Right now, reading NOAA’s 2025 accomplishments report has a subtly eerie quality. Instead, what should seem like a simple institutional summary—satellites monitoring storms, ocean buoys providing data streams, research labs generating the climate projections that farmers, insurers, and military planners silently rely on—reads like a list of what America is about to give up. It is impossible to overlook the timing.
The majority of people only indirectly interact with the infrastructure that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has spent decades developing. When an airline changes its route to avoid a developing low-pressure system, when a coastal city engineer determines flood risk for a building permit, or when a weather app on your phone updates ahead of a tornado, NOAA is somewhere in that chain. That tradition was carried on in the agency’s 2025 work. Ocean monitoring, fisheries management, hurricane tracking, seasonal forecasting, and atmospheric research. By most technical standards, it continued to operate.
The budget memo that was leaked followed. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research is facing much worse cuts, with a 74 percent reduction that the document itself acknowledged would effectively eliminate the division entirely. The proposed cuts total about 27 percent. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, a 57-year collaboration between NOAA and the university that generates some of the world’s most advanced climate modeling, is one of the targets. Against that backdrop, reading about NOAA’s 2025 achievements is more akin to taking one last look around a house before selling than it is to celebrating.
The timing’s particular cruelty is difficult to ignore. The 2025 report captures a year in which NOAA’s research was still going strong and generating the kind of long-range climate projections that defense agencies, multinational corporations, and foreign governments have come to regard as fundamental. Cutting that now, and cutting it so deeply, raises issues that go beyond politics surrounding science funding. There’s a feeling that the person who wrote the OMB memo either didn’t fully comprehend the results of these programs or understood them well enough to conclude that they didn’t align with the goals of the current administration.
Although vocal, the impact of congressional pushback has been unclear. During a hearing in April 2026, members from both parties voiced concerns. Texas Republican Brian Babin, the chair of the Science Committee, specifically called out proposed cuts to programs that feed flash flood warnings, such as hydrologic modeling and rainfall prediction. His state had recently experienced devastating flooding. It remains to be seen if that personal weight results in real budget protection. The House Appropriations Subcommittee’s proposal to maintain NOAA at $5.85 billion—much more than the White House’s request—must still pass negotiations.
The lived reality of NOAA’s work is lost in the political math. At two in the morning, scientists at the National Hurricane Center are observing a satellite loop of a developing Atlantic storm. Six days from now, an emergency manager in Florida will be informed by a model that uses buoy data gathered somewhere in the Pacific to determine whether to order an evacuation. Simulations conducted by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory help explain why monsoon patterns are changing in ways that impact rice harvests on the opposite side of the globe. These are not line items in an abstract budget.
When you carefully read NOAA’s 2025 accomplishments report, you will see that it is a document about accumulated expertise, the kind that takes decades to build and very little time to lose. It’s possible that a scaled-down version of the agency will survive the proposed cuts. It’s also possible that a generation will pass before the research capacity that has been dismantled now is rebuilt. That forecast is not overly dramatic. It’s only math.
