DOGE set to cancel lease on weather “nerve center” as tornado season begins

The Department of Government Efficiency is set to cancel the lease of a major National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facility that meteorologists call the “the nerve center for the entire weather enterprise in the United States.”

“I don’t think there’s any way I can overstate the importance of this Center in Maryland,” Don Paul, who spent nearly three decades as the chief meteorologist at WIVB-TV in Buffalo, New York, told Newsweek.

“We call it the ‘American Weather Enterprise,’ and by ‘we,’ I mean the American Meteorological Society, the industry, the private sector, as well as the government, the military, the Air Force and the Naval Weather Service,” Paul said Wednesday.

A day earlier, multiple outlets reported that the Trump administration was planning to make major cuts to NOAA, including cancelling the leases of several facilities that include the Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, Maryland.

Newsweek reached out to the NOAA, the National Weather Service (NWS), NOAA’s Hurricane Center and NOAA’s Storm Prevention Center via email for comment.

The reports come just as the country prepares to head into the Spring tornado season. About 70 percent of U.S. tornados take place between March to June.

“There’s never a good time for these kinds of awful decisions,” Paul said. “But this is an especially bad time, and later on, in the spring, we start to get concerned with hurricanes, and I’m not aware of what staffing changes, if any, are occurring at the National Hurricane Center.”

The South, Southeast and Mid-Atlantic are already facing threats of severe tornado activity this week. The severe weather pattern is expected to serve as a test to what remains of NOAA after the agency laid off about 800 staff last week.

“NOAA’s work helps protect Americans by monitoring extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, that pose a threat to millions of people,” Michael Mann, a nationally-recognized climatologist and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media, told Newsweek.

“They operate the hurricane hunters that fly into storms to collect key data that help us predict the paths and intensification rates of landfalling hurricanes. Canceling NOAA is putting Americans directly in harms way.”

The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore, perhaps the most well-known meteorologist in the country, called the reports of lease cancellations “horrible news for numerical weather prediction in this country” adding that the data from these facilities “saves lives.”

Current NOAA officials have also warned that deep cuts to the agency could harm vulnerable Americans who live in Tornado Alley ahead of what is likely to be another active tornado season.

Andrew Hazelton, a scientist with the NWS’ hurricane research division, said Monday on X, formerly Twitter, that while he’s “tried to stay fairly positive with recent messaging,” the cancelling of leases is “a direct attack that would cripple NOAA modeling capabilities and directly lead to more death and property loss if it is carried out.”

Opened in August 2012, the Center for Weather and Climate Prediction is associated with the University of Maryland’s flagship campus in College Park. The facility is where most of NOAA’s critical atmospheric modeling—not just nationally, but globally—takes place. According to a federal facilities profile of the center, it’s mission is to provide ” a seamless suite of environmental analysis, diagnostics and forecasts from the surface of the sun to the depths of the ocean floor.”

The center, which replaced an older facility in Silver Springs, where NOAA is headquartered, is filled with advanced super computers that drive the models meteorologists across the country use to forecast weather. Transferring this type of equipment—which are not just large, but also pose tremendous installation challenges—to another location would not be an easy feat.

“This is not like moving 50 Dell workstations to another office building,” Paul said. “It’s a huge facility and staffed by some of the Weather Service’s most talented meteorologists. You have to be somebody, academically and in terms of your achievements, before you get assigned to that center.”

“I can’t overstate how important that center is,” he said.

Paul said that the deal struck up between NOAA and the University of Maryland was already one way for the federal agency to lessen costs. He said that trying to further reduce costs by cancelling leases is “so illogical” because of how little NOAA accounts for the federal budget. For the 2024 fiscal year, the U.S. spent $6.8 billion on NOAA’s discretionary spending budget.

“That amounts to about $3 per taxpayer per year to get the kind of protection that we get,” Paul said, adding that, “I don’t think the public is fully aware of how much they’re getting on their tax dollars.”

Some believe that the reported lease cancellations, along with the recent layoffs and hiring limitations, suggest that DOGE is trying to dismantle NOAA entirely. Mann warned that “Without NOAA we are flying blind into a climate abyss.”

“NOAA has played—and continues to play—a fundamental role in monitoring the state of our atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and biosphere, collecting, maintaining and distributing key datasets used by scientists around the world,” Mann said.

Paul pointed out that the privatization of weather forecasting has been debated before. In 2005, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum previously sponsored a bill that would have crippled NOAA’s ability to compete with commercial forecasters like AccuWeather.

But Paul said that even if privatization was the administration’s endgame with NOAA, “you would still need this center.”