Last Thursday, the head of that team was fired alongside hundreds of other NOAA employees. Bret Collier, who holds a PhD in biology, started running the Ecosystem Dynamics branch at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Michigan last May. Like most other “probationary” employees across NOAA and the National Weather Service—those who were new to the federal workforce, took on new positions or were promoted—he received a late afternoon email notifying him that he was being fired, effective at 5 PM.
NOAA is best known for its weather forecasts that alert people about the path of oncoming hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis. Its lesser-known “wet side” operations perform a long list of vital services baked into the operations of other federal agencies and private businesses, often in sparsely-staffed offices. Close allies of Trump—including several now serving in his administration—laid out plans to virtually abolish the entire agency in Project 2025, clearing the way for private companies like Accuweather to snap up lucrative new government contracts for work that has long been considered a public service. Elon Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency reportedly intends to cut NOAA’s staff in half, and has already moved to cancel leases for its labs and office spaces around the country.
These cuts mean NOAA staff will be forced to take “a more constrained approach to mission-specific operations moving forward,” said Collier. That means “longer time lapses between data collection and data dissemination, especially safety data.” Real-time observations and monitoring “may not be real-time anymore,” he added.
Aside from emails that have gone out to all federal employees encouraging them to take “higher productivity” jobs in the private sector and list their recent accomplishments, Collier said he had never been contacted to ask what his team did or the risks that might be posed by axing them, or about whether doing so would endanger programs mandated by federal legislation. Other fired NOAA employees I spoke with said that firings in their departments had been similarly indiscriminate.
A 2014 microsystin outbreak in Lake Erie—shallower and warmer than the other Great Lakes, and therefore more prone to large-scale algal blooms—left nearly half a million people in Toledo and surrounding areas without water for three days. Harmful algal blooms of the sort GLERL monitors are estimated to cost the U.S. $50 million per year nationwide through damage to public health, fisheries, and coastal restoration. That figure could rise as these phenomena grow more frequent in a warming climate.
As soon as she got word she was being fired, Cooley said “the race was on” to pass on necessary information to the rest of her team before her internet access was cut off and she lost access to her federal email and IT systems. “There was a whole lot to do, as fast as possible.”
From weather forecasting and warning systems to fisheries management, NOAA’s vast operations provide valuable research and information that can’t be replicated elsewhere—or by the private sector. Even massive corporations don’t have the capacity in-house to produce the kinds of detailed maps and forecasts that NOAA creates, and that large and small businesses alike depend on every day. Academic researchers around the world rely on observations from NOAA buoys and satellites to understand the ocean carbon cycle worldwide, a key factor in the stability of the earth’s climate given that the ocean is the world’s largest carbon sink. That monitoring also makes it possible to prepare for and limit the considerable damage caused by El Niños and marine heat waves, and build durable infrastructure. “Who’s going to put up satellites and place buoys in the ocean, and do it at cost? That’s not going to happen,” Cooley says. “When it comes to the fundamental earth observations of ocean heat content and acidification—the things that inform how habitats are doing, and how to manage them skillfully—those things are not monetizable because not every citizen is going to be willing to pay for that information.”
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