If Trump and Musk Dismantle NOAA, Scientists Say Lives Will Be at Risk

“Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers are ransacking their way through the federal government, unlawfully gaining unfettered access to Americans’ private information and gutting programs people depend on,” Lofgren said in a joint statement with North Bay Rep. Jared Huffman. Both are ranking members of House environmental committees. “Now they have reached NOAA where they’re wreaking havoc on the scientific and regulatory systems that protect American families’ safety and jobs.”

The action at NOAA’s headquarters re-upped fears over a plan to significantly dismantle the department and get rid of the National Weather Service in Project 2025, the 900-page conservative policy document aiming to reshape the federal government that was published ahead of last year’s election. Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, but in his first few weeks in office, he’s already implemented some of its initiatives, and Russell Vought, considered one of its architects, was confirmed Thursday as his director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Project 2025 calls for eliminating many of NOAA’s functions and outsourcing others to states and the private sector. The document suggested that the agency drives climate change alarm and said its related research should be disbanded, calling it “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

Environmental experts and Democratic elected officials worry that its dismantling is what could be harmful.

“Privatizing this, basically eliminating it, would put Americans in danger,” Lofgren told KQED. “The Republicans are saying that climate change doesn’t exist, which is ridiculous, but the weather service tells us who’s in harm’s way. Ripping the rug out from under the program would prevent Americans from getting lifesaving information.”

‘Matters of life and death’

Since the beginning of the year, the NWS has issued red flag warnings and fire weather planning forecasts that helped prepare Southern California ahead of — and during — the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires. It tracked flooding in Sonoma County, prompting evacuations of low-lying areas that were underwater when the Russian River rose during recent storms.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain criticized the idea of cutting NOAA funding even before these events in one of his YouTube office hours last October.

In 2024, “the weather service has played an outsized role in peoples’ lives all around the country given the relatively extreme volume of extreme weather events we’ve seen — including some record-breaking ones — that 50, 60, 70 years ago probably would have killed hundreds of people if not thousands of people,” he said. “This time [the events] killed 10 to 100 times fewer people and resulted in many billions of dollars less in damages. That’s just this year.”

Seth Olyer, the president of Oakland’s firefighter union, said the department uses NOAA data to adjust staffing for red flag days and high wind events and ahead of storms that down trees and power lines and prompt evacuations.

“The day of the Keller Fire, we had upstaffed the amount of fire engines that were on the street from Oakland, and they were up in the hills patrolling because of the high wind event,” he said. “We have more people, more boots on the ground, to deal with the situation to keep small incidents small.”

“These are frequently matters of life and death,” he continued.

Air traffic controllers and the agriculture industry also rely on the weather data.

“I actually think it could impact farming as we know it,” said Andy Naja-Riese, the executive director of the Agricultural Institute of Marin.

He said farmers use weather modeling to make decisions every day — ensuring that they don’t plant crops before intense rains that would wash away seeds, staffing agricultural workers for harvest during heat waves, and preparing frost-prone crops for freezes. Ranchers also look at modeling to decide when livestock should be roaming outdoors.

“We grow a lot of wine grapes in the North Bay,” Naja-Riese told KQED. “Thinking through irrigation patterns and understanding how to prepare for things like when to water crops, let’s say, in the summer if there are forecasts of really intense heat that’s coming. You want to be able to plan for these types of activities, and you need reliable data to make that happen.”

Swain said that there are some private weather providers that give more agriculture-specific information, but that data comes from the weather service — as do commercial weather services and GPS apps found on Apple and Google devices.

“Where do you think the information in the Weather app comes from? It comes from NOAA,” Lofgren said.

Privatizing comes with costs

If the NWS — which costs individual taxpayers around $3 a year — were to be privatized, it would be expensive and likely time-consuming.

Noah Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, said a look at the budget of the federal programs gives a good idea of what it would take for a private company to run a comprehensive weather service. In 2023, the NWS had a budget of about $1.3 billion, while NOAA’s as a whole was $6.3 billion. That doesn’t include the investments needed to set up the infrastructure the federal government has built over the years.

“Our satellite observing systems that have now been in place for more than 40 years — that for a long time has really been dependent on government investments in satellite development,” Diffenbaugh said.

“While there certainly we can leverage knowledge that’s been developed, the reality is that the operational capabilities in terms of the real-time forecasts, the real-time warnings, the real-time response, you know, that’s all that’s all needed going forward,” he told KQED.

Creating new infrastructure would also take time. Climate scientist Swain said any gap in data would be dangerous.

“People would die in extreme weather events who would not have otherwise, [and the] economy would suffer,” Swain wrote on Threads on Wednesday. “Even a temporary or partial interruption in NOAA/NWS 24/7 lifesaving services — which are often used in an hour-by-hour (even minute-by-minute) context — would have this effect.”

Lofgren said that if Trump does move to dismantle the agency, which he doesn’t have the authority to do, it would take bipartisan support to stop him in Congress.

“Republicans control every level of government — the White House, the Senate, the House,” she told KQED. “We don’t have the capacity to put a bill on the floor.

“But we are fighting back. We’re taking whistleblower accounts and looking at what channels we might have in the democratic system.”

KQED’s Natalia Navarro contributed to this report.