Politico reports:

The Trump administration wants to effectively break up NOAA and end its climate work by abolishing its primary research office and forcing the agency to help boost U.S. fossil fuel production, budget documents show.

The move, outlined in a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget, carries forward President Donald Trump’s broader goals of slashing federal spending, gutting climate research and unleashing U.S. energy production.

But it also represents a dramatic shift in NOAA’s mission.

NOAA has long served as the nation’s preeminent climate and weather agency, and the new marching orders would downsize those functions in the pursuit of a “leaner NOAA,” the memo says.

It calls for a sharp spending cut at the agency.

NOAA would get about $4.5 billion in its next budget, down from roughly $6.1 billion in its 2025 enacted budget. Key to the cutback is the elimination of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which facilitates studies of the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, climate, weather patterns and other Earth systems.

The changes were outlined in a budget proposal shared this week with POLITICO’s E&E News by three current and former agency employees. The memo broadly calls for a shakeup within the Commerce Department, where NOAA is housed, to help balance the federal budget.

“Reaching balance requires: resetting the proper balance between Federal and State responsibilities with a renewed emphasis on federalism; eliminating the Federal Government’s support of woke ideology; protecting the American people by deconstructing a wasteful and weaponized bureaucracy; and identifying and eliminating wasteful spending,” the memo says.

The OMB document — called a “passback” memorandum because it notifies agency officials of what to expect in the forthcoming fiscal year — also indicates NOAA’s operations, research and facilities (ORF) budget would be cut by 38 percent, from $4.8 billion in 2025 to $3.47 billion in 2026.

The 12-page memo calls for radical changes to NOAA’s marine resource protection responsibilities by shifting all enforcement of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and other NOAA-specific endangered species functions to the Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency.

“I think it’s step one in the deconstruction of the agency,” former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in an interview Friday morning. “Any one of these [actions] are by themselves destructive enough. But taken together they foretell a much more calamitous outcome.” [Continue reading…]