In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.
Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather.
Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would close 10 laboratories run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that research the ways a warming planet is changing weather, among other things. That work is essential to more accurately predicting life-threatening hazards. Among the shuttered labs would be one in Miami that sends teams of “hurricane hunters” to fly into storms to collect critical data. The proposed budget would also make major cuts to a federal program that uses river gauges to predict floods.
The president is also envisioning a dramatically scaled-down Federal Emergency Management Agency that would shift the costs of disaster response and recovery from the federal government to the states. The administration has already revoked $3.6 billion in grants from FEMA to hundreds of communities around the country, which were to be used to help these areas protect against hurricanes, wildfires and other catastrophes. About 10 percent of the agency’s staff members have left since January, including senior leaders with decades of experience, and another 20 percent are expected to be gone by the end of this year.
The White House and agency leaders say they are making much-needed changes to bloated bureaucracies that no longer serve the American public well.
FEMA, for one, “has been slow to respond at the federal level. It’s even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis,” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said last week at a meeting convened by the president to recommend changes to the agency. “That is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today and remade into a responsive agency. We owe it to all the American people to deliver the most efficient and the most effective disaster response.”
National security and disaster management experts agreed that FEMA — or any federal agency — could be improved but they said the chaotic changes the Trump administration is making to FEMA, as well as other parts of the government, are harmful.
The federal government’s retrenchment arrives at a time when climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and severe. Last year, the United States experienced 27 disasters that cost more than $1 billion each.
“The Trump administration is leaving communities naked, without the necessary tools that could help them assess risks or reduce those risks,” said Alice C. Hill, who worked on climate resilience and security issues for the National Security Council during the Obama administration and who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“We know preparedness saves lives,” Ms. Hill said. “When you make cuts to the Weather Service, that is undermining forecasts. When you cut the collection of data, satellites, all of that will degrade the accuracy of forecasts. And even with a strong forecast, it’s meaningless unless the people who need to hear it, hear it.”
A ‘Generational Loss’ for Forecasting
For months, experts have warned that cuts to the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, could endanger local communities. Those fears have grown since the deadly flash floods in Central Texas earlier this month.
By all accounts, the Weather Service issued the appropriate warnings for the region that was inundated by the Guadalupe River on July 4.
But the agency had to move employees from other offices to temporarily staff the San Antonio office that handled the flood warnings, and the office lacked a warning coordination meteorologist, whose job it is to communicate with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn residents and help them evacuate. The office’s warning coordination meteorologist had left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration has offered to reduce the number of federal employees.
Since Mr. Trump took office, the Weather Service has shed about 600 jobs from its work force of roughly 4,200 people. They are part of a greater exodus of nearly 2,000 employees from NOAA. Nearly half of the Weather Service’s 122 forecast offices had lost at least 20 percent of their staff as of April. Thirty offices were lacking their most experienced official, known as the meteorologist-in-charge, as of May.
“When that position is vacant, it does have consequences because that is the primary person who is briefing elected officials and emergency managers,” said Brian LaMerre, who retired at the end of April as the meteorologist-in-charge of the Weather Service forecast office in Tampa, Fla.
Some forecast offices are no longer staffed overnight, and others have been launching fewer weather balloons, which send data to feed forecasts. The Weather Service has said it is preparing for “degraded operations.”
The president is preparing to deal another blow to weather forecasting in his spending plan for next year, which would cut funding for NOAA by another $2 billion, or 27 percent. On the chopping block would be the agency’s entire scientific research division, one of the world’s premier weather and climate research centers, preventing the creation of new weather forecasting technologies.
Ten laboratories across the country are also slated to be closed, including the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Founded in 1964, the lab created a tool to improve the accuracy of flash flood forecasts across the country — the same tool that correctly predicted the Guadalupe River’s rise after the floods hit Central Texas.
Mr. Trump also wants to shutter the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, which deploys “hurricane hunters,” or specialized aircraft and crew members who fly directly into storms to collect critical data like wind speed, temperature and humidity. Forecasters use this data to predict a storm’s intensity and where it is likely to make landfall.
“The proposed NOAA cuts would mean a generational loss in hurricane forecasting,” said Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist and meteorologist for WPLG Local 10 News in Miami.
Mr. Trump’s sweeping domestic policy and tax law, which Congress passed this month, also rescinds about $60 million in unspent funds at NOAA for atmospheric, climate and weather research. That money had been part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.
That cut was inserted into the legislation by the Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas.
Macarena Martinez, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz, said that the rescinded money had “nothing to do with weather forecasting.” Instead, she said the funds were supposed to be used “for ‘heat awareness’ campaigns, ‘green collar’ jobs” and other programs.
At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Trump wants to halve funding for earth science and terminate satellites that have been collecting data on the atmosphere, ocean, land and ice for more than two decades.
These cuts could bring about a “train wreck” for weather forecasting, said William B. Gail, a former president of the American Meteorological Society.
Reducing the Ability to Monitor Floods
The United States Geological Survey operates about 8,000 gauges in rivers, streams and other bodies of water, gathering data from across the country to help communities monitor and plan for floods.
The gauges automatically transmit information every 15 minutes by satellite, sending real-time data that forms the basis for flood alerts that are sent to phones, as well as forecasts made by the National Weather Service. The gauges showed the 28-foot surge in floodwater on Texas’ Guadalupe River early on the morning of July 5.
Mr. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal would cut 22 percent from the U.S.G.S. water resources program that includes the network of gauges. It argues that the plan “maintains support for stream gauges” but would increase the use of artificial intelligence to analyze the data.
The administration is already planning to cancel the leases for 25 of the roughly 100 water science research facilities, according to documents viewed by The New York Times.
In an emailed statement, the U.S.G.S. said: “These initiatives demonstrate our broader commitment to streamlining government operations while ensuring that our scientific efforts remain robust, effective, and impactful, supporting the unique field-based operations essential to the U.S.G.S. mission.”
Experts say the cuts will leave Americans less informed.
“There will be less data and fewer people to read it. If anyone wants the data, states, municipalities and private companies will have to pay for it. Otherwise, it’s going away. But flooding’s not going away,” said Keith Robinson, a former director of the U.S.G.S. New England Water Science Center.
The ‘Demolition’ of Disaster Response?
FEMA is the backbone of the nation’s emergency response resources, but disaster experts have for many years said the agency needs to be streamlined to deliver help to survivors more efficiently. Mr. Trump has said he wants to “phase out” FEMA and shift more responsibility — and costs — to the states.
The Trump administration has already begun significantly scaling back the agency, eliminating billions of dollars in grants that help communities prepare for extreme weather.
In addition to freezing $3.6 billion of unspent funds that had been approved for states, the administration stopped approving new grants that since the 1980s have been used to elevate or demolish flood-prone homes and strengthen buildings in hurricane zones.
The president’s proposed 2026 budget eliminates about $882 million in the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which helped support resources like flood control systems, wildfire prevention and storm water management upgrades. The Trump administration called the program “wasteful and ineffective.”
FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff in the past six months, including 20 percent of the coordinating officers at the agency, who manage responses to major disasters, as well as the head of FEMA’s disaster command center. Also gone: the deputy regional administrator in the agency’s Region 6 office in Texas.
David Richardson, FEMA’s acting head, has no emergency management experience.
“We are not witnessing a reimagining of federal disaster response — we are watching its demolition,” Mary Ann Tierney, who resigned recently as the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview. “With each policy rollback and staffing cut, the federal disaster management function is being hollowed out, leaving states and survivors to face storms, fires and floods with less.”
Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, said he agreed that FEMA was too slow to help communities rebuild after disasters. The way FEMA is organized makes it “harder, not easier, and more expensive,” to rebuild after disaster strikes, said Mr. Welch, whose state was inundated by floods in 2023 and 2024.
Communities are forced to borrow the money to repair infrastructure like roads and bridges, not knowing whether they will be reimbursed, “even though it’s for a repair that is clearly covered under FEMA guidelines,” Mr. Welch said. He argued that the slowdown in federal funds means banks “are getting more and more resistant” to issuing loans.
Mr. Welch has introduced legislation to shift more power to state and local officials in the rebuilding process, and to help them better navigate the red tape that slows down federal disaster assistance. Other legislation introduced in the House seeks to streamline the federal government’s disaster response and to restore FEMA as a Cabinet-level agency reporting directly to the president rather than the Department of Homeland Security.
Judson Jones contributed reporting from Atlanta. Raymond Zhong contributed from London.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environment policy, with a focus on climate change, for The Times.
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
The post Trump Is Gutting Weather Science and Reducing Disaster Response appeared first on New York Times.
