White House Budget Would Slash Funding for NOAA Climate Research

The Trump administration plans to eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s research arm, close climate and weather labs and slash the budgets of several NOAA offices, internal documents said.

If Congress approves the plan, funding for NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) office would be drastically reduced from $485 million to $171 million, reported The Guardian.

Retired OAR Director Craig McLean told The Guardian the cuts would “compromise the safety, economic competitiveness, and security of the American people.”

One document stated all budgets for weather, ocean and climate labs would be emptied, with that level of funding resulting in OAR being “eliminated as a line office.”

“The elimination of NOAA’s research line office and all of its research capabilities is a crushing blow to the ability of our country to protect our citizens and also to lead the world,” said former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, who called the recommendations “extraordinarily devastating.”

Under the proposed reductions, more than $324 million would be cut from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), with instructions for the agency to follow administration priorities in its work to “unleash American energy.”

Grants for habitat restoration, conservation and species recovery, as well as the fisheries grant program, would all lose their funding.

The uncertainty at NOAA has been felt all over the world, as researchers from other countries become more concerned about potential interruptions to crucial climate data from the many NOAA Earth-observing missions, Inside Climate News reported.

Argo, an important international ocean monitoring program, could be vulnerable due to the large role the U.S. plays in the operation, according to Jochem Marotzke, director of the climate variability department at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Germany.

“The U.S. is funding a bit more than half of Argo,” Marotzke said. “You could say the U.S. is carrying more than its fair share, which means that if the U.S. pulls out, it will leave an inordinately large gap.”

The Argo network is made up of roughly 4,000 ocean floats that monitor the temperature and salinity of the ocean’s top layers up to approximately one mile deep — where over 90 percent of the heat trapped by the world’s greenhouse gases is stored.

Argo is an example of “how resolutely the U.S. has long assumed the leading role in climate research and how admirably much has been invested in it,” Marotzke said. “That’s why so many of us in climate science have gone to the U.S. to conduct research. If the United States decides no longer to invest in climate research, it will be a disaster.”

The plan reduces the overall budget for NOAA by more than 27 percent, reported CNN. It eliminates funding for sea grant programs, regional climate data and climate competitive research, and cuts OAR’s funding by roughly 75 percent. OAR includes the National Severe Storms Laboratory, responsible for studying destructive storms like tornadoes and working to increase the lead time of storm warnings.

The plan “will put American communities in harm’s way,” Democratic Senator from Maryland Chris Van Hollen said in a statement, as CNN reported. “This move has nothing to do with efficiency – and in fact, it will endanger our communities and leave us all more vulnerable to destructive and costly natural disasters.”

The National Ocean Service would also be cut in half, reported The Guardian.

“It’s a really disturbing and concerning development – but I would say it is not all that surprising,” Spinrad said of the plans. “But it also has an element of randomness associated with it. There are specific programs called out, the reasons for which are absolutely not clear.”

Plans to drastically reduce NASA funding would result in a series of missions being scrapped, including some that have already received billions of taxpayer dollars.

“This is an extinction-level event for NASA science,” Casey Dreier, the Planetary Society’s chief of space policy, told The Washington Post. “It needlessly terminates functional, productive science missions and cancels new missions currently being built, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. This is neither efficient nor smart budgeting.”

The documents are part of the government’s budget process and must be finalized by Congress.

Industries that rely on the services and tools provided by U.S. scientists, along with the public, are likely to push back against the cuts, which Spinrad is confident many legislators won’t support.

“Many of the actions put forward by [the White House’s office of management and budget] are in direct contradiction to congressional intent,” Spinrad said, as The Guardian reported. “Zeroing out programs that Congress has worked hard to authorize over the years – that’s a clarion call to specific members and sponsors.”

However, experts say the extreme nature of the funding reductions shows the administration’s determination to hamper research and illustrates its position on climate science.

McLean said the document “will cost lives” if enacted.

“When a room full of doctors tell you that it’s cancer, firing the doctors does not cure you,” he added.