The breadth and scope of what they all do is stunning, awe-inspiring even.

The words used to describe their work are at such a high level they’re daunting to understand, yet comforting to know that someone does, because they fit.

The reach of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s campus in Boulder — one of 10 nationally and home to about 800 of the world’s best scientists — is truly global, yet its micro-level impact is hyperlocal.

You don’t know they’re out there, but we all benefit from them every day.

And it’s all at the precipice of disappearing.

In mid-April, researchers learned the Trump Administration was essentially looking to dismantle much of what constitutes the Boulder campus of NOAA — known as the David Skaggs Research Center — by slicing off nearly $485 million from its annual budget and resituating much of what remains.

The guts of what NOAA Boulder does runs through something known as Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). It is where all the global climate is studied, the earth’s weather is tracked, floods and wildfires are analyzed, and the sun’s interaction with the planet is monitored.

“NOAA protects lives and property,” said Waleed Abdalati, executive director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, which partners with NOAA on a variety of projects. “It’s hard to say what would happen without it.”

But the Office of Management and Budget, the arm of the federal government that counts the pennies and decides who gets them, said all those programs up in Boulder OAR should be “eliminated as a line office.”

In OMB’s own words, the budget reduction it suggests “eliminates all funding for climate, weather, and ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. It also does not fund Regional Climate Data and Information, Climate Competitive Research, Sea Grant (College and Aquaculture), or the National Oceanographic Partnership Program.”

To say it landed with a thud is a minimization of the reality.

“There is no expressed rationale for why this is a good idea,” said Dan Powers, executive director of CO-LABS, a non-profit consortium of more than 40 federally funded research labs, university institutes, tech companies and economic development organizations.

“The percentage of the annual budget that is being saved by these cuts is in the hundredths. Any impactful budgetary outcome is laughable and disingenuous.”

And the area within NOAA with the biggest target on its back — ironically one of the most critical components to much of the science research OAR does — is its Cooperative Institutes program, known as CI, where 16 universities nationwide partner their brightest minds with some of NOAA’s best scientists.

‘Major reductions in the workforce’

CU and Colorado State University are the only two CI campuses from the same state, and the more than 1,000 people there who work on nearly $1 billion worth of NOAA-funded projects are precariously close to being without those jobs, and the country without the research and knowledge those resources are generating.

“It’s ironic since successfully running any business is appreciating any nuance that impacts anyone’s bottom line, requiring understanding of the landscape, how it shifts and what tomorrow looks like before you get to tomorrow and capitalize on it,” Abdalati said. “Environmentally, we want to capitalize on what’s coming and mitigate the changes, and the only way is knowledge and research and applying it to meaningful outcomes.”

He argued that cuts for fiscal efficiency alone are shortsighted — and dangerous.

“They are cutting out things that are absolutely necessary and living with the impacts of what’s lost,” Abdalati said. “Doing that … leaves us at a tremendous disadvantage when the (prior) outcomes (before any cuts) have given us tremendous advantages.”

NOAA accounted for roughly $6 billion of the $10 billion allocated to the U.S. Department of Commerce last fiscal year. In its budget suggestion for 2026,  a leaked document known as a “passback” in which agencies are told what the budget people are thinking, cuts would bring NOAA’s budget down by $1.7 billion.

Not only that, OMB warned that spending for the remainder of the current fiscal year would reflect those cuts, meaning they were likely to happen even sooner.

“We’re very concerned about the continuing resolution though our main concern is the fiscal year 2026 budget with its deeper cuts,” said Massimo Ruzzene, senior vice chancellor at CU for research and innovation. “That would lead to major reductions in the workforce.”

Claims of radicalization

The administration’s targeting of NOAA and its scientific endeavors appears rooted in a single area: climate change.

“NOAA’s educational grant programs have consistently funded efforts to radicalize students against markets and spread environmental harm,” the White House’s budget proposal says about $1.3 billion in trims it wants to make. That figure pertains to proposed cuts to operations, research and grants, a big chunk of the overall $1.7 billion in reductions sought.

It points to organizations that receive federal dollars through NOAA — the school gardening program One Cool Earth among them — “that have pushed agendas harmful to America’s fishing industries,” and others such as the Climate Adaptation Partnership, which connects scientists and communities in dealing with climate change.

One of those CAP programs is at Colorado State University, where 61 professors, researchers and scientists combine to study climate subjects as diverse as rain forests and the impact on food safety.

The White House, in its budget proposal, scolded CAP for having “funded webinars that promoted a children’s book designed to foster conversations about climate anxiety” as therapy.

In the end, if the Trump Administration is to have it its way — Congress must approve all the recommendations, and some say it could be an uphill fight — much of the fiscal impact of the cuts will likely be felt across Colorado more than most other NOAA locales.

“The impact here can have as much an impact as the rest of the states (combined),” Ruzzene said. “If we interrupt the research pipeline, that workforce would not be replaced, and hiring later becomes impacted as well, with a diminished workforce to draw from.”

Project 2025: Break up NOAA

When President Donald Trump campaigned for a second term, he was emphatic that a policy agenda conceived by an ultra-conservative band of former officials from his first term, in tandem with conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, wasn’t on his radar.

Project 2025, as it was called, offered a 900-page blueprint for restructuring the executive branch of government. The ideas were contained in its “Mandate for Leadership,” which took direct aim at a variety of agencies and projects.

Notable among them was NOAA.

One of the co-authors for Project 2025 is Russell Vought, who is now director of the OMB.

In its mandate proposal, Project 2025 clearly pointed to one of its intents: Break up NOAA.

The agency houses OAR, the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, among others.

It’s a big place with many moving parts, not just on earth or underwater, but in the heavens as well.

NOAA’s primary focus, according to its mission statement, “is to understand and predict our changing environment, from the deep sea, to outer space” and to share all of what they find with others.

Project 2025 doesn’t see it that way.

“These form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” Project 2025 said. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

It said NOAA’s mission “corrupts its useful functions” and should be broken up and downsized.

Yet the crux of what Project 2025 saw as its main target at NOAA was what defines much of what occurs on the Boulder campus.

“OAR provides theoretical science, as opposed to the applied science of the National Hurricane Center,” it wrote. “OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

Project 2025 saw NOAA as being infiltrated by agenda-driven forces whose intolerance for outside ideas left it more a liability to a conservative agenda than an asset.

“Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy,” Project 2025’s mandate read.

It wasn’t long into the new Trump administration before it moved to ensure messages about climate change fit more in line with its own thinking. In mid-April, it dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who were part of the government’s semi-regular report about the impact of global warming on the United States.

Called the National Climate Assessment, the congressionally mandated analysis looked at how human health is impacted by rising temperatures, as well as fisheries, transportation, water supplies, and agriculture. The last report was issued in 2023 and the next wasn’t expected until 2028.

Except that all the contributors were told to go home; the same ones who said in earlier reports that the information being conveyed was important to understanding how climate change is impacting America.

That was soon followed by an announcement at NOAA that it won’t be tracking the damage costs of weather disasters, information it had been gathering — and sharing  — for more than 45 years. What’s more, the intensity and frequency of the disasters has picked up in recent years to an average of about 23 per year and dollars deeply into the billions, indicators that extreme weather was becoming more the norm than the anomaly.

That means the destructive costs of wildfire events similar to those that recently tore across the country  — including the Marshall Fire in Colorado and those that flamed through Los Angeles in January  — will not be maintained on the National Centers for Environmental Information database.

A Washington Post analysis found that although the number of intense storms are indeed growing, the damage they cause are more from people moving into disaster-prone areas.

“For a Colorado audience, the one thing is drought and fire vulnerability, which go hand in hand,” Abdalati said. “At NOAA it is the National Integrated Drought Information System that tracks and forecasts water availability. Then there is the assessment to help understand how to manage the water, and in the face of drought, if there’s enough for planting and recreational use.”

Quickly falling into line, NOAA in late April suddenly — inexplicably by some accounts  — minimized a key announcement that its scientists found that climate-warming concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had increased by record amounts in 2024.

In pointing out the muted tone of what would normally have been a trumpeted discovery, the journal Scientific American, citing a report by Politico, called it one of NOAA’s “biggest scientific findings of the year.”

“Yet the research largely has flown under the radar” because NOAA engineered it that way by mentioning the findings on a Facebook post and on X.

To boot, NOAA also didn’t bother to highlight the most important element of its scientists’ findings: that the CO2 concentrations had “jumped by an unprecedented amount” from the previous year, the Scientific American article noted.

Simple origins to massive umbrella

NOAA was formed under President Richard Nixon in 1970, but has its roots in the early years of the federal government. Its oldest predecessor is America’s first scientific government agency, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which lasted from 1807 to 1836.

The CGS’s initial purpose was essentially surveying and mapping the interior of the country, but it quickly took on jobs such as oceanography, geography, astronomy, meteorology, even the standardization of the nation’s weights and measures.

It was a very versatile organization that frequently became that national catch-all when it came to all things science and exploration.

Little remembered when the Nixon Administration came to create NOAA  — the Republican president also created the Environmental Protection Agency  — is that a feud with his interior secretary, Walter Hickel, ensured that the Department of Commerce and not the more logical Department of the Interior would be its home. Nixon’s distaste for Vietnam demonstrations across the nation were well-documented. Hickel’s urging that Nixon pay attention to the protesters’ messages rubbed the president poorly, so commerce is where the new agency landed.

Since then, NOAA, not unlike its earliest days under the maiden government, took on many assignments and functions that stretched from the depths of the oceans to the planetary bodies of the solar system.

There is, among dozens of others, the National Weather Service, the National Ocean Service, the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the National Integrated Drought Information System.

And then there is the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, or known simply as NOAA Research. It came to be in 1841 with the creation of the U.S. Lake Survey, whose main function was to better understand the Great Lakes and their impact on those who lived near them.

It’s essentially morphed into the greater research hand of NOAA that aims to understand and predict the planet’s oceans, weather and climate and advance the information for whoever’s benefit. If someone somewhere needs the data, they get it. No real questions asked.

The largest presence in the NOAA Boulder facility are the laboratories within the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research line office. While OAR is made up of 10 labs nationwide, Boulder houses four of them.

Their research encompasses the global climate, air pollution and solar geoengineering, floods and droughts, fire weather, and space weather, or the sun’s interaction with the atmosphere.

‘Like in the Wizard of Oz’ 

One lab is devoted to developing next-generation weather forecasting tools.

“What we do here matters,” said a mid-career NOAA scientist who agreed to be quoted only if her name was not used because she worried budget cuts could target her position. “This isn’t just looking out the window to see if it might rain today. This is significant science built on data that’s collected and analyzed over many years. We simply don’t wake up one morning and devise theories based on a whim. They are well-reasoned approaches to real world issues.”

For instance, the Global Monitoring Lab is recognized as the world’s premier climate monitoring lab. Its work is regularly relied on by climatologists who need information about weather variability.

The scientists at its Chemical Sciences Lab were instrumental in identifying the cause of the ozone hole over the Antarctic. That groundbreaking work has led to years of additional analysis that predicts a lessening of the problem through extended efforts at minimizing the causes.

Then the folks at the Global Systems Lab are basically the research and development team for the National Weather Service, providing better models for predicting weather, patterns and outcomes. Their work in estimating the ferocity of wildfires, droughts and all forms of harmful weather patterns has frequently proven to be a difference maker.

The Physical Sciences Lab has a very unique mission. It basically studies all the information the others cobble together, as well as much more of its own, in order to better predict water availability and the extremes.

Under its umbrella, the PSL has nine atmospheric river observatories along the West Coast that stream information the weather service relies on for its forecasting.

“We are the person behind the curtain, like in the Wizard of Oz,” said Dr. Steven Miller, executive director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University. “I feel Congress and the administration, with a proper awareness of what we do, that it’s a thing of great benefit in terms of lives and property saved. A lot of that comes from the research.”

In 2024, for example, the Warn-on Forecast System was able to give scientists more real-time information about the potential for severe weather. They were able to offer a 75-minute warning to Greenfield, Iowa, about the likelihood of a tornado.

The norm had been about 13 minutes.

Though five people died, experts say the devastation and loss of life would likely have been worse had it not been for the earlier warning.

“It’s not just the today that matters, it’s the every day and the tomorrow and the next week and year,” said a senior scientist who, fearing retribution, took an early buyout and is hoping to work with a private sector firm. “Getting better at doing what we did was an every day action item. Saving lives was not at all theoretical. It was real.”

Whacking research funds

When the Office of Management and Budget unveiled its plan for the new fiscal year, it noted that OAR was to be funded at just $171.5 million, a massive drop of $484.6 million from the previous fiscal year.

It eliminated all funding for climate, weather and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes.

Gone was regional climate data and information, climate competitive research, and the National Oceanographic Partnership Program. The remaining pieces of OAR would be moved either to the National Ocean Service or the National Weather Service.

Though a number of the programs that operate there would survive — the National Weather Service among them — and simply be reorganized in a different part of the NOAA superstructure, the most direct hit to NOAA’s offices in Boulder is the closure of the labs and the cooperative institutes programs.

“All the climate work, monitoring greenhouse gases, understanding the carbon cycle and how Earth responds to continued levels of CO2, understanding that research is the future of all the work that we do, even the fisheries, all start in OAR,” said a NOAA scientist who would not allow her name to be used because of repercussion fears. “Colorado now has four of the premier atmospheric research institutes in the world. It’s not just an issue of employment and the work that we do, but the broader tremendous public investment over the years, that’s going away.”

The OAR workforce is composed of more than 400 people, which is well over half of the entirety of NOAA’s Boulder employ.

Between NOAA and the network of research universities across the country, there are hundreds of ongoing research projects at 16 consortiums that knit together 80 universities and research agencies in about 33 states, including the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado State University.

The funding that supports the CI programs is similar to a grant but is a lot more flexible in the work that gets done and timeline of the awards. Each is typically a five-year award with a second five-year term following reports and updates. Universities have to compete all over again for any new award.

The science researchers that make up the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University rely on data from dozens of satellites orbiting Earth. The images they create help other agencies fine-tune weather predictions and the potential onslaught of wildfires and severe storms.

In 2013, a segment of CIRA’s 200 scientists determined how specific wind bursts from a severe thunderstorm in Yarnell Hill, Ariz., rapidly, and fatally, shifted a wildfire, killing 19 wildland firefighters. The outcome was a new way of predicting how wildfires behave, given certain conditions and circumstances.

The tool was key to saving firefighters from disaster in 2021 when the National Weather Center directed them away from an area under siege in Midland, Texas.

CU Boulder’s program, known as the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), is the largest and the oldest among them, starting in 1967. About 900 people are employed by CIRES.

Roughly half of its $122 million budget comes from NOAA grants.

“What sometimes gets missed is these federal monies aren’t just handed out,” CU’s Ruzzene said. “We work for that money and provide value to it. This is a very serious investment and an efficient way to spend. We deliver quality knowledge, but also education through our research.”

The focus on OAR appears rooted in the Project 2025 blueprint, referring to it as the “source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and a direct call for it to be dismantled.

Part of that impacts the work done in Colorado that comes far from the state’s line: Princeton, N.J.

There sits the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory which, since 1968, has worked on the interaction between fluids and gases. It was there scientists learned that the atmosphere and oceans are what drives the weather.

Said simply, it’s where climate science began.

GFDL is known by many as OAR’s crown jewel, where climate preparedness emanates and where the throne of America’s supremacy in weather forecasting resides.

But staring down a budget cut of nearly 50% means all the other dominoes behind it fall as quickly.

“The concern of existing employees who are having to deal with the mix of probationary employees fired and others who chose the early retirement option is they’re understaffed to a level that there is a deep, deep concern of things getting dangerous,” Powers at CO-LABS said. Those are “the gaps in info sharing and data analysis for severe weather, tornados, hurricanes, but even thunderstorms and extreme activities that would impact regular traffic, on the ground and in the air.”

Impact on private businesses

The downstream impact of federal cuts at NOAA are similarly significant because so many sectors of private enterprise rely on the government’s data, Powers added.

“Naively, the private sector wasn’t who was targeted by the administrative decisions, and (had they considered it) they’d have made more sophisticated decisions to avoid that kind of impact,” Powers said. “We haven’t been leaders in a while in a spectrum of technologically innovative categories, but to voluntarily take ourselves off line or diminish our standing while our global competitors gleefully move forward” makes no sense.

The variety of businesses that rely on OAR outcomes is staggering.

Data helps drive the forecasts also helps property insurance underwriters calculate premiums, as well as likelihood for disaster claims. Catastrophe modelers use NOAA data to help making their own assessments that lead to industry-wide calculations on risk.

Shipping and agriculture sectors are reliant on the climate science in deciding how its work will be done in the short term, with navigation charts, use of fuel, fertilizer plans and harvest estimates, all information flowing from OAR and associated programs.

“The quality of drought forecasting that advises agriculture, ski resorts, helps assess fire risk and the ability to understand those risks, how they spread and behave,” CU’s Abdalati said. “Then there’s the electromagnetic behavior of the sun that impacts every energy grid, as well as communications and aviation safety.”

In mid-May, CU Boulder announced that 56 sources of all forms of federal funding have been affected by “grant terminations or stop work orders, carrying a financial impact in the tens of millions of dollars.”

The school noted that last year two-thirds of its research funding came from federal sources. The loss of federal funding “would mean a loss of $3.6 billion in economic impact to the Colorado region.”

Changes to current spending has broad impact, Abdalati said.

“If we can’t charge the rates we negotiated with the government in the first place, then we can’t do the research we currently do,” he said.

The proposed budget cuts, if approved, would leave another wake of disaster.

“Thousands of seasoned scientists, early career scientists, and young scientists in graduate schools will lose funding,” according to a blog post by Marc Alessi, a science fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “These folks have spent their livelihoods conducting research that improves climate and weather prediction that directly affects every American.”

The signal sent is vivid: There is no future for young scientists in government.

“They’re not making a very good argument for wanting to work there,” said a CU graduate student who said he still hopes for a career at NOAA, but believes speaking out could impact his chances. “I’ve studied for years with a job there as my goal. How can they simply make the science go away?”

‘There’s tremendous value to knowing’

Roughly 10% of the NOAA Boulder workforce was terminated earlier this year, all of them probationary employees who were summarily dismissed without cause.

It’s estimated that another 15% of the workforce are foreign scientists on work visas who could be forced to return home if their jobs are cut.

Then there are the early retirements — estimates run from a few dozen to several dozen — of those whose experience and knowledge will be lost to anyone who follows.

“There is a tone and intent of harshness and dismissal,” Powers said. “It’s unlike anything we’ve seen impacting our scientific enterprise. There is no discussion, just a cold dismissal. For all that is removed today, putting it back together isn’t feasible in any short or meaningful term.”

He added: “There’s a whole generation of those in their 20s who are not perceiving the government as a stable or desirable place for work to grow their career, and that’s a self-inflicted wound.”

Three of Colorado’s congressional representatives — Rep. Joe Neguse and Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet — in May asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to leave the CI programs alone, noting the impact on future generations of scientists.

“It is our fear that if sweeping cuts are made, the damage will be irreversible,” according to the letter.

Using phrases such as “climate alarmism” to attack the science is not good policy, Abdalati said.

“I rely on policymakers to have good judgment, but hope they rely on the scientists to make use of what they have, to give them the information they need to make that good policy,” Abdalati said. “If we just step back and said, ‘What’s the value of knowing?’ I don’t think anyone would disagree that there’s tremendous value to knowing.”

The problem, he added, “is the baggage people end up attaching to it.