The wave of layoffs and chaos unleashed by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) finally crashed into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in late February. Between about 880 terminations and a reported 500 resignations, NOAA has lost around 10% of its workforce. The terminated staff were reinstated by court order while also placed on leave.

It is difficult to overstate NOAA’s contribution to the United States. Through its collection and analysis of oceanic and atmospheric information, NOAA has helped ensure public safety and been a boon to the economy. Its work supports major industries including agriculture, energy, shipping, aviation, fisheries, insurance, and research.

It is hard to see how it will do all that now. Already, staff departures have reduced the United States’ weather observational capacity. The rapidly evolving news stream now points to potential closure of several NOAA offices around the country, at least some of which actively provide emergency weather forecasting.

Perhaps recognizing the mistake, the Trump administration scrambled to rehire critical personnel, like NOAA’s hurricane hunters. The organization is nonetheless still on notice for broader disruption and, potentially, dissolution. The White House approach to the agency mirrors the recommendations in Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation suggested NOAA be “broken up and downsized” because it is a “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

It is narrow minded to blame NOAA for the state of climate change science and politics. And it may or may not be the case that the Trump administration is using Project 2025 as its playbook. However, Project 2025 is hardly the first critique of NOAA’s organization, function, and status. For example, in 1996 the Department of Commerce Inspector General recommended eliminating NOAA’s ship fleet and the following year former President Clinton wanted to eliminate the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. A long-range view of the agency suggests that its successes have come despite its structure and budget, not because of them.

But instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it is worth considering how the organization could better support U.S. interest in a wide range of matters, from resilience to extreme weather to energy and agriculture to space and marine affairs.

Tough love for NOAA

NOAA houses the National Weather Service (NWS), which is one of the oldest scientific agencies in the country and which has achieved tremendous success in weather forecasting and advancement in atmospheric and ocean sciences. Its activities in hurricane forecasting have saved countless lives, supported economic development, and led the way in tropical meteorology.

Even still, NOAA weather forecasting lags that of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in terms of accuracy—the difference between the forecast and what actually occurs.

In a review of efforts throughout the 1990s to improve NWS’s forecasting capabilities, for example, a National Academy of Science panel explained that the NWS “had been unable to keep up with the pace of technological advances and had nearly become obsolete by the 1980s.” Its forecasting skills continue to leave room for improvement.

For example, the graphs below use a common statistic of forecast skill to compare NOAA’s Global Forecast System (GFS, black line) to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF, red line). The bigger the number on the y-axis the better the relationship between forecasts and observations. In both the Northern Hemisphere (top) and Southern Hemisphere (bottom), the GFS is just not as good.

The difference in skill has meant that US forecasting is routinely in a position of playing catch-up. When the ECMWF performs better in critical situations, as it did in forecasting Hurricane Sandy, there is a sudden sense of alarm about United States technical capabilities but little ability to sustain coordination for long term leadership.

Shortcomings in U.S. weather forecasting capabilities are attributed to organizational inefficiencies, loyalty to legacy modeling programs, and challenges in maintaining cutting edge computing capabilities. Whereas other nations have focused their efforts on creating the best possible forecast capabilities through a single modeling powerhouse, the United States has kept its forecasting activities sprawled across various offices, models, and departments.

Immaculate Conception

Edward Wenk was a submarine engineer turned science policy sherpa during the early days of bringing NOAA to life. His detailed, fascinating, and long account of the politicking in this era of marine science is testament to the lack of broad appetite for the development of what had been coined in Congressional debate as a “wet NASA.”

Today, however, NOAA is beloved among aspiring students, ocean and atmospheric scientists, recreational sailors, and weather nerds. This is due in part to concerted engagement efforts and in part to NOAA’s immense contributions to science, technology, and public wonderment of the oceans and atmosphere.

Yet many observers are still skeptical that the cumbersome institution is a good idea—or perhaps better put, that it is as good an idea as possible.

Some of the problem goes back to NOAA’s founding. The impetus originated in the Cold War. As most thoroughly described in the late 1960s by a team of science, technology, industry, and legal experts known as the “Stratton Commission,” NOAA was intended to support the nation’s marine strategy. More specifically, NOAA would advance the U.S. capacity in managing and utilizing ocean resources to compete with Russia, improve sustainability (then, “wise use”) of marine resources, advance deep-sea mining of critical minerals, and establish the nation as a global leader of the world’s oceans.

U.S. President Richard Nixon ultimately created NOAA under the Department of Commerce through his Reorganization Plan #4 in 1970. “Since NOAA was created under the Reorganization Act and consolidated only existing agencies with well-defined prior missions,” Wenk noted, “no new missions were added.” In the years ahead, Congress assigned NOAA many of the responsibilities the Stratton Commission had originally sought, which further contributed to its jumbled architecture.

The piecemeal approach to NOAA’s activities and budget created a cumbersome and unstable organization for which oversight has proven difficult. As a result, Congress spent the past 55 years regularly debating what to do about NOAA.

Serious proposals have included improved organization, breaking up the organization, and yes, even complete dismantlement with commercialization of some data and services. There appears little real-world appetite for its dismantlement though. Even Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary expressed no interest in breaking up NOAA during a nomination hearing.

Dear Congress

Over the past half century, questions about what to do with NOAA have become complicated by private interests in commercializing different aspects of NOAA’s activities.

What exactly could be commercialized—and the trade-offs in doing so—is an area of debate. According to former NOAA head Rick Spinrad, any commercialization would necessarily lead to death and destruction. This is unlikely. A more fine-tuned critique demonstrates that commercialization could make data and forecast information more costly, thus favoring companies with deep pockets over the diverse array of researchers, small businesses and consultants that offer individual expertise and viewpoints.

But even those tradeoffs may be mitigated. The United Kingdom MET Office, for example, offers a model of commercialization. The MET Office provides the public with weather and emergency forecast information while charging fees for more specific data and consulting. Very recently, the ECMWF announced free access to its data while maintaining pricing for high-volume users and custom needs.

The needs of the public and the needs of, for instance, energy managers or weather derivative traders, are quite different. Whereas most of the public is content with a general forecast several days out— partly sunny with a high of 72— and emergency weather forecasts, financial traders deal with business contracts that may hinge on a tenth of a degree temperature change in the forecast. Assessing how accurate a weather forecast the public needs (and the military needs) is a good starting point for deciding what parts of the weather enterprise can be commercialized.

Another area of debate about commercialization is the increased use of private satellite data as a means of building a space industry. Currently, NOAA contracts with industry partners to build the satellites it needs. NOAA launches and operates them. An alternative model is for NOAA to signal its willingness to buy satellite data, which would encourage greater private investment to build and operate this very expensive equipment. The trade-offs inherent in this kind of privatization is likewise debated.

And then there is all the great “ocean stuff” NOAA does.

The Stratton Commission intended for NOAA to support the build out of a U.S. aquaculture industry. Aside from making the development of such an industry a declared policy in 1980, Congress has not negotiated a workable regulatory framework for the industry. Aquaculture permitting in federal waters remains “complex, time consuming, and difficult to navigate” according to the Congressional Research Service.

The Stratton Commission also intended for NOAA to advance capabilities in deep seabed mineral mining. Again, in 1980, Congress gave some regulatory responsibilities to NOAA for licensing of private mineral exploration and mining. However, NOAA has not issued any exploration licenses since 1984, and the ability of U.S. businesses to exploit seabed minerals is uncertain because of Congressional hesitation to be obligated to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Since the 1970s, NOAA has provided significant assistance to states in their management of coastal zones in accordance with the federal Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA). This too was a major aim of the Stratton Commission. However, the extremely localized nature of coastal development coupled with the high concentration of the nation’s population and wealth along the coasts challenges the premise that the CZMA is—or ever was—a practical policy approach.

The Future of United States Oceanic and Atmospheric Capabilities

One recent effort to streamline oversight and stabilize the “unwieldy” agency came from Representative Frank Lucas (R-OK), Chairman of the House Science Committee. Lucas’ bill would establish NOAA as an independent agency, broaden the forecasting focus of the National Weather Service while highlighting attention to forecast accuracy, and direct the Administrator to develop an agency reorganization plan. Yet Congressional clarity on what it wants from NOAA remains vague with no main goal for NOAA broad activities in research, forecasting, and data collection.

Representative Lucas’ bill also requires that NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce be “located in the principal physical location” of the Office of the Secretary of Commerce and headed by a Presidential appointee. It does not appear that the intent is to move the Office of Space Commerce out of NOAA but rather to privilege it. This is apt to create fights about who, exactly, the rest of NOAA is accountable to.

A recent essay by Breakthrough’s Seaver Wang and colleagues at the Payne Institute of Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines makes the case that Congress has been so impotent on the front of marine affairs that it is now at a critical juncture with China over deep seabed mineral access. The United States faces “geopolitical peril.”

Congress needs to think about NOAA’s functions more strategically. Competitive skill in weather forecasting is important; space commerce may be lucrative. Neither is a substitute for the original intention of NOAA in advancing the United States leadership in the global maritime order.

Tim Gallaudet, former member of NOAA’s leadership under the first Trump administration, is vocal that the wrong thing to do is what is happening now. The indiscriminate approach to NOAA firings undermines national capabilities in profound and severe ways. “At some point, Congress is going to have to take some action” he stated recently. “This is stuff that the administration should care about. They don’t know what they’re doing is the bottom line.”

It is easy for the White House to kick things down. It is a lot harder to build awe-inspiring things that empower a nation to lead the world. Congress needs to step up.