Dismantling NOAA won't save us from climate alarmism
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides important public goods, and it is not the main source of alarmism or political bias in climate change research.
The White House is proposing major cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s climate, weather, and ocean science budgets. The May 2 White House discretionary budget request calls for a $1.3 billion reduction to NOAA’s “operations, research, and grants” in order to terminate “climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs, which are not aligned with Administration policy-ending ‘Green New Deal’ initiatives.” A leaked April Department of Commerce proposal calls for eliminating “all funding for climate, weather, and ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes”. These proposals echo Project 2025’s call to break up NOAA and privatize many of its functions, under the pretext that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”, despite Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s disavowal of Project 2025’s plans for NOAA during his confirmation hearings. In addition, Secretary Lutnick’s insistence on reviewing all grants larger than $100,000 has reportedly ground many important NOAA operations to a halt already.
The Trump administration is not wrong in stating that alarmism and ideological corruption infect some climate change research and public discourse. Colleagues and I have called this out before in the past. For example, we have lamented the overuse of unrealistically hot emission scenarios in climate change research and reporting, the increasingly brazen partisanship of many scientific and academic institutions, the infusion of hard-left politics into climate change discourse and academia as a whole, and the negative effects that climate alarmism and doomism are probably having on the mental health of our young people. The Biden administration and their political allies did not help with statements comparing the threat of climate change to nuclear war (no, nuclear war is much more dangerous), or arguing that voting against the Inflation Reduction Act would “doom humanity”.
NOAA is the wrong target
Nonetheless, if the Trump administration wants to eliminate alarmism and political bias from climate change research and discourse, NOAA is the wrong target. First, NOAA employees are subject to the Hatch Act, which prohibits them from engaging in partisan activities at work. Second, most NOAA researchers work in the hard sciences, whereas the epicenters of activism and political corruption in academia are in the social sciences and humanities (e.g., see the table below).
In my experience, NOAA employees are some of the most rigorous and apolitical members of the climate, Earth, and ocean science communities. (Full disclosure: I previously worked at one of NOAA’s cooperative institutes—the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder—before moving to the University of Wyoming.)
Dismantling and defunding the hard sciences will certainly not make U.S. academia and research less woke. I will have more to say about this in a post next week about the Trump administration’s broader efforts to reform higher education.
NOAA research is trustworthy and has high returns on investment
More importantly, NOAA’s climate, weather, and ocean laboratories provide valuable public goods. These public goods save lives, produce more than enough economic benefits to pay for themselves, and contribute to America’s scientific leadership. For example, a 2024 study estimated that improvements in NOAA’s hurricane forecasts alone have reduced hurricane costs by $5 billion per hurricane since 2007. NOAA’s total annual budget was $6.7 billion in 2024, for comparison. A 2023 study estimated that improving weather forecasts by 50% saves over two thousand American lives per year.
NOAA’s critics might think that NOAA’s weather forecasting services can be separated from their climate research, but this is naive. NOAA’s climate and oceans data and models are integral to their weather forecasting functions. Even putting these links aside, NOAA’s climate models have important economic benefits on their own—to the tune of billions of dollars per year for U.S. farmers, water managers, and households, for example.
A good sign of NOAA’s trustworthiness—regardless of any political slant—is that researchers who challenge the mainstream consensus on climate change typically use NOAA data to make their arguments. For example, the CO2 Coalition refers to NOAA data as “very accurate” in a December report arguing for the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions for humanity. In contrast, getting rid of the data—if the Trump administration and Congress choose to do so—would not be a move of someone who thinks they can win the argument on its merits.
More broadly, public money spent on scientific research produces large enough economic benefits to cover its fiscal costs, and it complements (i.e. it does not crowd out) private research spending. Macroeconomic estimates suggest that publicly funded research may be responsible for 20% of U.S. economic productivity since World War II. John Drake from the University of Georgia summarizes this evidence here.
There are better ways to tackle climate alarmism and political bias
How can the Trump administration combat political bias and alarmism in climate science? First, they could fix the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, instead of scrapping it. My colleague Roger Pielke Jr. has written about how this could be accomplished. For example, the administration could form a bipartisan panel to choose the assessment author team, and they could survey decision-makers about what information they would find most useful to define the assessment’s scope. Second, the Trump administration could move NOAA’s natural disaster economics data to an economic agency with more appropriate expertise, as Pielke has also written about. Third, the administration could crack down (while following due process) on practices in academia that already violate federal free speech, political non-discrimination, contracts, and civil rights laws, as I have written about before. Fourth, the administration could invest in areas of research that they think are being overlooked because of bias—for example on climate adaptation or the benefits of cheap and reliable energy to national security and international development. (I will say more on these last two points next week as well.)
Don’t just take it from me. Meteorologist Ryan Maue—who served in the first Trump administration at NOAA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—wrote last December in The New York Times: “dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error”. He’s right. NOAA’s services pay for themselves many times over, and there are better ways to address the Trump administration’s concerns.