Trump-Musk Assault on NOAA Risks Upending Climate Data Industry

Yesterday, emblazoned at the top of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) website was the following message:

“Please note: NCEI users may experience intermittent data access outages. NCEI is working on a resolution. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

It’s a fairly routine message — data outages happen — but a portentous one given the chaos currently engulfing US agencies. Experts fear access to public climate and weather data could be curtailed and privatized under President Trump and his semi-official enforcer, Elon Musk, and that notices like the one above will become more frequent as their acolytes continue to rampage across the federal government. 

In fact, wrecking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the NCEI, is an explicit goal of Project 2025, the blueprint for a Republican administration published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation last year. The document calls for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized” and for most of its existing functions to be “provided commercially”. To date, the Trump administration has largely kept to the Project 2025 roadmap. Last Thursday, one of its chief architects, Russell Vought, was confirmed as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Experts say that taking a hammer to public climate data would be a disaster for US climate resilience and imperil Americans’ lives and livelihoods. “Anytime you’re privatizing or limiting access to data, you’re undermining public well being,” says Justin Mankin, a climate scientist and Associate Professor at Dartmouth College who has written about the importance of public climate information. “Removing any kind of data that can help people understand and manage the risks of climate change is going to put people’s lives at risk and will undoubtedly generate more pain — irrespective of people’s political leanings.”

It could also cut the legs out from under private climate intelligence providers — ironic given Project 2025’s assertion that they could sub-in for many of NOAA’s services.

“There’s no organization out there in the private sector that can come even close to the information content that NOAA provides,” says Josh Hacker, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Jupiter Intelligence, a long-standing climate risk analytics firm. “You won’t get startups if they’re walking in the door and they have to spend a whole bunch of money just to get the one source of data that everybody needs to start from,” he adds.

Public Harm, Private Costs

The NCEI, housed at NOAA, is the world’s largest archive of climate and paleoclimatology data. It maintains over 60 petabytes of environmental data, including a massive storm events database, tide gauge and sea-level rise info, and satellite climate data records. NOAA’s own website has hosted a wide variety of datasets and graphics that help communicate climate risks and weather hazards.

Frequent users say access to some parts of NOAA’s website have flickered off and on in recent days. For example, a Climate Literacy Guide hosted on climate.gov was not accessible as of this morning. NOAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already swept through NOAA and gained access to its IT systems, ostensibly to root out Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion workstreams. Trump officials have also instructed staff to log outstanding grants with “climate”, “climate science”, and related keywords.

So far, there are no indications that NOAA’s climate data assets have been affected by the Trump-Musk assault. But even if steps aren’t taken to shut down data feeds and archives directly, there are other ways in which the administration can impair the agency’s resources.

”What I've been pretty worried about is that they're going to create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, where they [the Trump administration] remove the data, or at least hollow out the systems and the people enough that those data aren't reliably available,” says Twila Moon, a climate scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center — part of a sprawling research collaboration between NOAA and the University of Colorado Boulder.

CBS reports that NOAA is in line for a 30% budget cut and 50% reduction in headcount, which could greatly degrade the climate weather data and tools private companies depend on.

“NOAA line offices have been understaffed for years, and further reductions will hamper service quality and reliability,” says Brian Smoliak, Co-Founder of Weathervane, a weather intelligence startup. For example, data feeds that go offline may take longer to fix, and APIs moved around or disconnected in the midst of staffing upheavals. The end result could be that private companies have to do more work and jump through more hoops to conduct the same analysis — adding friction to their operations.

“We can build good models because of the amount of data that’s openly available — and the US has actually been world leading in this regard,” says Dr Oliver Wing, Chief Scientific Officer at flood modeling company Fathom. “You can access flood maps, river gages, elevation data, all of the NOAA rainfall data; all components that are fundamental building blocks to create flood models. And it’s been the government innovating on data collection, because they have the resources and also because it’s in the public interest,” he adds.  

Moreover, US public data serves as a benchmark against which the credibility of private climate risk companies’ offerings can be measured. Many private climate intelligence tools and analytics consist of a layer of innovation on top of public data. Companies vary on the level of transparency they offer into these innovations, making it hard to compare results and methods. Publicly available data serves as a restraint, preventing private enterprises from pushing their own outputs and models too far.

“We don’t have much to compare these private products against, so our ability to assess or benchmark products is very low right now. But any loss of climate datasets could hinder efforts to develop public alternatives or benchmarks,” says Oriana Chegwidden, climate scientist at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit committed to improving the transparency of climate solutions.

Mankin at Dartmouth adds that the dynamics of private businesses could also lead to a distortion of scientific data that produces unhelpful, if not downright harmful, climate risk maps and models. “What we’re doing is taking an industry — the climate modeling community and climate risk community — which has this incentive in the public sphere to get it right, and we're ceding that to the private sphere, which has an incentive to get it to market.”

The costs of misleading climate data, unmoored from credible public datasets, could be high. “What it presents is these kinds of unique opportunities for maladaptation. You take a costly adaptation decision — under the assumption that some risk claim is correct — and that actually turns out to have been a poor decision,” says Mankin.

A Data Revolution Forestalled

NOAA data was not initially gathered with the interests of the climate intelligence industry in mind. Scientists, meteorologists, and government bodies were its original “clients”. This has changed as climate risks have increasingly threatened the viability of private businesses, especially those in insurance and real estate.

The disconnect between existing public data and current climate risk needs has meant private companies have to laboriously “translate” NOAA resources to fulfil niche purposes, like quantifying the financial losses possible from extreme weather events, or estimating disruptions to complex supply chains across huge geographies.

“Much of the scientific data pipeline for climate and weather data was developed for specific use cases, whether that was informing giant consortium climate science efforts at the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] or using NOAA data in meteorological or other applied research settings,” says Sadie Frank, Co-Founder at N4EA, a supply chain resilience-focused intelligence startup which uses NOAA data.

“The problem is that the financial sector uses a completely different set of tools than the government or research institutions. This often gets as granular as whether or not someone can adequately access an API, or if the meta-data is stored effectively. It’s very boring but very important work that requires a lot of technical, multi-disciplinary fluency and collaboration between sectors,” she adds.

The very fact that public data lacked private sector utility gave the climate intelligence industry a chance to take root in the first place and provide services to a wide range of lucrative customers. “When we first set this company up and were focused primarily on building global flood maps, we presumed that, beyond insurance, our main clients would be in organizations like the World Bank, looking to support infrastructure development in low-income countries,” says Dr Wing at Fathom. “But within a few years, our product roadmap had expanded to include building US, UK and Japan flood models — all developed countries that we’d previously presumed wouldn’t need private sector support. But they did, and they do.”

There was a realization under the Biden administration that the federal government could and should make its climate and weather datasets more user-friendly for the private sector. Last year, NOAA announced an US$85mn Industry Proving Grounds (IPG) initiative, with the aim of improving the usability of climate data for three economic sectors: finance and reinsurance, retail and architecture, and engineering. Speaking to Climate Proof last year, Deke Arndt, director of the NCEI, said the end-goal was “high-risk, high-reward investments in potential data structures that are hopefully adopted by the market.”

The University of Maryland, Colorado State University, and Oklahoma University all received grants under the initiative. Some awards were for supporting AI-based products and techniques, others for enhanced risk modelling. Moreover, at least two private companies — Cadmus Group and Riverside Technology — were allocated IPG dollars to help NOAA ‘storify’ its data. One output of this collaboration is a ‘StoryMap’ cataloguing NOAA’s hurricane data and tools for the public and key industries.

Many of the grants and contracts awarded under the IPG and similar initiatives have years left to run. Whether the awardees will be able to continue their work is in doubt, though, given Trump-Musk efforts to purge projects financed by Biden’s climate laws.

“We're meant to be undertaking activities as normal right now, because of court responses to the new executive orders. But nonetheless, the suite of orders is accomplishing damage. It's accomplishing people re-thinking entering the federal workforce. It's accomplishing people reconsidering going into scientific research,” says Moon.

To Frank at N4EA, the end — or reversal — of Biden-era efforts to liberate NOAA data would be a great shame. “Biden took the necessary steps to identify the problem, and begin thinking seriously about a solution, but the actual development and implementation of a solution has not happened. And, given what we’re seeing now, we’re going to end up in a world where private data players become even more important.”

No Substitutes

With NOAA’s Biden-era mission to improve data accessibility in jeopardy, and rumblings that reliable, public data is on the Project 2025 chopping block, private climate intelligence firms are being forced to adjust their game plans.

Lukky Ahmed, Co-Founder and CEO of Climate X, a risk analytics company for financial institutions, says firms need to innovate beyond government data sources. “Climate intelligence companies will need to develop and maintain their own databases, leverage ML/AI to enhance accuracy, fill data gaps, and future-proof insights,” he says.

It’s true there has been a flourishing of private climate and weather data-gathering entities in recent years as the demand for advanced risk mapping and granular, address-level hazard data has surged — particularly across the insurance industry. Companies like ICEYE and Spire, for example, master sprawling constellations of satellites that collect and transmit vast troves of Earth Observation data.

Still, Hacker at Jupiter Intelligence does not believe that public data infrastructure can be fully replaced by private capabilities. “The support for the infrastructure to observe and deliver [climate and weather] information is just too big for any one company to take on. It’s a big, expensive thing. These are just massive public projects,” he says. 

Moreover, while AI and machine learning techniques for enhancing weather forecasts and extrapolate changing climatic patterns have taken great strides forward in recent years, these approaches can only go so far without a bedrock of real-world observation data. “You have to have those actual observations to pin it [model outputs] to reality. So I don't see a way, just because of the way that the Earth system and the atmosphere work, that you don't have something to anchor it to truth,” Hacker adds.

Tellingly, none of the private companies contacted by Climate Proof said that their industry would actually benefit from a withdrawal of public data. This contradicts the Project 2025 assertion that NOAA’s services could be provided commercially at lower cost and higher quality.

“The private sector is very good at innovating, but we need a base layer of public provision to ensure that scientific progress is maintained and is in service of everyone in the country and on the planet,” says Frank. “I do believe that government should be thinking very hard about how to produce the best, most responsive data out there for use in applications like finance, insurance, etc. Let the innovation happen there.”

But it does not appear that Project 2025’s adherents want this kind of innovation to happen. Instead, by accelerating a crisis in public data it looks like they hope to pull forward a revolution in privatized climate and weather information that the industry may not be ready for.

“[If NOAA is impaired] some private companies can come in and start to fill the gaps, and then [the administration] can say: "‘We don't need a National Weather Service or whatever — because we have a private company over here doing it,” says Moon.

“But a business doesn’t have a national allegiance or have to serve all citizens — so this push towards privatizing things ultimately could weaken America,” she adds.

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor