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The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has placed onerous new restrictions on its scientists that people within the agency say could hamper the quality and availability of the world’s weather forecasts, among other key services.
The new requirements have created a sense of unease within the agency, according to current and former high-level Noaascientists and officials the Guardian spoke with, and alarmed partners at European agencies.
“My expectation is that it’s going to be a crackdown on climate,” said a senior Noaa scientist. “People are just somewhere between disturbed and terrified.”
Last week Noaa’s office of research sent a message to all staff saying that “effective immediately”, the agency’s headquarters will implement a new layer of oversight over its scientists’ email and “virtual meetings” with foreign nationals. The new restrictions also require all Noaa employees and affiliates to document “all international engagements” in an internal spreadsheet for approval by a Trump political appointee on a case-by-case basis.
“We haven’t stopped anything yet,” the scientist said, but “it’s a crazy amount of stuff to do. Working internationally is so routine, it’s just hardly thought of.”
“It’s a difficult time to be a federal employee right now,” said the scientist, who did not want to be named.
The Noaa directive did not outright bar its scientists from continuing ongoing international collaboration, but the additional administrative burden appears to be especially onerous for the National Weather Service (NWS) – the division of Noaa that underpins all weather forecasting in the US and provides a constant stream of data on the atmosphere and oceans to the world for free as a public good.
A climate scientist at the EU’s Copernicus agency, who did not wish to be named, said he was “appalled and saddened” when he heard the news last week. “The climate crisis knows no boundaries, and halting international scientific collaboration can only undermine our ability to understand and combat it.”
Staff within Noaa are also preparing for further budgetary and staffing cuts which would place further strain on the agency. According to reporting from CBS, “current employees have been told to expect a 50% reduction in staff and budget cuts of 30%”.
Before he was confirmed as the director of the office of management and budget last week, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought proposed a 38% budget cut for Noaa to “to curb excessive mission creep in key agencies, halt steadily increasing climate extremism within the department, and eliminate the prioritization of woke agendas”.
Other policy experts within Trump’s inner circle want to privatize the NWS. A recent study found that for every dollar invested in the National Weather Service, it produces $73 in value to the American people (and more to the world through freely available public data access).
Because the NWS is so valuable to society, Greg Carbin, who until recently served as the chief of the forecast operations branch for the NWS’s weather prediction center, said the restrictions at Noaa cannot be seen to be strictly a cost-saving measure.
“Cutting these services now would be a reckless decision that would cost far more in lives and damages than it would ever save on a balance sheet,” said Carbin. “Investing in weather and climate services is not a cost – it is an essential safeguard for the nation’s security, economy and wellbeing.”
The steps appear to be part of a larger coordinated effort by the Trump administration to reduce government spending and reprioritize federal efforts away from the climate crisis.
Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), placed the head of Noaa’s human resources team on administrative leave and initiated an agency-wide purge of activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion. According to further reporting, Noaa staff have also been recently asked to compile lists of all climate-related programs the agency currently operates or funds.
Sources within Noaa say that the additional administrative burden, combined with an ongoing federal hiring freeze and additional anticipated staff and budget cuts, will hamper ability of the US to maintain a functioning public weather service. It could also result in a restriction in the freely available use of Noaa data abroad, which could have a profound global impact.
“Accurate forecasts protect lives, mitigate billions of dollars in disaster-related damages, and enable businesses, from agriculture to transportation, to operate more efficiently,” said Carbin.
European scientists who work with Noaa said they were worried by what they had heard from their US colleagues, but were waiting to hear what the changes would mean in practice for their work.
“One of the most concerning aspects of this situation is the availability of US datasets for environmental science, particularly in weather forecasting and climate science,” said Nicolas Bousserez, an atmospheric scientist at Copernicus, who was not speaking on behalf of the agency.
Bousserez, who has collaborated extensively with Noaa and Nasa, said it was not yet clear whether access would be restricted but that “such an extreme scenario remains plausible and could have significant consequences”.
The US has played an outsize role in climate and weather science for decades, particularly in fundamental climate observations, said Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at Maynooth University who has collaborated with Copernicus and Noaa. “It’s not as if in a worst case of Noaa going dark, everything would be sent into an existential crisis ... [but] it would not be pretty.”
Noaa did not respond to a request for comment.
The NWS usually employs about 4,500 scientists and technicians but is struggling to keep itself fully staffed. Noaa has a sprawling mission that spans the entire globe, but is primarily focused on maximizing science’s benefit to society.
“If the proposed cuts to Noaa and NWS are enacted, the consequences will be severe,” said Carbin. “It will lead to less accurate and slower weather forecasts and warnings–putting lives and property at risk.”
One senior Noaa official estimates that “hundreds” of Noaa staff have already accepted a federal buyout offered by the Trump administration.
