Breaking: If NOAA’s Budget Passes Congress, People Will Die
If the proposed NOAA budget is approved, tornado and hurricane prediction, air quality alerts, and climate monitoring could grind to a halt.
Donald Trump’s latest budget plan doesn’t just reflect political priorities—it’s a direct assault on the scientific infrastructure that protects Americans from the worst impacts of weather and climate disasters.
Quietly embedded in the 2026 proposed federal budget is the full termination of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. These institutions aren’t redundant bureaucracies, they are the brains behind hurricane modeling, tornado warnings, climate attribution science, and the air quality alerts that have saved lives during record-breaking wildfire seasons.
If Congress passes this plan, the results will be immediate and far-reaching.
Start with hurricanes. NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, based out of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab (AOML), and run in partnership with the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS), would be effectively shut down. That means the next-generation HAFS hurricane model, which dramatically improved forecasts of Hurricane Idalia’s rapid intensification in 2023, would never reach full implementation. Ocean heat content observations, a crucial factor in forecasting how storms explode in strength, would be cut. The science that helps us better predict life-threatening hurricanes would disappear, at a time when ocean temperatures are breaking records every year.
Next, tornado warnings. NOAA’s National Severe Storms Lab (NSSL) and its partner, the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO) at the University of Oklahoma, would lose support to continue work on Warn-on-Forecast. This effort has been inching us toward the holy grail of severe weather preparedness - extending tornado and hail warnings from 15 minutes to an hour or more. Mobile radar trucks, sounding balloons, and lightning mapping systems that collect the data needed for those breakthroughs? Gone. Families in the path of the next EF-4 tornado will be given less time to find safety.
The plan also erases one of the world’s most widely used emergency response tools: the HYSPLIT model. Managed by NOAA’s Air Resources Lab in Maryland, HYSPLIT tracks the transport and dispersion of smoke, volcanic ash, radioactive fallout, and toxic chemicals. It was critical during the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, helping emergency managers understand where the hazardous plume would travel. Without HYSPLIT, we’ll be flying blind the next time disaster strikes.
Trump’s plan also cripples the U.S. satellite weather enterprise. It halts algorithm development for GOES-R and JPSS, satellites that provide the nation’s most critical storm imagery. These algorithms help us detect fire starts from lightning strikes, monitor the health of tropical systems, and assess cloud-top temperatures to identify severe storms. It was these satellites that warned of the dry lightning outbreak that sparked California’s 2020 wildfires. Strip the funding, and those early alerts vanish.
Air quality will suffer too. The Physical Sciences Lab and CIRES provide key forecasting for wildfire smoke, ozone transport, and air stagnation—issues that impact tens of millions of Americans. During June 2023, when Canadian wildfire smoke blanketed the Northeast and made New York City’s air the most polluted on Earth, NOAA’s forecasts were vital for public health agencies and school systems. With this proposal, the capacity to warn people in similar future events would be slashed.
The budget would also cut ocean and Arctic climate monitoring, including the Argo float program and NOAA’s Mauna Loa CO₂ record—the longest-running continuous carbon dioxide monitoring program in the world. Run by the Global Monitoring Lab (GML), this site, along with others in Alaska, the South Pole, American Samoa, and Greenland, has tracked our planet’s most basic life-supporting gases for decades. Ending this monitoring is akin to taking the batteries out of a smoke detector during a wildfire.
And then there’s climate attribution—the science that tells us why extreme events are becoming more intense. NOAA’s labs and cooperative institutes have pioneered real-time “rapid attribution” studies that explain how climate change made events like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome more likely and more extreme. Without that science, the void will be filled with conspiracy theories, denial, and dangerous misinformation.
To be clear, this is not about cutting “waste” or “streamlining government.” It’s about intentionally blinding the public to real and rising risks.
Trump’s allies have framed this as part of a larger war on what they call the “green agenda.” But these programs are not ideological. They are the reason communities get accurate hurricane tracks, advanced tornado warnings, and reliable air quality alerts. They are the backbone of science-based decision-making in disaster preparedness.
Stripping them away is not just irresponsible-it’s dangerous.
If Congress doesn’t stop this, the country will lose its early warning systems, its scientific credibility, and the tools it needs to navigate an increasingly unstable climate future.
PLEASE - share this, call your representatives in Congress and make sure they vote ‘NO’ on this NOAA budget! If passed - people will die.
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I simply cannot understand how the insurance industry can allow these cuts to be implemented as loss to property will increase and claims will surge -- as data shows billions is saved by warnings, separate and apart from human life.
Well, we are going to die..... This is just absurd, all these cuts and the needless interruptions of services to only realize later oops, we need to rehire those people. The most inept, and dangerous administration ever!