Left Adrift: NOAA, DOGE, and the War on Science

As the Trump administration quietly dismantles NOAA, the nation’s scientific compass is being sabotaged one late-night termination at a time.

The dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is unfolding not through transparent policy changes but via covert operations led by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under the direction of Elon Musk. This process involves abrupt notifications to employees, often delivered after hours, leaving many to learn of their job status through media reports rather than official channels. Such tactics have resulted in significant layoffs and a climate of uncertainty within the agency.

Late Friday, reports began circulating that the NOAA, the nation’s foremost scientific agency for weather, oceans, and climate, would be broken apart. The administration, in keeping with its now-familiar tactics, left employees to learn the news through headlines rather than internal briefings. Only later, in a scattershot, often delayed series of after-hours communications, did individual staffers begin receiving messages about their own positions. Many were informed late in the evening, at the start of a weekend, isolated, unable to ask questions, and uncertain whether they still had jobs.

This is not merely administrative reshuffling. The restructuring plan aligns directly with Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for an authoritarian overhaul of federal agencies. Project 2025 explicitly targets NOAA for deconstruction, seeking to scatter its components to departments more easily controlled, while eliminating those functions, like climate science, that are politically inconvenient to the fossil fuel industry and to ideologues who see facts as enemies of faith and profit.

Under the proposed plan, NOAA will be gutted. Its budget is slated for a 27% cut, and over 2,000 employees have already been laid off or resigned. Programs essential to environmental monitoring, disaster preparedness, and ecosystem stewardship will be eliminated or transferred without clear plans for continuity or oversight. In its place, a Frankenstein's monster of siloed, underfunded fragments will struggle to uphold the public trust.

The administration’s disdain for science is total. Agencies like NOAA are not valued for the public good they provide, but feared for the data they produce. Inconvenient truths, rising sea levels, warming oceans, collapsing fisheries, and unsustainable extraction, threaten the mythologies of economic nationalism and resource dominance that this regime seeks to enshrine. Rather than confront those truths, they have chosen to silence the messengers.

The implications of these cuts stretch far beyond our borders. NOAA’s scientific presence in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Arctic has long been critical to monitoring oceanic health, responding to severe weather, and protecting fragile marine ecosystems. With its dismantling, international collaboration will weaken, and regions already facing the brunt of climate instability, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and beyond, will bear the cost of our abandonment.

This is more than bureaucratic bloodletting; it is a declaration of war on environmental science and global stewardship. It is part of a broader campaign to kneecap agencies that serve the public interest, replacing them with structures that serve private power. And it is happening right now quietly, strategically, while most of the country is being told not to look up.

What’s being done to NOAA is both destructive and deliberate. And if this regime continues unchecked, it won’t stop there.