STAT(S) of the Day:
The Big Ugly Cuts to Climate Science
The Forecast Calls for Extinction
Donald Trump and his Republican reality-denial cult just passed their Big Beautiful Bill. Buried in its thousand pages is one of the dumbest and deadliest policy decisions in American history: erasing climate change by erasing the people who study it.
And no, that’s not rhetorical flourish. This bill literally erases the scientists, the research centers, the forecast models, the data archives – everything that tells us Earth is warming and the weather is getting deadlier.
Here’s what the Big Beautiful Bill actually does to NOAA and the National Weather Service:
Cuts $2 billion from NOAA’s budget.
Not trimming fat. Amputating limbs. This includes staff, programs, and research grants vital to predicting severe storms, floods, and hurricanes.
Eliminates ~600 NWS employees.
That’s nearly 17% of the National Weather Service workforce gone. Fired or forced out through buyouts. Fewer forecasters to keep you alive.
Defunds NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) by 74%.
That effectively eliminates the entire federal research arm for climate, ocean, and atmospheric science. No OAR means no new hurricane intensity models, no tornado forecast advancements, no ocean warming research, no severe flood studies. Nothing.
Shuts down the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL).
This lab created dual-polarization radar, tornado detection models, and flash flood warning systems. Its elimination is like blowing up the CDC in the middle of a pandemic.
Eliminates NOAA’s Office of Education.
No scholarships, no training pipelines, no internships for future meteorologists or climate scientists. The knowledge chain ends here.
Ends development of forecast models.
The North American Mesoscale (NAM), High-Resolution Ensemble Forecasts (HREF), and others your local meteorologist uses to warn you? Funding cut. Future upgrades cancelled.
Discontinues the Billion-Dollar Weather & Climate Disasters database.
That public record showing climate disasters costing America hundreds of billions each year, worsening with global warming? Gone. Poof. Deleted.
And this is on top of the Elon Musk Doge Cuts™️.
Earlier this year, before Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill even passed, Musk’s Doge Cuts stripped NOAA and NWS staffing via unilateral efficiency mandates. In Texas, the Austin-San Antonio severe weather coordinator position was eliminated. That’s a region prone to catastrophic flash flooding and tornado outbreaks, left with fewer experts when it matters most.
By the way, you should know this. Kerr County continually asked for funding for a siren warning system in a known flood plain in an area known as Flash Flood Alley from the Republicans who control Texas’ purse strings and got denied.
But did you know how much such a system costs?
Turns out the town 15 miles down river, Comfort Texas, has a siren warning system.
It cost them just $75,000.
Why gut the National Severe Storms Laboratory?
Because it studies extreme weather, and extreme weather is climate change’s calling card. Kill the lab, kill the data. Kill the data, kill the narrative. Kill the narrative, keep the donations flowing from oil companies and keep your base believing climate change is just liberal fear porn.
This isn’t budget discipline.
NOAA’s entire research budget is pocket lint compared to Republican tax cuts for billionaires. This is about punishing reality.
They cut NOAA because NOAA tells the truth.
They cut NSSL because NSSL proves them wrong.
They cut OAR because OAR exposes the costs of their policies.
You can’t erase climate change by erasing climate science.
You can delete it from federal websites.
You can fire every scientist who utters the word “warming.”
You can defund every lab that models it.
But you can’t erase the problem itself. Because eventually, climate change will erase you.
Here’s what’s coming next:
Forecast accuracy declines as models go obsolete and upgrades vanish.
Severe storm warnings fail as staffing gaps widen and research ends.
Climate science loses an entire generation of American expertise and infrastructure.
More people die.
This is America’s suicide note.
A government so fragile it cuts its own eyes out to avoid seeing the approaching storm.
A political movement so desperate to preserve fossil fuel profits that it will let its own people die.
Enjoy the weather. And good luck!
So sad, and so true.
The stats don't lie, wonder where I have heard that before...oh yeah, you !
Thank you again Rachel; you are the fresh air needed to make facts blow far and wide.
Keep up the excellent work !
The longer these people (the fossil fuel industry) are allowed to control our future the WORSE it will get until it is too late to do ANYTHING to stop what is coming. And the WORST part is that we and they have known for YEARS how bad this is and just conned and lied to everyone into NOT believing what they can see with their own eyes. We are allowing others to commit us to suicide as a species along with all the other life on earth. Mother Nature does NOT care. Mother Nature is on her way. Mother Nature is going to clean house. And all the BULLSHIT LIES and DECEIT will NOT stop her from coming! "Mother Nature ALWAYS bats last, and she ALWAYS bats a thousand"