Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have been tearing through federal agencies, ostensibly looking for places to cut down the government. One of the group’s first stops was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nonpartisan scientific agency in charge of research on the atmosphere and oceans. NOAA’s monitoring work underpins weather forecasting, hurricane modeling, climate change projections — and resilience work by utilities.
Earlier this month, Musk’s team sought access to NOAA’s IT systems. According to reporting by Wired, a DOGE engineer named Nikhil Rajpal is now inside the agency; he has previously worked at both Tesla and Twitter, and does not appear to have any background in either ocean or atmospheric sciences.
Neil Jacobs, Trump’s nominee to head the agency, is a known quantity, having led NOAA in an acting capacity in the first administration. That first tenure was marred by an investigation that found he violated the agency’s code of ethics in the infamous “Sharpiegate” episode.
However, climate research proceeded mostly unimpeded in that first Trump term. The question is whether NOAA’s work can continue amid both policy and “efficiency” pressures this time around. And so far it doesn’t look promising. Current employees have been told to expect a 50% reduction in staff and a 30% cut to NOAA’s budget, according to CBS News.
Project 2025, the policy blueprint supplied by the Heritage Foundation with input from former and current Trump administration officials, calls for breaking up and downsizing NOAA. It said the agency should “focus on its data-gathering services,” and “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
The prospect of privatizing — or otherwise limiting access to — NOAA’s trove of climate data has caused alarm throughout the climate tech and energy industries. For instance, the loss of this data would be a major wrench for companies like Rhizome, a climate resilience planning platform for the power grid that relies on NOAA projections. According to Rhizome co-founder and CTO Rahul Dubey, the company is concerned about the potential for both delays and data quality impacts.
“These are the main sources of information when you go and look at historic weather,” Dubey said. “We deeply rely on them to understand the weather patterns that have led to major outages, especially when it comes to severe weather.”
Rhizome also uses NOAA’s data for information on how frequently extreme weather has occurred historically, as well as future projections of event intensity. So far, the company has not “seen any degradation or any clear indicator that some of these services will go away,” he added. “But there’s a lot of confusion [and uncertainty] around what could happen.”
NOAA declined to comment on the transition or potential future actions, though an agency spokesperson said it “remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.”
The uncertainty toll
As the Guardian reported yesterday, NOAA has imposed new restrictions on the agency’s scientists, such as new oversight over meetings with foreign nationals and the requirement to document “all international engagements” for case-by-case approval by a Trump political appointee. For an agency that by definition works internationally, it’s an onerous level of restriction — and reportedly is especially impacting the National Weather Service, which offers free access to its constantly updated data on weather, the atmosphere, and oceans.
Rhizome relies on both present-day observational data and forecasting from NOAA. As a part of Rhizome’s work with utilities, the company runs multiple “what if” scenarios based on projections (such as future weather) that it pulls from NOAA, among other sources. But if those projections start to degrade, he added, it “will definitely have an impact on some serious decision-making” that the company’s customers do when future-proofing the grid.
Dubey said it’s the uncertainty that is the main problem so far.
“The decisions today will impact how the grid will behave in the next six months, the next 12 months, the next 18, the next 24,” Dubey said. “These uncertainties in the worst case make you make bad decisions. [Or else they] make you delay certain decisions, which is equally bad;…generally, the tendency is to delay the decision until you are certain.”
NOAA’s data is uniquely valuable, and there are certain services that simply don’t have backups, Dubey said, including NOAA’s Global Forecast System. If that data is compromised, people “will have to rely on some third-party projections of what the ground realities are, especially in the case of observations,” he added. For forecasting, he anticipates that “people will have to actually take some of this internally, which is a very, very expensive operation.”
But, he added, those approximations or projections built in-house can’t come near what NOAA has been doing for years.“You can’t do this overnight,” Dubey said. “It’s not an easy transition. There’s a lot of money at stake; there are a lot of decisions at stake.”
