On Monday, July 14, the House appropriations committee released a draft bill that includes a 6% cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), markedly less than the 25% reduction proposed by President Trump, but still a $380 million cut that advocates say will jeopardize key programs.
Trump’s proposed budget sought to eliminate NOAA’s entire research arm, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), which funds all four of the NOAA research labs in Boulder, as well as the agency’s partner program with CU Boulder. The appropriations bill is less specific and makes no mention of OAR or Boulder’s labs. The cuts don’t appear to target OAR specifically and are not deep enough to defund NOAA’s research entirely. Boulder’s labs are expected to continue operating under the current proposal.
Read: NOAA budget request would eliminate Boulder climate labs, slash hundreds of jobs
Similarly, the bill proposes a 10% cut to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, as well as research at CU Boulder and work at the National Center for Women & Information Technology, also based in Boulder. While more modest than the 40% cut Trump proposed, the reductions are still considered significant.
Earlier this month, several experts told Boulder Reporting Lab they did not expect Congress to adopt Trump’s dramatic budget cuts.
“The cliché is the president’s budgets are typically dead on arrival,” David Skaggs, the former congressman for whom Boulder’s NOAA building is named, told Boulder Reporting Lab. Waleed Abdalati, director of CIRES, a NOAA cooperative institute at CU Boulder, cited past instances in which Congress continued to fund NOAA and OAR despite the Trump administration’s efforts to cut them.
However, the proposed reductions are larger than those enacted by Congress during the last Trump administration, and advocates are still calling them “drastic.”
“The 6% reduction in funding all but ensures that NOAA will continue mass layoffs, paralyzing the agency’s ability to respond to the environmental, ecological and extinction crises,” Rachel Rilee, oceans policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a press release.