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GreenPolicy360: The latest news coming from the Trump administration with its extreme policy goals is no surprise to us. E&E News is revealing the breaking story and it is, though shocking, not a shocker coming from an anti-facts and anti-science president.

Before we go on to deliver our judgment of the decision to attempt to drastically cut the budget of the preeminent climate and weather Earth Science organization in the world, let's introduce the news organization that has the story.

E&E News goes back to a start that involved friends of ours who carved a successful path in investigating and reporting a wide range of environmental and energy news. Although the current administration's memo re: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration refers to its work as "woke", we say, yes, science is woke.

Those who are pushing to deconstruct the work of NOAA are, in effect, in the process of damaging the nation's and, to be truthful, the world's security.

Here's a touch from Green Policy's point of view re the importance of national security and environmental protection -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security

The inward-looking, damaging vision of those on the far-extremes of policy, as with the Project 2025 document that the current president's administration has taken up after denials that it would, is a glimpse of science denial at its worst.

But here it is, in the form of ideological words attacking decades of science, and the results of science in assisting the needs of the United States in all forms, from safe transportation, to navigation, to weather predictions, to extreme weather advance warnings, to agriculture, to planning engineering, to avoiding disasters and saving lives and money... the short-sightedness of those who are looking to deconstruct the work of NOAA 'boggles the mind'.

Fortunately, as with the previous years of this president's term in office, the US Congress which has the power of the purse under the US Constitution will look at the proposed cuts to NOAA and go, 'huh'?

Every state's congressional delegation in Congress will go, 'huh'?

And then they will restore, again, much of the essential program and science work that benefits their districts and states, and the Commons that connects the district, state, nation and commerce across borders.

The Secretary of Commerce should step up and re-think this OMB memo that seems to be coming down from his office ....

Read on....

White House outlines plan to gut NOAA, smother climate research

April 11/2025

• https://www.eenews.net/articles/white-house-outlines-plan-to-gut-noaa-smother-climate-research/

The agency’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be “eliminated as a line office,” according to a memo from the Office of Management and Budget.

The Trump administration wants to effectively break up NOAA and end its climate work by abolishing its primary research office and forcing the agency to help boost U.S. fossil fuel production, budget documents show.

The move, outlined in a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget, carries forward President Donald Trump’s broader goals of slashing federal spending, gutting climate research and unleashing U.S. energy production. But it also represents a dramatic shift in NOAA’s mission.

NOAA has long served as the nation’s preeminent climate and weather agency, and the new marching orders would downsize those functions in the pursuit of a “leaner NOAA,” the memo says. It calls for a sharp spending cut at the agency.

NOAA would get about $4.5 billion in its next budget, down from roughly $6.1 billion in its 2025 enacted budget. Key to the cutback is the elimination of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which facilitates studies of the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, climate, weather patterns and other Earth systems.

The changes were outlined in a budget proposal shared this week with POLITICO’s E&E News by three current and former agency employees. The memo broadly calls for a shakeup within the Commerce Department, where NOAA is housed, to help balance the federal budget.

“Reaching balance requires: resetting the proper balance between Federal and State responsibilities with a renewed emphasis on federalism; eliminating the Federal Government’s support of woke ideology; protecting the American people by deconstructing a wasteful and weaponized bureaucracy; and identifying and eliminating wasteful spending,” the memo says. The OMB document — called a “passback” memorandum because it notifies agency officials of what to expect in the forthcoming fiscal year — also indicates NOAA’s operations, research and facilities (ORF) budget would be cut by 38 percent, from $4.8 billion in 2025 to $3.47 billion in 2026.

The 12-page memo calls for radical changes to NOAA’s marine resource protection responsibilities by shifting all enforcement of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and other NOAA-specific endangered species functions to the Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency.

“I think it’s step one in the deconstruction of the agency,” former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in an interview Friday morning. “Any one of these [actions] are by themselves destructive enough. But taken together they foretell a much more calamitous outcome.” ...

The document reflects OMB Director Russ Vought’s proposal in Project 2025, the conservative policy handbook, to break up NOAA and dramatically shrink its mission while ending its work on climate.

Read more about Politico-E&E, NOAA, Project 2025 and... GreenPolic360 citing NOAA's work

• https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-press/2020/12/29/politico-acquires-e-e-news-1525901
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Oceanic_and_Atmospheric_Administration
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=noaa&go=Go

and ...

Is NOAA Going to be Okay?

Interview with Dr. Rick Spinrad, Outgoing NOAA Administrator

• https://play.pocketcasts.com/podcasts/213da650-2620-0136-c266-7d73a919276a/c5755c95-afbd-4a70-9ade-d49314871a27?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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