‘Trainwreck’ of NOAA funding cuts could derail Colorado research on wildfires, earthquakes and storms

At a lab in Fort Collins, scientists are researching how to incorporate artificial intelligence into the forecasting of hurricane paths and how to better predict storms’ impact on wildfires.

In Boulder, researchers are learning about ways to better forecast drought and assessing what kinds of pollutants are released into the air after a wildfire.

Much of that research and dozens of similar projects are at risk of grinding to a halt if planned budget cuts by President Donald Trump’s administration come to fruition and eliminate funding crucial to the Colorado labs’ existence.

Already, the two institutes — the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University — are preparing for potential layoffs should money held up in new federal approval processes not materialize in the coming weeks.

“It’s not one giant cliff, it’s a series of cliffs,” said Steven Miller, the director of CIRA at CSU. “If you want to call it a trainwreck, you can.”

Both institutes for decades have partnered with the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides the majority of the budget for both facilities. The federal agency’s weather prediction and air and ocean monitoring impact nearly every industry and provide critical severe weather tracking, including through the National Weather Service.

Its work is advanced by research from a network of 16 cooperative institutes, like those in Fort Collins and Boulder.

A memo by the White House Office of Management and Budget for the 2026 fiscal year — which begins Oct. 1 — proposes reducing funding for NOAA by 27%, effectively eliminating the agency’s research arm and ending support for the cooperative institutes.

The budget reductions are part of a wide-ranging effort by the Trump administration to slash the size of government. Project 2025 — a conservative think tank’s outline for Trump’s second presidency — called for the dismantling of NOAA and for its functions to be privatized. The policy document identified the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, (it) is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

The White House plan prompted three of Colorado’s Democratic congressional leaders — Rep. Joe Neguse and Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet — on Wednesday to send a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to urge him not to cut cooperative institutes’ funding.

“CIs are home to experienced researchers and long-standing data collection programs with major impacts on human societies, (and) moreover they are instrumental in training future generations of workers who continue to contribute to societal needs,” the letter states. “It is our fear that if sweeping cuts are made, the damage will be irreversible. Even short-term interruptions in their research could threaten the safety and economies of the communities that CIs serve across the nation.”

Congress would have to approve the White House’s plan for the next fiscal year, but cooperative institute leaders also worry about more immediate funding problems. The memo directs NOAA to align its spending through fiscal year 2025 with the priorities in the document.

The administration could strangle funding to the cooperative institutes even before the 2026 budget is set, said Waleed Abdalati, the director of CIRES at CU Boulder. Already, institutes are struggling to get money previously approved for research projects.

“There’s the opportunity to do a lot of damage between now and fiscal year ’26 that will be unrecoverable,” he said.

Colorado institutes’ pragmatic research

Both CIRA and CIRES focus on research with real-world applications.

“This isn’t about scientists having fun exploring things we find interesting,” Abdalati said. “What we study impacts lives.”

CIRES, established in 1967, employs about 900 people and is the largest and oldest cooperative institute in the country.

The institute’s wide-ranging research includes mapping the ocean floor to understand where the country’s border is under the sea. CIRES researchers helped lead a 20-year effort with the U.S. Department of State that eventually added more than 386,000 square miles of seafloor to the U.S. and resulted in the discovery of a 4,500-foot methane plume off the California coast.

After the 2021 Marshall fire in Boulder County, CIRES researchers sought to learn how the fire impacted air and soil quality since it burned in a more urban area — research that was then used after the fires in January outside Los Angeles. They also dissected the forecasting challenges from the fire in the hopes of improving how forecasters issue red flag warnings.

The institute’s research has improved the world’s understanding of how certain tornadoes form, how hurricanes impact coastal communities, and how weather and clouds affect air flight and turbulence.

“As an institute as a whole, we carry out scientific research that serves purposes across all domains of human life, frankly,” Abdalati said. “We say from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the sun and everywhere in between.”

The 200 researchers at CIRA — established in 1980 — work to take data from satellites and transform it into images and information that can be used in real time on the ground. Their work helps detect wildfires, track tornadoes, and predict severe storms and other weather.

After a wind burst from a thunderstorm changed the direction of the 2013 Yarnell Hill fire and killed 19 wildland firefighters in Arizona, CIRA researchers created a new tool. It used artificial intelligence to analyze satellite data and better predict how storms will impact fire behavior.

In 2021, the National Weather Center used the tool to move firefighters when a storm developed near a wildland fire outside Midland, Texas.

“We think of pictures as being worth a thousand words, but when it comes to decision-making, they can not only be worth a thousand words, but a thousand lives, quite literally,” Miller said.

Funding uncertainty

NOAA pays for about half of CIRES’s $122 million budget and supports about half of its positions. If that money were to go away, the institute would likely be forced to implement layoffs and furloughs, Abdalati said.

Already, the institute is hamstrung by the Trump administration’s order that all funding over $100,000 be reviewed and approved by Lutnick. And money that the federal government already approved is not making its way to CIRES while it waits for Lutnick’s review.

“We’re in limbo where the funds aren’t flowing — and we’re at a real risk to not be able to support the people who do the work in a couple of months if the funds don’t come,” Abdalati said.

CIRA is in a similar position with held-up money, Miller said.

“If we don’t get funds soon, that would force us into a situation where we would have to issue layoffs,” he said.

The institute’s policy is to give employees 60 days’ notice about funding sources ending. If nothing changes, Miller said, layoff notices could begin as early as next week.

Federal NOAA dollars make up about two-thirds of the institute’s budget, Miller said. CIRA could continue to exist in some form without the NOAA money, but in a diminished way, he said.

The uncertainty has stoked anxiety among CIRES staff — some of whom have worked at the lab for more than 20 years, Abdalati said.

”I wish so badly I could offer reassurances to everyone. And in my 12 years as director, I’ve been able to do that — because NOAA has always been good for it,” Abdalati said. “Right now, it isn’t clear.”

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