Trump’s NOAA cuts would save less than a day and a half of Iran War spending

Our good friends at the Popular Information newsletter have calculated the real cost of the Iran War so far: $72 billion for the first 60 days, or about $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars per day. The numbers are revealing, in that they show the Trump administration is perfectly capable of finding money when the goal is destruction. But when it comes to protecting Americans from fossil-fueled extreme weather, suddenly we’re told the cupboard is bare. Because at the very same time Trump is spending roughly $1.2 billion a day on war, his administration is proposing to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA—the agency that helps keep Americans alive when the weather turns deadly. Supposedly, we just can’t afford it. The Trump administration recently released a proposed budget that would cut NOAA by 26 percent. This proposed $1.6 billion cut—equivalent to about 1.3 days of the war in Iran—would eliminate NOAA climate, weather, and ocean research labs, zero out grants that help improve rainfall and flood prediction, and cut the Integrated Ocean Observing System—our national system for monitoring what is happening in the ocean, where hurricanes strengthen, and where coastal flooding begins. And this comes on top of DOGE-driven layoffs last year that eliminated roughly 880 NOAA jobs, including staff at the National Weather Service. The stupidity of this is almost difficult to overstate. Because Trump is not proposing to gut NOAA during some calm, stable weather period. He’s doing it at the very moment forecasters are warning that a potentially dangerous El Niño may be on the way. The newest long-range forecast from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts shows a 100 percent chance of a so-called “Super El Niño” forming by November, potentially one of the strongest El Niño events ever recorded. El Niño is a natural warming pattern in the tropical Pacific, but it acts like a planetary heat amplifier—raising global temperatures, reshuffling rainfall patterns, and increasing the risk of droughts, floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather. Even a regular El Niño would risk pushing global temperatures into record territory. And it’s not like we’re starting from a great baseline: More than 60 percent of the U.S. is already in drought, which means a lot of landscapes are already primed for wildfire. Forecasters are already warning about elevated wildfire danger across multiple regions this spring and summer. .Under a normal administration, this would be the moment to invest in the agency designed to help us understand, forecast, and prepare for extreme weather. But this is not a normal administration. It is one completely and totally captured by the fossil fuel industry, which is desperately trying to suppress accurate information about climate change. And NOAA, in addition to being a weather forecasting agency, just so happens to be one of the most prestigious climate science agencies on Earth. This is why NOAA is being targeted for such huge reductions: Not because we need to save money, but because its research threatens fossil fuel dominance. Project 2025 said this out loud. It called NOAA one of the main drivers of the “climate change alarm industry,” said the agency should be broken up and downsized, and called for much of its climate research to be disbanded. So this is not just a proposed budget cut. It is a political attack on the government’s ability to understand climate change and warn the public about what’s coming. That’s not just my assessment. It’s also the assessment of Craig McLean, the former acting chief scientist of NOAA, who spent more than 40 years at the agency. In a recent post for SciLight, McLean wrote that the NOAA budget request “is not streamlining. It’s sabotage.” His argument is simple: You cannot eliminate the research that improves forecasts, protects communities, and helps the country understand what is coming—and then pretend you are making the agency more efficient. McLean knows what it looks like when politics corrupts weather science. You might recall, McLean was the NOAA official at the center of “Sharpiegate,” the infamous Trump-era scandal in which the president falsely claimed Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama, then displayed a forecast map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie to make him look right. McLean pushed back after NOAA leadership rebuked its own forecasters for correcting the president, calling for an investigation into whether the agency’s scientific integrity policy had been violated. McLean was then relieved of his position. This week on the HEATED podcast, I spoke with McLean about what these cuts would actually do, why NOAA research matters far beyond “the weather,” what Sharpiegate revealed about scientific integrity under Trump, and why attacking climate science is so dangerous at the exact moment Americans need it most. You can find the full interview at the top of this newsletter, on your favorite podcast app, or on YouTube.