This story was originally published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The United States is hurtling towards a potential government shutdown if Congress does not pass a budget or short-term funding bill by the end of the month, and the fate of the federal government’s Earth and climate science programs may hang in the balance.
President Donald Trump has proposed vast, devastating cuts to these agencies, many of which target programs dedicated to studying and preparing for climate change. In the event of a shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has told agencies to consider layoffs or reductions in force for “all employees” in all “programs, projects, or activities” with lapsed funding that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”
As Sophia Cai notes in Politico, this is starkly different from how previous government shutdowns were handled, when federal workers were temporarily furloughed and returned to work when funding was restored. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer characterized the memo as an “attempt at intimidation.”
“When you cut holes in the mosaic…It has an impact on people’s lives and their livelihoods….We are really hurting our civil defenses.”
Bobby Kogan, a former OMB official with the Biden administration, said the direction may not be legal. “It doesn’t seem to me that they would really be able to legally do that additional work during a shutdown—and it doesn’t seem to me that they’d be able to get it all done beforehand,” Kogan told the Federal News Network. “So either this is something they were planning to do anyway, and they are just using this as a pretext, or it’s a threat to try to get what they want.”
Organizations that represent the interests of public workers have been more explicit: “The plan to exploit a shutdown to purge federal workers is illegal, unconstitutional, and deeply disturbing,” Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a statement. “A shutdown triggers furloughs, not firings. To weaponize it as a tool to destroy the civil service would mark a dangerous slide into lawlessness and further consolidate power in the Executive Branch.”
But illegality (or possible illegality) would not necessarily stop the Trump administration from choosing the layoff route if a budget deal is not reached. In any case, the memo obviously creates uncertainty and anxiety for the federal scientists whose work has been singled out for steep funding cuts or even elimination by the Trump administration.
“Either we all go home or it’s business as usual…nobody knows what’s going to happen,” one NASA scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Bulletin.
Earlier this year, the president submitted a budget request to Congress that would slash NASA’s overall 2026 budget by 24 percent. It is the clearest indication of what his priorities are going into a possible government shutdown. The steepest cuts were within science programs, which the president proposed reducing by more than 46 percent. Funding for Earth science programs specifically would be cut by more than half.
Proposed cuts to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research are also severe, outright eliminating the entire budget for climate research, weather and air chemistry research, and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). (In addition to cuts to Earth and climate science, the proposed budget recommends cutting all funding for habitat conservation and research, as well as ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes research.)
Although the White House recommended cutting NOAA’s budget by up to 30 percent, members of the House Appropriations Committee have recommended a much smaller cut of 6 percent. But by telling agencies to conduct layoffs based on the president’s priorities, the Trump administration could try to preempt Congress and reshape the federal government in line with their own vision and budget proposal during a shutdown.
Even without a government shutdown, a third of the US Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers could wind down or cease operations this week because the Interior Department is refusing to submit paperwork to release funding.
“This is a dismantling of efforts in the United States on climate science, and in fact, in large swaths of environmental science. And I don’t think that people know that,” Elisabeth Moyer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Bulletin. “This is wholesale destruction, what’s proposed.”
“We are not talking about trying to find water on Mars. We are talking about understanding what’s happening on our planet.”
There are at least 14 NASA Earth science missions that the Trump administration has proposed terminating. These include an array of satellite-related research (see: NASA missions at risk under the Trump administration).
The worst-case scenario would be if the government shuts down and agencies begin to comply with the administration’s budget proposal, including the termination of missions. According to a NASA scientist, people have already been instructed to do the preparatory work for ending these satellite and instrument programs, so this is not an impossibility.
The list of projects and programs that the Trump administration has proposed terminating at NOAA is, frankly, shocking. It includes the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, which conducts wide-ranging research on everything from aquaculture to corals to pollution; the National Coastal Resilience Fund; Habitat Conservation and Restoration; and OAR’s Regional Climate Data and Information program, which helps communities develop plans for dealing with climate crises like droughts and heat waves.
The budget also recommends terminating funding for OAR’s Climate Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, which would result in the closure of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory; the Air Resources Laboratory; the Chemical Sciences Laboratory; the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; the Global Monitoring Laboratory; the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory; and the Physical Sciences Laboratory.
NOAA has already been hard hit under the Trump administration this year. Rick Spinrad, a NOAA administrator under President Biden, said the agency has lost around 2,000 of its 12,000 employees to layoffs, buyouts, resignations, and retirement this year. (Exact figures are remarkably hard to find, but in March the New York Times reported that the agency was planning to fire another 1,000 workers in addition to the 1,300 workers that had already resigned or been laid off.) Some of the vacancies within the National Weather Service (which is part of NOAA) have resulted in reduced operations at some forecasting stations across the country.
Monica Medina, a principal deputy administrator of NOAA in the Obama administration, compared the work the National Weather Service does to issue weather forecasts to a mosaic. “When you cut holes in the mosaic…you’re losing pixels, and so the picture gets fuzzier,” she said. “It has an impact on people’s lives and their livelihoods. When key vacancies happen, when we cut holes, we are really hurting our civil defenses.”
The Trump administration has already withheld or rescinded several hundred million in funding for NOAA operations this year, Spinrad said. The Senate Appropriations Committee has been tracking federal funding that the Trump administration has frozen or cancelled (last updated September 8) totaling more than $400 million in NOAA funds, including those earmarked for disaster response and the procurement of weather radars and satellites.
“There are programs like the phased array radar program that have been pulled back—that was undoubtedly going to be one of the most important efforts in trying to improve observational capability for the National Weather Service,” Spinrad said. “So many of those kinds of programs are suffering, and that’s just what’s been done in [fiscal year] ‘25, I’m not even talking about the ‘26 budget.”
“We are not talking about trying to find water on Mars,” Medina said. “We are talking about understanding what’s happening on our planet, impacting people in their day to day lives today. We could be improving that in the face of these forces that are changing in our global environment. And instead, we’re taking away funding at the very moment when we need it most.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.