After cuts, former NOAA chief scientist says U.S. science risks becoming a 'backwater enterprise'

This story was originally published by bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

In the mid-2000s, the Pacific Northwest shellfish industry, one of the world’s largest, was on the brink of collapse. Millions of oyster larvae were dying, and no one knew why. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States were among the first to investigate. The federal researchers soon realized the problem was much bigger than oysters.

Over the preceding few years, scientists had begun studying what happens to fish and shellfish when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide—the result of burning fossil fuels. Water plus carbon dioxide makes carbonic acid and, as scientists were showing, the estuaries across the eastern Pacific Ocean are especially vulnerable to this acidity. But ultimately, NOAA scientists found, the crisis of ocean acidification was seeping into every part of the sea, felt all along the food chain from tiny crustaceans to whales.

While the U.S. Congress lacked the political muscle to rein in the carbon emissions fundamentally driving ocean acidification, in 2009 it did make a commitment to study the problem. The United States passed the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act, establishing, among other things, NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program. Over the subsequent 15 years, this program’s small team has partnered with universities and scientific institutions around the world to study how to protect oceans and marine life, and the millions of people who depend on them for food and fortune. It’s one small part of NOAA’s overall work measuring greenhouse gas emissions, modeling the global climate, monitoring and protecting fish and marine mammals, restoring and protecting coastlines from erosion and floods, providing marine navigation data, and even predicting space weather.

Sarah Cooley had worked alongside the Ocean Acidification Program for its entire existence—from her early career as a researcher to her more recent role as a senior director at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy. “I was one of the external partners pointing to the work that this program was doing and working with Congress to make sure there was adequate funding for the science that needed to be done,” she says.

So Cooley was thrilled when, in August 2024, she was hired to take over as program director for NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program. In an official announcement at the time, the agency hailed Cooley for her “exceptional arsenal of scientific expertise, communication prowess, interdisciplinary collaboration, and leadership.”

It came as a shock, then, when Cooley received a job termination notice on February 27, 2025, claiming that her “ability, knowledge, and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.” It was the same round of job slashing that eliminated about 800 other NOAA staff—roughly 10 percent of the agency’s workforce. “I was hoping that I would be spared because my program is legislatively mandated,” Cooley says. “It was pretty gutting.”

The firings were spurred by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a Trump administration effort that has no authorization from Congress but has so far fired tens of thousands of federal workers. DOGE has also proposed canceling leases on NOAA offices and research facilities and on numerous other federal properties across the country. According to multiple reports, NOAA is bracing for another round of firings which could, when combined with previous job losses, mean NOAA’s staff shrinks by a fifth.

Scientists abroad who work with NOAA are sounding the alarm about the cuts and firings. Jean-Pierre Gattuso, an oceanographer with the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Sorbonne University who frequently collaborates with NOAA researchers, says the agency’s roles in global ocean and atmospheric research are “absolutely essential.”

“I find the situation at NOAA … very, very concerning,” he says. “I think it will hurt the U.S. a lot. It’s very sad, this situation.”

Craig McLean, who was NOAA’s assistant administrator for research from 2015 to 2022, worries the Trump administration’s policies will turn the United States’ ocean science efforts into a “backwater enterprise.”

McLean spent 41 years at NOAA, starting as a uniformed officer in the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps and eventually joining the agency’s leadership. NOAA’s science programs, he says, have helped galvanize and inform a raft of research efforts around the world.

Still, NOAA is already a slim agency, says McLean. In 2021, he argued before Congress that NOAA has been underfunded, calling it a “$12-billion agency trapped in a $5-and-a-half-billion budget.” 

Now, he says: “If the United States pulls back, where’s that going to leave us?”.

Withdrawing from international collaborations will be detrimental to U.S. interests, adds Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA’s administrator until January 2025. The country won’t be involved in negotiations associated with access to global resources, such as fisheries and deep-sea minerals, he says. “And I doubt we will benefit from international collaboration if we’re not there at the table.”

Future worries aside, the cuts to NOAA’s staff are already disrupting the agency’s work on rapidly emerging scientific issues with global consequences.

Geoscientist Gabby Kitch, for instance, was hired in March 2024 to research marine carbon dioxide removal—a cutting edge and sometimes controversial field of research and commercial development that seeks to intentionally pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through methods ranging from seaweed farming to dropping minerals into the ocean. Over the past few years, investors and venture capitalists around the world have rushed to launch startups and pilot projects that claim to successfully store carbon in the sea. Part of NOAA’s role was to make these projects more accountable and scientifically sound. But Kitch, like Cooley, lost her job in February.

Kitch and Cooley say that even before they were fired pressure from the new administration had interfered with their work. In early February, staff were ordered to seek prior approval for any interaction with international colleagues—even brief Zoom calls—which created enormous extra bureaucracy and scheduling troubles for NOAA staffers working, for example, to monitor border-crossing fish and whales. “It kind of overwhelmed the system a little bit,” Cooley says.

Watching the axe come down on the federal workforce brought an “overwhelming sense of paranoia—of fear in your everyday life,” says Kitch. “Sometimes I would just wake up … and just start sobbing.” 

As her own firing loomed, Kitch says, she copied her colleagues on nearly every message and briefed them on almost every task so the work could carry on in her absence. But the only other federal scientist devoted to studying marine carbon dioxide removal—an employee of the U.S. Department of Energy—was also fired in February. Now, Kitch laments, “U.S. competitiveness in this field might slip away.”