Trump’s NOAA cuts would save less than a day and a half of Iran War spending
Our good friends at the Popular Information newsletter have calculated the real cost of the Iran War so far: $72 billion for the first 60 days [https://substack.com/home/post/p-196611596], or about $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars per day.
The numbers are revealing, in that they show the Trump administration is perfectly capable of finding money when the goal is destruction. But when it comes to protecting Americans from fossil-fueled extreme weather [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/extreme-weather/], suddenly we’re told the cupboard is bare.
The Trump administration recently released a proposed budget [https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/2026-04/FY2027-NOAA-CJ-Submission.pdf] that would cut NOAA by 26 percent. This proposed $1.6 billion cut—equivalent to about 1.3 days of the war in Iran—would eliminate NOAA climate, weather, and ocean research labs, zero out grants that help improve rainfall and flood prediction, and cut the Integrated Ocean Observing System—our national system for monitoring what is happening in the ocean, where hurricanes strengthen, and where coastal flooding begins. And this comes on top of DOGE-driven layoffs last year that eliminated roughly 880 NOAA jobs [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/noaa-layoffs-trump-musk-doge/?utm_source=chatgpt.com], including staff at the National Weather Service.
The stupidity of this is almost difficult to overstate. Because Trump is not proposing to gut NOAA during some calm, stable weather period. He’s doing it at the very moment forecasters are warning that a potentially dangerous El Niño may be on the way.In today's episode, we talk to Craig McLean, the former acting chief scientist of NOAA, who spent more than 40 years at the agency [https://research.noaa.gov/craig-n-mclean-director-of-noaa-research-to-retire/]. McLean recently wrote that the NOAA budget request “is not streamlining. It’s sabotage.” McLean knows what it looks like when politics corrupts weather science. You might recall, McLean was the NOAA official at the center of “Sharpiegate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian–Alabama_controversy],” the infamous Trump-era scandal in which the president falsely claimed Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama, then displayed a forecast map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie to make him look right. McLean pushed back after NOAA leadership rebuked its own forecasters for correcting the president, calling for an investigation into whether the agency’s scientific integrity policy had been violated. McLean was then relieved of his position.
In our interview, McLean speaks about what these cuts would actually do, why NOAA research matters far beyond “the weather,” what Sharpiegate revealed about scientific integrity under Trump, and why attacking climate science is so dangerous at the exact moment Americans need it most.
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