The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has proposed a sweeping budget cut to Congress that would eliminate its entire research arm, including four Boulder-based laboratories and all university cooperative institutes nationwide, such as CIRES at CU Boulder.
The new proposal aligns with President Trump’s budget request and includes a $1.8 billion cut to NOAA, more than a quarter of the agency’s total funding. Separately, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — two other federal labs based in Boulder — have submitted budget proposals seeking 40% and 28% reductions, respectively, through the National Science Foundation and the White House.
If enacted, the plans would mean hundreds of lost jobs in Boulder and a major setback for climate science globally.
“It’s surreal to me that the entirety of the research office within NOAA that provides such daily tangible benefits to the country has been called out for elimination,” said Dan Powers, executive director of CO-LABS, which promotes Colorado research, in an interview with Boulder Reporting Lab.
The U.S. House is expected to begin reviewing the proposed budgets next week. Federal agency budgets were not part of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the Senate July 1. Many Democrats are confident the NOAA cuts won’t survive Congress.
“I think that these proposed cuts to NOAA will be rejected in large part,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in a recent webinar, noting that “the president’s budget is advisory only.” He pointed to past Trump proposals — such as eliminating the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program — that were ultimately ignored by a divided Congress.
Waleed Abdalati, director of CIRES, a NOAA cooperative institute at CU Boulder, said they’re bracing for cuts but not expecting the worst.
“In the previous Trump administration, the president’s budget request sought to cut NOAA and OAR [Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research], but Congress continued to fund them,” he said.
David Skaggs, the former congressman for whom Boulder’s NOAA building is named, called the proposed cuts to NOAA “sad, but not hopeless.”
“The cliché is the president’s budgets are typically dead on arrival,” he told Boulder Reporting Lab. “Which is not to minimize the seriousness of this proposal. It ignores the importance of this science to the well-being of the planet, to the well-being of the country, to the ability for us to understand what’s going on in the natural environment and prepare for it.
“It is tragic for us locally, because obviously the labs are an employer of valuable people in this community. But we need to take a deep breath and keep fighting.”
Still, the scope of proposed eliminations is striking. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), with a $738 million budget, would be dissolved. That includes 10 major labs and 16 cooperative institutes — university-based research centers responsible for roughly half of NOAA’s scientific research.
Craig McLean, former head of OAR, warned that the cuts would cripple U.S. climate and ocean science leadership globally. He said NOAA’s research is inseparable from the agency’s mission and that eliminating it would disrupt everything from tracking fish migration to forecasting hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and wildfires.
“Each organization working together has been the signature of this agency,” he said.
Boulder’s labs on the chopping block
Among the targets is Boulder’s Earth Systems Research Laboratories, which house four NOAA labs: the Chemical Sciences Lab, Global Monitoring Lab, Global Systems Lab and Physical Sciences Lab. These labs provide critical forecasting models, air quality monitoring and satellite support, among other functions.
Robin Webb, former director of the Physical Sciences Lab, said the lab helps the U.S. better predict risks from floods and droughts and ensure critical infrastructure — like nuclear reactors or reservoirs — can withstand extreme rainfall events.
CIRES and Colorado State University’s CIRA would also lose all NOAA funding. These institutes’ scientists, Abdalati said, are deeply integrated with federal scientists, often indistinguishable from one another in practice.
“It’s very difficult, frankly impossible, to separate the federal workforce from the university workforce in terms of the execution of the mission,” he said.
But it’s not just current science at risk. The cuts also threaten the training of the next generation. Cooperative institutes employ many early-career scientists who would lose their jobs, and federal labs have already lost some of their newest talent due to recent budget contractions. Webb said he recruited nine promising hires shortly before retiring — all were later laid off.
“That’s one of the more painful things,” he said, “That you spend years thinking about succession planning and future capabilities, and then that’s just all thrown in the garbage can.”
Morale hit by uncertainty, vacancies
NOAA’s Boulder workforce has already taken a hit. Sources estimate that 10-20% of its roughly 800 employees are gone due to early resignations or layoffs of probationary staff. If the proposed budget is enacted, that number could drop by at least half.
Nationally, NOAA would lose 2,000 of its 12,000 full-time employees.
“The uncertainty is an incredible distraction,” Webb said. “It’s not a great workplace environment at this point. There’s a lot of vacant offices, but there’s also a lot of vacant science capacity. The functionality has been degraded, because if you’re losing world-class people, by definition, they’re missed.”
One current NOAA employee, speaking anonymously in May, said staff were “anxiously awaiting a budget that may yet cripple or destroy us.”
Within CIRES, staff were warned a few months ago that funds might only stretch through July. The funding eventually came through, but the unusual 30-day increments by which NOAA is currently being funded has made leadership uncertain. That temporary funding is disruptive, Abdalati said.
“We are living in a state of uncertainty,” he said. “It shows up in morale. It’s hard to work under those circumstances. And this is a workforce that’s very committed to the mission of NOAA and CIRES.”
NCAR, which is managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, is also preparing for possible deep cuts.
“If we faced a 40% funding reduction, it would likely mean large-scale cuts to programs and labs at NSF NCAR. It is too soon to say which specific research programs and positions would be affected if Congress were to approve such a budget, but we would work with the National Science Foundation to set priorities,” a UCAR spokesperson said.
Science targeted by politics
Many of the proposed changes mirror those outlined in Project 2025, the right-wing policy blueprint that calls for dismantling federal climate programs, among other things.
NOAA’s offices, the document claims, “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and should be “broken up and downsized.”
Russ Vought, a key Project 2025 architect and head of the Office of Management and Budget, has recently pushed to freeze billions in federal funds, including those for NOAA, requiring agencies to seek approval from Congress to release them, according to Politico.
Van Hollen warned this maneuver could be unconstitutional, calling it “an impoundment,” during a webinar last month.
“They’re indiscriminate,” Webb said of the proposed cuts. “There’s no strategy in terms of any sort of benefit to the nation. It’s just: ‘We’re going to destroy it.’”