Assessing NOAA’s Continued Role in Climate and Weather Science

At a seafood expo in Boston last month, Togue Brawn, the founder of the seafood business Downeast Dayboat, spoke up from the audience to ask a panel of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) administrators an urgent question about funding.

What, Brawn wanted to know, is the status of the Saltonstall Kennedy program? The grant program—which helps fishing communities market their catch, build capacity, and conduct research to advance their fisheries—had been on hold for a year. “As someone who works with a lot of small-boat fishermen, we could use all the help we can get,” she told the panelists.

But Eugenio Pineiro Soler, assistant administrator of NOAA Fisheries, could not say when the popular program would restart.

Congress fully funded NOAA in January, ignoring the president’s plan to gut the agency. But NOAA has yet to restart many programs that were put on hold by the Trump administration in 2025, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is slow-walking the release of congressionally approved funding.

“OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] controls the purse strings, and [Director] Russell Vought has essentially said, Congress may appropriate it, but that doesn’t mean we have to spend,” noted Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

NOAA hasn’t been dismantled, as experts feared, but its ability to carry out its duties—monitoring and conserving fish stocks, managing coastal waters, and predicting changes in weather, climate, and the oceans—is diminished. Big staffing cuts, the uncertainty of when and if the OMB will release program funds, and executive orders redirecting the agency’s priorities all impact fishing communities.

And the existential threat to the agency remains: The administration’s proposed budget for next year, released in April, once again slashes NOAA to the bone. Moreover, a new Ocean Conservancy report finds that the agency cannot let down its guard: 42 of 500 managed stocks are overfished, while 65 percent are being rebuilt or had flat or decreasing population estimates.

Here’s a closer look at the state of NOAA today.

Job Vacancies Largely Unfilled

NOAA Fisheries lost nearly 550 of its 3,000 employees last year, many of whom were career scientists working at the agency’s five regional science offices. One-quarter were firings of probationary staff; the remainder were resignations.

“It’s very difficult to lose and replace that type of expertise,” said Meredith Moore, director of the fish conservation program at Ocean Conservancy. Some regions were harder hit, with the Pacific Northwest region reporting a 40 percent loss of staff and Alaska losing half its employees.

NOAA staffers declined interviews with Civil Eats for this article. Outside observers say that last year’s job cuts and the administration’s new “Schedule Policy/Care” rule stripping federal employees of civil service protections has had a profound chilling effect on their willingness to speak to the press.

“Everyone understands the precarity of the situation that they’re in,” Moore said.

However, when asked how many positions might be rehired, a NOAA spokesperson did respond by saying that it was longstanding practice not to discuss personnel matters and adding, “we don’t speculate about things that may or may not happen in the future.”

While it’s unclear how many fishery employees may be rehired, none of the 21 NOAA jobs now listed are for fishery scientists.

At least one regional science office, in Alaska, has been cleared to hire back three out of 37 staff cut last year, said Linda Behnken, a fisher and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.

The agency’s National Ocean Service—which oversees coastal zone management, marine navigation, and the popular Sea Grant program, which funds collaborative research in every coastal and Great Lakes state—lost 20 percent of its staff and isn’t rehiring.

Derek Brockbank, executive director at the Coastal States Organization, a nonprofit that coordinates the work of state coastal zone management offices, said the agency is only hiring for administration priorities, like deep-sea mining and aquaculture.

The National Weather Service (NWS), however, has been hiring to replace the 550 staff who were fired or resigned last year. It’s “really focused on hiring recent graduates, which is cool,” said Tom DiLiberto, a meteorologist and former NOAA spokesperson now at Climate Central, a nonprofit climate research organization. But, he adds, “You can’t replace 30 years of experience with someone just out of school.”

Delayed Stock Assessments and Guidance

Deep staff cuts are hobbling fisheries management. The stock assessments that underpin regulatory decisions are being delayed, made less rigorous, or dropped altogether. NOAA is also behind schedule with issuing some of the rules that guide fishing.

In the Gulf region, for instance, “Fishery management plans are backing up and bottlenecking,” said Eric Brazer, deputy director of the Gulf of America Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance. “We have about 10 actions the Gulf Council has taken that are waiting for NOAA rulemaking. They’re lost in the process, because NOAA doesn’t have the resources to move these things through.”

Similarly, in Alaska, fishers have learned that a long-expected rule amendment was pushed to 2028, said Linda Behnken, a fisherman and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association. The amendment would allow fishermen to release at sea unintentionally harvested, undersized sablefish rather than having to land them and count them toward their quota.

Having to land those small fish, which fetch $2 a pound versus $6 or $7 a pound for larger fish, has “a huge impact on the industry,” Behnken said. “It can make your catch worth half to a third less.”

NOAA’s Alaska science office also rolled over last year’s quota and fishing limits without doing stock assessments, Behnken said. “That’s super risky because in some cases the surveys show a big decline.”

Meanwhile, the northeast science office dropped the number of stock assessments planned for 2026 from 20 to six. Another six stock assessments were downgraded to updates.

Many, however, support such scaled-back stock assessments. “For the most part, [these] are going to be fine and we probably need to do that anyway,” said Charlie Phillips, owner of Phillips Seafood and Sapelo Sea Farm and a member of South Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

Fisheries Management Pushed to the States

ANOAA spokesperson said the fisheries division was working with independent regional councils to implement last April’s executive order titled Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness, including “considering where regulatory changes are needed to simplify or improve fisheries management.”

One way the councils are following the president’s executive order is by shifting management to the states. The Pacific Northwest Council, for instance, removed 47 species from federal management. California agreed to manage six groundfish (blue rockfish, deacon rockfish, cabezon, China rockfish, copper rockfish, and kelp greenling).

Oregon and Washington declined to do so, compromising with NOAA to move the same six species into an “ecosystem component” system, which means they’re still monitored but not subject to federal regulations, fishing permits, or annual catch limits.

That creates a messy, confusing system and it weakens the fisheries, Moore said, noting that the West Coast groundfish fishery has been a big management success. “It’s wild that we’re just throwing a bunch of species out of management.”

Most states don’t have the resources, enforcement capacity, or scientific capability to manage the species the federal government drops. “They don’t have legal requirements to understand what overfishing is or to rebuild the stock if it’s depleted,” Moore said.

Neither are they authorized to manage fish in federal waters, which are three miles offshore. Also, states will ask for payment to pick up the management, Rosenberg said, so no money is actually saved.

“It’s a dance to figure out what level of protection [a species] needs and at the amount of resources you have,” Phillips said. “We didn’t have the funds before they started cutting things, and we definitely don’t have funds now.”

Deregulation of Entire Fisheries

The Magnuson Stevens Act, which governs fisheries in federal waters, includes a provision for experimental permitting, which allows NOAA to issue permits for catch quotas beyond set limits. Historically, the agency has granted experimental permits to support cooperative research, such as for testing new types of fishing gear.

Now it’s applying this permitting provision, relabeling it as “exempted,” to an entire fishing sector, approving red snapper for exempted permits for recreational fishing in Florida, Georgia, and South and North Carolina.

“It was one of the solutions in the President’s seafood competitiveness executive order to allow for additional fishing opportunity,” Moore said, describing it as “a giant loophole to get around all of the protections.”

Last week, NOAA approved red snapper for exempted permits for recreational fishing in Florida, Georgia, and South and North Carolina. Moore said such a move spells disaster. “Our estimate of the total amount of fishing that the recreational sector will do under these exempted permits is 20 times the sustainable annual catch limit, which is going to cause a lot of overfishing and very plausibly crash the stock.”

“I am very, very skeptical that this is going to come out well,” Phillips said.

Climate Research Division Intact, but Hobbled

Congress did not jettison NOAA’s climate science research division, the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), but the 16 cooperative institutes that collaborate with OAR to research climate-change impacts on our oceans and weather were “hit very hard,” Rosenberg said. These university-based institutes collect, analyze, and model long-term temperatures and atmospheric chemistry, among other tasks.

“They’ve fired all the staff, and they’re refusing to rehire them,” he said, adding that the administration is also starving the programs of funding. The cooperative institute at Princeton, for example, lost all its funding last year. The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado, will furlough half its staff in May if NOAA doesn’t resume funding for its grants.

To add to the challenges, in some instances, the OMB doles out money in 30-day spend plans, making it incredibly difficult for scientists to conduct research or for OAR to carry out a long-term mission, Moore said.

Furthermore, eroding OAR’s ability to do core science research ultimately hurts the weather service that fishers rely on for their safety. The NWS depends on that data and modeling to forecast the weather.

It also hurts our understanding of fishery populations. “With the way the oceans are changing so quickly, we’ve had 98 percent drops in fish populations over two years,” Behnken said, adding, “Those are the impacts we’re going to face” with a handicapped NOAA—one with fewer staff and no ability, she said, “to do the climate modeling and predicting we’ve always relied on.”

National Weather Service Remains Public, but Trust Is Eroded

Many worried the administration would privatize weather services, but that’s not happening “to the levels people were fearing,” said DiLiberto.

NOAA is shifting to buying satellite and weather-balloon information from private companies to fill gaps in its own underfunded data collection, but when it comes to weather forecasting, it’s not yet privatizing those services.

“[The administration] is not going to be allowed to privatize weather,” Rosenberg said, “but they’re going to make it impossible [for NOAA] to collect all the weather data and make it harder to produce the [weather forecast] products.”

DiLiberto worries more that “no one trusts anything going on with the weather service any more” because the staff cuts have sometimes led to faulty forecasts with tragic consequences. That’s a big concern, he said, because a forecast is only as good as people getting it, understanding it, and acting on it.

Looking Toward the Future

NOAA has significant bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, so experts aren’t worried about the president’s proposed cuts in funding for the coming year.

They worry more about the OMB’s ability to starve the agency of current and future funding, and the administration’s attacks on science and research institutions. Though OMB’s tactics may be questionable from a legal standpoint, withholding funding is one of the many ways the Trump Administration is breaking norms to achieve its agenda.

“They’ve realized that you can withhold the money and make it difficult,” Rosenberg said. “They might not cut the programs but take a really long time to move the money—and kill the work that way.”

https://civileats.com/2026/05/05/noaa-is-still-standing-but-its-shaky/