The Guardian reports:

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Project 2025, written by several former Trump staffers, has called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized”, claiming the agency is “harmful to US prosperity” for its role in climate science.

Rosenberg noted it had been a longtime goal of corporations that rely on Noaa data to prevent the agency from making the data public, instead of giving it directly to private corporations that create products based on it, such as weather forecasting services.

He also argued there was no legal authority to abolish Noaa or reduce its budget, outside of reducing it through Congress.

“There’s no real transparency. They just show up wherever they want, do whatever they want. They’re following through on major budget cuts and major staffing cuts,” Rosenberg added. “I think the strategy here is: ‘Well, we’re just going to do it and dare somebody to stop us, and by the time they stop us, we’ll have destroyed it.’” [Continue reading…]