BalancedWx Special: Perspective on the NOAA budget passback
A proposed sea change to the US meteorological science enterprise
While I had seen some excerpts of the NOAA FY2026 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “passback” budget document that numerous media outlets reported on Friday and that I wrote about here, today was the first opportunity I had to read it front to back after the San Francisco Chronicle obtained and published the full document yesterday. After reading it in full and having a little time to reflect, I feel compelled to share some thoughts and perspectives, primarily because to really understand all the intricacies going on here, you need to have a lot of deep NOAA experience, and obviously the people still at NOAA who are engaged cannot publicly comment. So even though I am no longer in the arena, I have only been out for a month and have experience dealing with a lot of the programs and budget items in question here, so I hopefully can share some meaningful perspectives.
The first thing I want to stress is that what I am sharing here is primarily just that, my perspective based on what I see in this document and my own experience and interpretation. I do not have any inside information; obviously I am still in touch with colleagues in NOAA, but to be frank, they really do not know anything more than what is in the document or being reported by the media. I am going to focus on the topics I know the most about, namely the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research’s weather research programs and the National Weather Service.
However, I will start with an overall perspective on the document. It is clear to me that the administration is establishing that the focus of NOAA going forward should be on collecting observations and maintaining basic services within tight budget constraints. In the opening paragraph when discussing the Department of Commerce, they emphasize the importance of the bureau “collecting essential scientific observations like ocean and weather data to support navigation and forecasting.” While “leading edge R&D” is also mentioned, the next paragraph highlights “significant reductions to education, grants, research, and climate-related programs within NOAA.”
Language throughout the document also emphasizes focus on budget versus research or new technologies. For example, there is an extensive section directing NOAA to completely reorganize and refocus the planned next geostationary satellite program GeoXO, and it makes clear that the focus should be on maintaining the current geostationary satellite capacity rather than any improvements. You can read the full text (including many typos) in the SFChronicle document, but to me, the summary is in this line: the program shall be redesigned to fit budget constrats (sic), not maximize new capabilities.
It is also clear that, as was reported by several media outlets, OMB intends for the priorities to begin being implemented immediately, and that they expect the agencies’ 2025 RIF and reorganization plans that it requested to be aligned with the priorities of this passback budget document:
OMB expects that the Department will exercise all allowable authorities and flexibilities to align the 2025 operating plans with the 2026 Passback. This includes reducing funding from areas that are not funded in Passback to areas that are protected or increased.
With regard to specifics that I have familiarity with, I want to focus first on the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), also known as NOAA Research. From the document:
Passback provides $171.474 million for OAR programs, a $484.579 million reduction from 2024 enacted Passback eliminates all funding for climate, weather, and ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. It also does not fund Regional Climate Data and Information, Climate Competitive Research, Sea Grant (College and Aquaculture), or the National Oceanographic Partnership Program. At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office.
So, while devastating in my opinion, this paragraph is actually pretty straightforward and does not need much reading between the lines. The intent of the administration is to eliminate NOAA Research and close all of the NOAA research labs, cooperative institutes (CIs), and Sea Grant programs. I feel compelled to list all of the various research labs, their primary mission, and associated cooperative institutes so that you can see the breadth of what we are talking about eliminating:
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ (numerical weather prediction and fluid dynamics); associated cooperative institute: Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System (CIMES), Princeton University
Air Resources Laboratory (boundary layer and air transport research), College Park, MD
Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Miami, FL (tropical weather and oceanic research); associated cooperative institute: Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS), University of Miami
National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman, OK (severe thunderstorm and other high impact weather); associated cooperative institute, Cooperative Institute for High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO), University of Oklahoma
Earth Systems Resource Laboratories in Boulder, CO, consisting of four individual labs:
Chemical Sciences Laboratory (atmospheric composition and climate)
Physical Sciences Laboratory (water availability and extremes)
Global Sciences Laboratory (numerical weather prediction and decision support)
Global Monitoring Laboratory (measurement of greenhouse gases, ozone, and changes in clouds/radiation)
Associated cooperative institutes: Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), Colorado State University, and Cooperative Institute for Earth System Research and Data Science (CIESRDS), University of Colorado
Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle (research on oceans and interactions with atmosphere, ecosystems and climate); associated cooperative institutes: Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES), University of Washington; Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (CIMAR), University of Hawai’i; Cooperative Institute for Marine Ecosystem and Resources Studies (CIMERS), Oregon State University
While I’ve listed each lab’s primary CI, the individual CIs often work with other labs and NOAA entities, and there are several other CIs that work across NOAA (all of the CIs can be found here). NOAA Sea Grant operates in each coastal and Great Lakes state, performing research, outreach and extension related to NOAA’s mission. Elimination of the funding for regional climate centers is also of tremendous importance. The regional climate centers (RCCs) maintain climate data web services and products that are used extensively by the public, private sector and academia. For example, I use the XMACIS RCC website almost every day to help retrieve climatic data to help contextualize weather events and records. That site will be lost assuming this funding elimination happens.
The passback document goes on to say:
Passback moves the remaining funded programs- the U.S. Weather Research Program Tornado Severe Storm Research/Phased Array Radar, Joint Technology Transfer Initiative, Ocean Exploration and Research, Integrated Ocean Acidification, Sustained Ocean Observations and Monitoring, and High-Performance Computing Initiatives to the remaining line offices, primarily NOS and NWS. These moves will allow these research programs to carry out research that is more directly related to the NOAA mission. By April 24, 2025, NOAA shall provide revised PPAs/PPA levels, either through increases to existing PPAs or lifting and shifting PPAs from OAR to other line offices. In general, these movements of funds from OAR to other lines offices should be done with the goal to streamline program management rather than increase bureaucratic layers
This paragraph has been the focus of a lot speculation in the weather community because of what it preserves from OAR. There is a lot of bureaucratic language here that I will try to decipher.
This is a screen capture from the FY2024 Omnibus budget act showing OAR’s budget that year. If you look closely, you can see that the lines in the passback document match a number of the specific budget allocations in this table. What is listed in the passback paragraph above are not programmatic areas, they are specific budget allocations (PPAs) that receive specific appropriation amounts each year from Congress. So the passback is not necessarily saying there is a desire to preserve any specific weather or oceanic research programs per se; it is saying that these budget lines (PPAs) are being maintained and rolled into the budgets of the other line offices.
Obviously if the budget lines are being maintained, at some level this does mean some of the research is still being supported. Here we would really need to know more details about agency plans to better understand the implications, and obviously those plans may not even exist yet. Still, the current nature and intent of these PPAs can give us pretty strong indications, which I think are important for the public and weather community to understand.
US Weather Research Program (USWRP) and Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI) are grant programs currently managed by the Weather Program Office (WPO) of OAR. They provide research grants for specific, time limited research projects to both NOAA affiliated institutions like cooperative institutes, and to other academic and private sector partners. While some small amounts of this funding may help fund lab infrastructure in support of projects that are associated with a given NOAA Research lab, this funding is not for the labs themselves, and clearly the intent of the passback is for this funding to now be managed by NWS to fund NWS prioritized research (and to be fair, in my opinion there are both pros and cons to this approach).
I have heard and seen speculation about what the Tornado Severe Storm Research/Phased Array Radar callout means in relation to NSSL. The first thing to understand here is that this again is not a programmatic reference but a reference to a budget PPA as you can see in the table above, in this case, the funding that is provided to NSSL specifically in support of Phased Array Radar (PAR) research. This is not the general funding that is provided to NSSL for its overall severe and hazardous weather research programs; that funding goes to NSSL as part of the “Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes” funding in the table above. My educated guess is that the intent of the passback is for NWS to manage this funding PPA (and associated research) as part of their RadarNext program, which is developing requirements and evaluating alternatives for the next generation weather radar network for the country, or perhaps within the NWS severe weather program.
So, while the passback does maintain funding for some specific budgetary allocations that OAR was receiving, I think it is very important to distinguish that from funding for any actual OAR offices or entities. Given the directions in the passback to modify PPAs and the last sentence of the paragraph above in which NOAA is directed to meet a “goal to streamline program management rather than increase bureaucratic layers,” I feel the intent here is for these budget allocations to be absorbed into NWS rather than maintaining any vestigial aspect of OAR or its structure. While it is certainly possible that the process of rolling these budget authorities into NWS will mean that some federal jobs and/or resources will be absorbed from OAR into NWS, it seems clear the overarching intent of the passback is to eliminate all of the NOAA Research labs and the associated CIs and administrative infrastructure.
So, clearly the ramifications of all of this to the weather and broader scientific community are massive. Labs like NSSL that developed Doppler weather radar for the country, GFDL that did groundbreaking climate and numerical weather prediction research, and AOML that has played a crucial role in making major advances in hurricane prediction in the last decade, would all be gone - along with all of the other impacts I describe above, and many more impacts to NOAA that I do not detail but that you can read in the full document.
While NWS is level funded in the passback compared to FY2024, in the document OMB directs NOAA to “streamline (NWS) operations and eliminate unnecessary functions in order to best service the American people.” Just today, the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times reported on substantial additional service reductions that the NWS is planning as a result of staffing losses. Given the overall direction of the passback document and dramatic backing away from research and innovation in NOAA, it seems clear that a future NWS will be a much different entity than the one that exists today, and I would suspect heavily focused on observations and some basic core public services (such as warnings).
Obviously, there is a lot happening within the federal government science enterprise beyond what I am describing here, including in health, space, energy, etc. I am interested in and concerned about it all. But meteorology is the field in which I have spent my career, and hopefully by sharing my detailed perspectives on what I am seeing, that will help you better understand what is happening not only in the weather enterprise but also the broader US scientific sphere. It is important to remember that what is outlined in the OMB document is still in the proposal stage and has not yet been executed. Regardless of current intent, there is still opportunity for change, and if this is an area that you feel a strong interest in as I do, hopefully you will stay aware and engaged as the bureaucratic processes move along. I would encourage questions and discussion in the comments section below, I have opened it for all subscribers.