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White House Plan Calls for NOAA Research Programs to Be Dismantled

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White House Plan Calls for NOAA Research Programs to Be Dismantled

Trump administration officials are recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times and several people with knowledge of the situation.

The proposal from the Office of Management and Budget would abolish the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office at NOAA, one of the world’s premiere Earth sciences research centers.

A budget allocation of just over $170 million, down from about $485 million in 2024, would hobble science as varied as early warning systems for natural disasters, science education for students in kindergarten through high school, and the study of the Arctic, where temperatures have increased nearly four times as fast as the rest of the planet over the past four decades.

“At this funding level, O.A.R. is eliminated as a line office,” the proposal states.

Programs that retained funding, including research into tornado warnings and ocean acidification, would be relocated to the National Weather Service and National Ocean Service offices.

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The outline for the 2026 budget passback, which would need to be approved by Congress, suggests “significant reductions to education, grants, research, and climate-related programs within NOAA” and comes after the dismantling of other agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the United States Agency for International Development, and the removal of mentions of climate change from federal websites.

Under the proposal, the total budget for the Commerce Department would be nearly $7.7 billion, a reduction of more than $2.5 billion from 2025 levels. According to the document, the budget would refocus on activities more in line with the Trump administration’s agenda, including enforcing trade laws and collecting scientific observations like ocean and weather data to support forecasting.

“This Administration’s hostility toward research and rejection of climate science will have the consequence of eviscerating the weather forecasting capabilities that this plan claims to preserve,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, the senior Democrat on the House Sciences Committee, said in an emailed statement.

NOAA, which takes up more than half of the Commerce Department budget, would receive just over $4.4 billion, a reduction of $1.6 billion from 2025.

“It’s not surprising, but it’s very disturbing,” said Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

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That includes reducing the budget for the National Marine Fisheries Service by one-third. The office would be split from NOAA and moved to the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Grants that fund species recovery and habitat conservation would be eliminated.

Funding for National Ocean Service, a branch of NOAA, would be cut in half. Programs like the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, an office within the ocean service that studies corals, pollution, and the effect of climate change and sea-level rise on coastal communities, would not be funded.

The National Centers for Environmental Information, which archives climate data, would lose a quarter of its funding.

The proposal would also alter NOAA’s satellite and space programs.

It would gut the Office of Space Commerce and relocate the Space Weather Prediction Center to the Department of Homeland Security. A program called the Traffic Coordination System for Space that was set to take over the monitoring of satellite traffic from the Department of Defense, a kind of traffic police for outer space, would also lose funding. The passback suggests having such work done by the private sector.

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The satellite program that provides data for weather forecasting and modeling would also be downsized. The longstanding relationship that helps NOAA acquire satellites through NASA would also be terminated.

Dr. Spinrad said the likelihood that this budget, as proposed by the White House, would pass Congress was low. “I don’t think it will withstand congressional scrutiny.”

The passback is part of balancing the federal budget, according to the document, which includes “eliminating the federal government’s support of woke ideology.”

Project 2025, a document that has been used as a blueprint for an overhaul of the federal government under the Trump administration, included a goal to break up NOAA and downsize its research arm.

“It begs the question, is the Trump Administration intentionally breaking our weather forecasting capabilities as an excuse to carry out the dangerous Project 2025 proposal to privatize the Weather Service?” Ms. Lofgren said in a statement.

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Project 2025, which was published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy research organization, called NOAA Research “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

“It would take the U.S. back to the 1950s in technical and scientific skill,” said Craig McLean, chief scientist at NOAA under both the first Trump presidency and President Biden, of the proposed budget.

The agency has until noon on April 15 to appeal the proposal. And it has until April 24 to submit plans for many of the overhauls the passback suggests, even before the proposal has been addressed by Congress.

On Thursday, probationary government employees who had been fired in February, and then reinstated by a judge, received an email from the Department of Commerce firing them again after the decision was reversed by a higher court. A so-called reduction in force plan could slash an additional 20 percent of its work force in the coming weeks.

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Video: Engineer Is First Paraplegic Person in Space

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Video: Engineer Is First Paraplegic Person in Space

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Engineer Is First Paraplegic Person in Space

A paraplegic engineer from Germany became the first wheelchair user to rocket into space. The small craft that blasted her to the edge of space was operated by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin.

Capsule touchdown. There’s CM 7 Sarah Knights and Jake Mills. They’re going to lift Michi down into the wheelchair, and she has completed her journey to space and back.

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A paraplegic engineer from Germany became the first wheelchair user to rocket into space. The small craft that blasted her to the edge of space was operated by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin.

December 21, 2025

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This City’s Best Winter Show Is in Its Pitch-Dark Skies

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This City’s Best Winter Show Is in Its Pitch-Dark Skies
Flagstaff mandates that shielding be placed on outdoor lighting so that it doesn’t project skyward. There are also limits on the lumens of light allowed per acre of land.

The result is a starry sky visible even from the heart of the city. Flagstaff’s Buffalo Park, just a couple miles from downtown, measures about a 4 on the Bortle scale, which quantifies the level of light pollution. (The scale goes from 1, the darkest skies possible, to 9, similar to the light-polluted night sky of, say, New York City. To see the Milky Way, the sky must be below a 5.)

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Social media users in the Central Valley are freaking out about unusual fog, and what might be in it

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Social media users in the Central Valley are freaking out about unusual fog, and what might be in it

A 400-mile blanket of fog has socked in California’s Central Valley for weeks. Scientists and meteorologists say the conditions for such persistent cloud cover are ripe: an early wet season, cold temperatures and a stable, unmoving high pressure system.

But take a stroll through X, Instagram or TikTok, and you’ll see not everyone is so sanguine.

People are reporting that the fog has a strange consistency and that it’s nefariously littered with black and white particles that don’t seem normal. They’re calling it “mysterious” and underscoring the name “radiation” fog, which is the scientific descriptor for such natural fog events — not an indication that they carry radioactive material.

An X user with the handle Wall Street Apes posted a video of a man who said he is from Northern California drawing his finger along fog condensate on the grill of his truck. His finger comes up covered in white.

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“What is this s— right here?” the man says as the camera zooms in on his finger. “There’s something in the fog that I can’t explain … Check y’all … y’all crazy … What’s going on? They got asbestos in there.”

Another user, @wesleybrennan87, posted a photo of two airplane contrails crisscrossing the sky through a break in the fog.

“For anyone following the dense Tule (Radiation) fog in the California Valley, it lifted for a moment today, just to see they’ve been pretty active over our heads …” the user posted.

Scientists confirm there is stuff in the fog. But what it is and where it comes from, they say, is disappointingly mundane.

The Central Valley is known to have some of the worst air pollution in the country.

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And “fog is highly susceptible to pollutants,” said Peter Weiss-Penzias, a fog researcher at UC Santa Cruz.

Fog “droplets have a lot of surface area and are suspended in the air for quite a long time — days or weeks even — so during that time the water droplets can absorb a disproportionate quantity of gasses and particles, which are otherwise known as pollutants,” he said.

He said while he hasn’t done any analyses of the Central Valley fog during this latest event, it’s not hard to imagine what could be lurking in the droplets.

“It could be a whole alphabet soup of different things. With all the agriculture in this area, industry, automobiles, wood smoke, there’s a whole bunch” of contenders, Weiss-Penzias said.

Reports of the fog becoming a gelatinous goo when left to sit are also not entirely surprising, he said, considering all the airborne biological material — fungal spores, nutrients and algae — floating around that can also adhere to the Velcro-like drops of water.

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He said the good news is that while the primary route of exposure for people of this material is inhalation, the fog droplets are relatively big. That means when they are breathed in, they won’t go too deep into the lungs — not like the particulate matter we inhale during sunny, dry days. That stuff can get way down into lung tissue.

The bigger concern is ingestion, as the fog covers plants or open water cisterns, he said.

So make sure you’re washing your vegetables, and anything you leave outside that you might nosh on later.

Dennis Baldocchi, a UC Berkeley fog researcher, agreed with Weiss-Penzias’ assessment, and said the storm system predicted to move in this weekend will likely push the fog out and free the valley of its chilly, dirty shawl.

But, if a high pressure system returns in the coming weeks, he wouldn’t be surprised to see the region encased in fog once again.

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