following the Atlantic hurricane season. 

“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it back to the state level,” Trump stated during a June briefing in the Oval Office.

The administration has established a FEMA Review Council, co-chaired by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, tasked with recommending the agency’s restructuring or elimination. The council is expected to submit its recommendations by mid-November 2025.

Under the new framework, states would assume primary responsibility for disaster response and recovery, with the federal government providing reduced funding allocated directly from the president’s office rather than through FEMA’s established grant and aid assessment processes. Trump has warned states to expect “less funding” from the federal government for disaster recovery efforts.

This will be a departure from the current system, where FEMA coordinates with states to prepare for disasters, provides on-the-ground assistance during emergencies, and distributes billions of dollars in recovery aid. 

The administration’s actions closely mirror the recommendations outlined in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy blueprint that describes NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and calls for the agency to be “broken up” and downsized.

Project 2025 specifically advocates for the National Weather Service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” shifting from providing free public weather information to focusing on data collection for private companies. The plan suggests that private firms should become the primary source of weather forecasts for the public, requiring Americans to pay for information currently provided free of charge.