When Brian Ritchie takes his 53-foot charter fishing boat into the cold, choppy waters of the Cook Inlet near Homer, Alaska, carrying a dozen or more anglers hoping to catch Pacific halibut, he’s paying extra attention to weather conditions. That’s because an automated National Weather Service station that provided detailed local wind reports is offline and won’t be operational until at least November.

“It's a long season and we've gone half a year without knowing what the wind is doing in a part of the inlet that we fish a lot,” said Ritchie. “That's pretty important, especially for charter fishing. Because the people that I take out like watching ‘The Deadliest Catch,’ but they don't like living it.”

Ritchie’s weather station issue, which hasn’t resulted in any disasters so far, isn’t an isolated headache. Nationwide, launches of weather balloons have dropped, decreasing the amount of data on temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction that feeds into weather prediction models, fire and marine weather forecasts and aids the aviation industry. Off U.S. coasts, fewer buoys are measuring wave conditions than in 2024. As wildfires rage across western states, there’s a tight supply of specialized meteorologists to provide detailed weather data that helps communities and firefighters make lifesaving, tactical decisions, people familiar with the matter told Forbes. A 20-year-old program that measures arctic ice just got cut, and plans for next-generation weather satellites to replace two critical ones that may begin to fail in the early 2030s have been halted.

This is what happens when the government dismantles the country’s vast environmental intelligence system. Built over decades, NOAA’s sprawling network of satellites, balloons, buoys, radar stations and scientists underpin much of the U.S. economy. Fishermen use it to decide whether waters are safe to sail. Farmers use it to determine when to plant and harvest. Airlines use it to route flights. Insurers and reinsurers use it to assess risk of losses from major events like hurricanes, fires and large-scale accidents. Utilities, builders and emergency officials use it to manage power grids, protect infrastructure and keep people alive.

“Sometimes its impacts are a little bit more diffuse unless you're directly employed by those sectors,” said Costa Samaras, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, who advised the Biden administration on upgrading infrastructure for a warming climate. “There are also simple things like, ‘Will my street flood? Is there a hurricane approaching? Am I safe from tornadoes? These are all very tangible impacts people around the country tend to understand.”

Up to 6% of U.S. GDP is impacted by weather conditions, worth as much as $1.34 trillion annually

NOAA’s systems rarely announced their value. They just worked—until they didn’t. Now failures are arriving quietly: one dead weather station, one missing balloon, one stale map, one climate website at a time.

In dozens of interviews with current and former NOAA employees and representatives of industries that depend on its data, Forbes found that as America’s environmental intelligence goes dark piece by piece, it raises risks to lives and property while pushing new costs onto businesses and consumers. The systems and cuts made to them may seem obscure; the bill won’t be.

The root cause is Elon Musk’s DOGE program, which in early 2025 slashed jobs, budgets and programs in a Red Wedding massacre across all federal agencies. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service and is responsible for providing crucial intel about weather and climate patterns, it began with a 10% budget cut and the elimination of about 17% of staff, totalling about 2,500 people. Worse, among those who left were several hundred veteran NOAA and NWS researchers who took early retirement deals.

“DOGE ripped apart the agency," said Craig McLean, a career NOAA researcher and former chief scientist who retired from it in 2022 after more than 40 years. “Across NOAA in totality, 27,000 years of experience left by April of last year.”

Congress prevented deeper cuts, but the Trump administration is seeking a further 27% reduction in fiscal 2027, aiming to slash the budget to about $4.4 billion from $6.17 billion beginning this year, a move critics say would do even more wide-ranging harm.

“Even more damaging is the cutoff, not of future services, but of information products that are going stale across the board,” said Stephen Volz, a physicist who retired as an assistant administrator at NOAA in June. “That's where you see this thousand cuts of information ignorance.”

The National Weather Service is adding back staff, hiring 321 meteorologists, hydrologists, electronics technicians and physical scientists since late last year, said spokesman Christopher Vaccaro. He didn’t provide details on overall staffing at NOAA. Additionally, all 122 of NWS’s local weather forecast offices have enough staff to provide 24/7 forecasting operations, Vaccaro said.

Rachel Hager, with NOAA Fisheries, said it doesn’t discuss “personnel or internal management matters” and that it’s optimizing available resources.

“Perhaps no other federal entity facilitates greater economic and commercial activity than NOAA and its data sources”

Homer, Alaska’s dysfunctional weather station is just one example of how data collected by NOAA underpins not just weather apps, but shipping routes, insurance models and crop decisions. It informs construction choices made by architects, roadbuilders and city engineers, and triggers disaster warnings. Up to 6% of U.S. GDP is impacted by weather conditions, worth as much as $1.34 trillion annually. The National Weather Service estimated in 2024 that it produced $73 of value for taxpayers for every dollar invested into it.

“Perhaps no other federal entity facilitates greater economic and commercial activity than NOAA and its data sources,” Frank Nutter, former president of the Reinsurance Association of America (RAA), the financial industry that backstops insurance companies, told Congress in 2025 when lobbying to restore funding for NOAA that DOGE sought to cut.

That’s why NOAA is part of the Department of Commerce. “Weather impacts basically two-thirds of our economy in one way, shape or form,” said John Morales, a former NWS meteorologist and founder of consultancy ClimaData Corp. “And there are more things in harm's way nowadays. That's certainly a contributing factor to billion-dollar disasters increasing.”

Things like fewer weather balloons, ocean buoys and the fate of future weather satellites have some industries on edge. “Natural hazard observations and data access are core federal responsibilities and a critical national capability that serves every American,” said Karalee Morell, executive vice president and general counsel for RAA. Morell is particularly concerned about staffing shortages and how that’s impacting NOAA’s ability to gather the data that feeds into weather prediction models and forecasts essential to industries including construction, real estate, aviation and insurance that contribute hundreds of billions of dollars annually to the U.S. GDP.

Already, forecasters have been caught by surprise. In central Kansas, no one predicted two tornadoes that hit the region this past spring, apparently due to staffing shortages. Gaps in weather balloon coverage, also tied to fewer NOAA staff, led to less accurate predictions of Typhoon Halong’s intensity and storm path in western Alaska last October. Modeling by Alan Gerard, a former NWS meteorologist, shows a decline in the accuracy of the NWS’s global weather model between 2024 and 2025.

In the wake of Hurricane DOGE, complaints from industry groups and states led to bipartisan efforts to claw back funds for NOAA. For example, after deadly floods in Texas last summer, NWS was authorized to add 450 employees, but it appears to have only hired around 275 employees through the end of June. Most of those are less experienced than staff who took buyouts last year, said Margaret Cooney, an energy and climate policy specialist with the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

“They’ve gone into this extreme weather season a good 300 employees short and with reduced institutional knowledge of where they were pre-DOGE,” she said. “And with fewer resources and staff, current employees are stretched thin and without the tools needed to be consistently successful at their jobs.”

Today, NOAA researchers often aren't approved to travel to visit long-term measurement sites–like that weather station in Homer, Alaska–to do calibration and maintenance, according to a NOAA staffer who requested anonymity.

Over the past 18 months, NOAA data sites, including Climate.gov, Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters, Radar Next, and regional marine and climate datasets, have been deactivated (though some of the research is being maintained by outside volunteers on non-government websites).

“The last year has been a heck of a rollercoaster,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. His organization relies on NOAA data to guide the design of infrastructure like culverts, sewers and drainage channels to withstand intense rainfall and flooding. After the staff cuts, status reports on a critical update to that database, known as Atlas-15, stopped for months, though it’s back on track.

Similarly, weather satellites that take years to plan are functional, but future upgrades aren’t happening right now, said Volz, the former NOAA assistant administrator. “The satellite programs take a long time to build. They’re generational spacecraft systems–block upgrades you do every 10 to 20 years. And we’re about halfway, maybe two-thirds of the way through the block implementation for low-earth orbit” satellites, he said. But planning for replacements stopped last spring, after the DOGE team arrived, and “my biggest concern is that they are not going to be ready … when it needs to be in 2032,” Volz said.

Not everyone is experiencing disruptions. Carolyn Olson, who raises organic corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa in Cottonwood, Minnesota, and is vice president of the Minnesota Farmers Bureau, said the 10-day NWS forecasts she relies on to determine when to plant haven’t been affected by budget or staff cuts. And the NWS station in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that produces them even “had a huge radar upgrade this summer,” she said.

“I may be more fortunate than some in other areas,” said Olson, a self-described weather nerd who was trained as a storm spotter by NWS and provides daily precipitation data from her farm to NOAA’s CoCoRaHS network.

More Cuts

Despite NOAA’s value to the economy, the Trump Administration wants to extend DOGE’s budget and staff cuts. Before his current role as director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought was the architect of Project 2025, a controversial collection of proposals for Trump’s second term that he denied knowledge of on the campaign trail but has largely adhered to as president.

NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” it declared. That didn’t happen under Musk, but Vought is still pushing for it in the 2027 budget request he submitted to Congress in April.

The proposal, which seeks to cut NOAA’s budget by $1.6 billion while boosting defense spending by $500 billion to $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2027, would terminate what Vought calls “Green New Scam programs at NOAA,” such as educational grants that “consistently funded efforts to radicalize students against markets, promote DEI, and spread baseless environmental alarm.”

“We’ve had to spend extra time working around the word ‘climate’” to sidestep the administration’s anti-climate science bent

NOAA researcher

The administration’s repudiation of climate science has meant that NOAA’s remaining staff must navigate linguistic hurdles. “We’ve had to spend extra time working around the word ‘climate,’” according to anonymous comments from staffers shared with Forbes. In seeking research funding, for example, that means replacing the word “climate” with “changing ecosystems” or “seasonal changes,” according to people familiar with the matter.

“We are trying to do the same climate-type work (albeit with fewer people) but have to tiptoe around so we can stay under the radar,” one person said.

That anti-climate militancy has hit projects that have nothing to do with climate science. Bill Dewey, a spokesman for aquaculture company Taylor Seafood who also runs a shellfish farm of his own off the coast of Washington, says his farm was part of a NOAA grant to harvest algae and transfer it to terrestrial fields to enhance the soil.

“But because the title of the project was ‘Blue Carbon to Green Fields,’ it got canceled by the administration,” he said. The $5 million NOAA grant, for a study to be done by the University of Washington, was to determine if the algae is beneficial for farmed crops. It’s been partially restored, but without funding for scientific research.

“They're going to give me a little bit of money to harvest my seaweed and give it to some farmers,” Dewey said. “Hopefully, we can do some level of research to understand whether there's actually a benefit to it or not.”

NOAA’s challenges are also impacting Taylor Seafood, which sells $80 million a year of oysters, clams, mussels and geoducks raised off the coast of Washington state. Dewey said NOAA research on ocean acidification, which harms its crop, probably saved the 136-year-old company back in 2009. But now a new habitat restoration research plan Taylor submitted to NOAA isn’t moving as fast as hoped, apparently because of fewer scientific resources at the agency.

“We've been frustrated with the pace,” he said.

Private Data

Vought’s proposed gutting of NOAA is predicated in part on his desire that the agency’s functions should be privatized. Floodplain managers like Berginnis or civil engineers and urban planners fear that would raise costs and lead to unreliable data.

Cities and states would have to begin paying private data companies for information previously funded by federal taxes, said Marsha Anderson Bomar, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a long-time engineer for the city of Atlanta and its transit agency. Both she and Berginnis also worry private companies won’t be as open about their methodology as NOAA, making the data less trustworthy.

“What is your confidence that they have the experts who are going to make sure that we have the right data in the right form that is accurate, verified and validated? All those things that engineers worry about,” she told Forbes. “Because if I use a data source that I don't know for sure has been validated, I could be way off. It only takes a small error in an early calculation to have something go very wrong.”

Musk and Vought may not value what NOAA does, but maintaining the breadth of its work is a priority across multiple industries.

“Collecting basic data isn’t sexy, so it doesn't capture the public's mind or eye, but I guarantee you it’s foundational to not only our hazard reduction efforts, but I think to our very success as a country,” said floodplain manager Berginnis.

“Having good, solid science and data allows us to build programs and policies and all those things on top of it. You take away that foundation and I’m very, very concerned about what direction that takes us.”

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