Avery Kaplan contributed to this report
The United States is facing a “Triple Danger Season” this year with one of our biggest safeguards against increasingly extreme weather wrought by a warming climate—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—under threat. That’s why UCS is actively tracking the Trump administration’s attacks on this critical agency to ensure the public has all the facts: from previous to proposed NOAA budgets to cuts to its datasets, tools, and services, as well as previous and continuing impacts from NOAA staffing shortages. Our NOAA tracker lays bare what is at stake and what the administration has stolen from the US taxpayer.
Danger Season (defined by UCS as the time of the year between May and October when the United States experiences numerous extreme weather and climate-related hazards) is amplified this year as the triple crises of climate change, a reckless authoritarian government, and economic insecurity start to collide. Yet, it feels like Danger Season has been underway for months now. This year has brought astonishing weather extremes across the country, including a record-shattering March heatwave that exacerbated the ongoing snowpack drought across the West and contributed to an early start to the wildfire season, a heatwave across the East that made April feel like July, and an ongoing widespread drought across the US.
As a nation, we rely on NOAA for scientific data, research, and predictions that help us understand and prepare for all kinds of weather, including extreme weather. You would think that with present and oncoming hazards, there would be ample funding, staffing, and prioritization of all of NOAA’s activities and mission. Unfortunately, and similarly to last year, NOAA is again under threat from the Trump administration.
Over the last year, the administration has relentlessly attacked staffing, budgets and scientific resources at the agency. The President’s latest fiscal 2027 budget proposal, which NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs supports, continues that trend. And to top it all, the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) have been withholding funds that Congress already appropriated, with a strategy of trickle-down disbursement of funding that is making the valuable and life-saving work of NOAA much, much harder to do.
So let’s talk about that value of NOAA’s work during Danger Season, what exactly the Trump administration is doing to make Danger Season even more dangerous with a weakened NOAA, and what UCS is doing to track the attacks and fight back.
What NOAA does during Danger Season
All year, and particularly during Danger Season, NOAA plays a crucial role in forecasting weather events: researching, observing, and understanding our weather, climate, freshwater sources, and oceans. The agency also develops new tools and operations that enhance our ability to prepare for extreme events.
These operations contribute to the health of the national economy: we see $30 billion a year in annual economic benefits from just public weather forecasts and information.
NOAA’s strength comes from its integrated structure. The agency’s six line offices operate as an integrated system where observations, forecasts, research, and operations reinforce one another to deliver life-saving benefits.
Let’s take the example of a hurricane. The National Weather Service (NWS), which provides us with hurricane forecasts and warnings, relies on a suite of observations: satellite data from the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS), ocean data from the National Ocean Service (NOS), and aircraft reconnaissance information from the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (OMAO).
Hurricane and hurricane forecasting research from NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) provides NWS with invaluable information to develop new hurricane forecasting tools. NOAA’s integrated approach to hurricane forecasting has led to more effective evacuations and better emergency planning, saving Americans nearly $5 billion per major US-landfalling hurricane.
During Danger Season, NOAA’s integrated functionality is critical to the translation of observational and modeling data into forecasts, warnings, and guidance that communities rely on to make life-saving decisions. Extreme events grow more frequent and more severe in a warming climate, therefore the demand for these services is increasing, not decreasing.
And yet the administration is undermining NOAA AGAIN
At the very moment the nation depends most on the NOAA, policy and budget decisions by the Trump administration are weakening NOAA. The Trump administration via the OMB—and supported by NOAA’s Administrator Neil Jacobs—has proposed to Congress to slash NOAA funding by 32% ($1.6 billion) for the next fiscal year. This includes terminating NOAA’s research arm, OAR, and numerous existing oceanic, atmospheric, and weather grant programs.
And even worse, despite Congress rebuking the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to NOAA for this current fiscal year, OMB director Russ Vought is doing the administration’s bidding, conducting sleezy trickle-down disbursement tactics, across multiple agencies, including the National Science Foundation. For NOAA, this includes stalling the disbursement of NOAA grants that many of NOAA’s activities, such as its Cooperative Institutes, rely on.
Just recently, half of the employees at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Lab (GML), which oversees and maintains long-term measurements of heat-trapping emissions like CO2, would have been laid off by May 15 because the OMB allowed the grant that pays them to lapse on March 24.
The grant funds NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences (CIRES), where scientists operate tools that take many of GML’s measurements, including aerosol networks, atmospheric and oceanic CO2, and the Antarctic ozone recovery. The OMB finally approved the disbursement of the funds, one-month post-lapse.
Despite Congress appropriating funds for NOAA CIRES and GML months ago, the OMB is choosing to either stall or slowly disburse funds, leaving critical life-saving information on a thread. This funding delay was just one in a series of attacks on NOAA by this administration.
Last year, NOAA faced unprecedented staffing shortages, funding cut threats, abrupt dataset terminations, and the proposed shutdown of valuable products—including key satellites that inform hurricane forecasting during the middle of the Atlantic Hurricane Season. One of NOAA’s core climate archives, the Global Historical Climatological Network, is still facing severe disruptions, with only about 6,000 of its 20,000 observational stations reporting valuable weather and climate information. This happened against the backdrop of intense heatwaves, wildfires, severe thunderstorms, and flash flooding all throughout Danger Season 2025.
Any one of these losses reverberates throughout the entirety of NOAA’s integrated system. The administration is reorganizing the NWS while NWS is still struggling to recover from the staffing shortage impacts from last year, as the Director of the NWS shared that staff are “burning out.” These losses and lingering impacts are why worry is mounting ahead of this Danger Season. Will there be more lapses of funding for NOAA activities that impact our ability to prepare for extreme weather events? Will there be abrupt cancellations of NOAA datasets that inform our understanding of these extremes? Will this affect our long-term ability to forecast, observe, monitor, and research these extremes, putting people and the economy in greater danger?
What UCS is doing: NOAA Tracker
In the face of growing threats to NOAA, UCS is working to ensure the public, policymakers, and stakeholders have a clear understanding of what is at stake. UCS has developed a NOAA tracker, a centralized database that documents ongoing changes to NOAA’s programs, funding, and scientific datasets.
Specifically, you will find an overview of previous and proposed NOAA budget by line office and its subsequent activities, existing cuts to NOAA datasets, tools, and services, and previous and continuing impacts from NOAA staffing shortages. There is also a “Readme” for more information.
Our publicly available NOAA Tracker can be found here. I highly recommend that anyone, especially members of Congress, take a look and see the breadth and value of NOAA’s activities and work; the latest on what is being proposed by the Trump administration, and what are existing impacts from announced closures, funding freezes, and other impacts to NOAA’s activities. It is important we see in full transparency what the administration is planning or executing on NOAA that impacts all of us.
Communities, businesses, farmers, emergency management officials and many more rely on NOAA. Congress must step up to defend this vital scientific resource that has been carefully built up through taxpayer investments over decades. That includes ensuring it is robustly funded and staffed, protected against harmful dismantling, and that its scientific integrity policy is strictly adhered to.
Also check out our latest on Danger Season and the latest blogs on NOAA here.
Overall, the nation’s ability to navigate extreme weather events, including those occurring during this upcoming Danger Season, depends in part on the strength of NOAA and the scientific infrastructure it supports. Weakening that integrated system at this moment would mean less time to prepare, less certainty in forecasts, and greater harm when disasters strike.