By Gutting NOAA, Musk and Trump Are Destroying a Public Good to Aid Big Oil

The news came late Thursday afternoon that the Musk tornado had reached NOAA, the government agency responsible for, among many other things, warning us about actual tornadoes. Ten percent of the staff was instantly given pink slips, and an hour to leave; with thousands more firings expected imminently. The wording on the termination letters seems to have been uniform; the work these people were doing was not considered “in the public interest.”

I want to bear a little witness to the people fired from NOAA and so many other places—and even more to the long and careful tradition of which they were a part. For the moment I don’t know what we can do to protect those people or that tradition—there will be court battles, and we should support them; general defense against President Donald Trump’s absurd and illegal destruction is ongoing at places like Third Act and Indivisible and you should join in. But for now, I simply want to explain what’s being destroyed.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was founded in 1970, but its roots go back to 1807, when Thomas Jefferson formed the “Survey of the Coast,” noting the importance of “waterborne commerce” to the new nation. Over the following decades it produced the first nautical maps, and then early tide tables, and then began to figure out how to locate and map underwater obstructions. Though I now live in landlocked Vermont, I was a Sea Scout when I was a boy and I remember navigating with those blue and tan charts, walking the parallel rules across the chart, always with an eye to the compass rose at the bottom, all painstakingly marked with hazards and aids to navigation.

Musk is an impulsive child who has been handed an intricate toy, and whose only impulse is to break it, for the pure satisfaction of the crash.

It became the Coast and Geodetic Survey later in the 19th century—geodesy was the “science of accurately measuring and understanding the Earth's geometric shape, orientation in space, and gravity field,” and if like me you are a hiker you have doubtless encountered their brass markers on the summits of mountains. Other agencies—the Weather Bureau chief among them—grew up over the first two centuries of the republic to track the hazards of the continent. By 1970, in the wake of the first Earth Day, then-Republican President Richard Nixon combined all of them in this new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.

Nixon was not an honest or good man, but he was an intelligent one, in an intelligent era. Here’s how he described the rationale for this new agency:

The oceans and atmosphere are interacting parts of the total environmental system upon which we depend, not only for the quality of our lives, but for life itself. We face immediate and compelling needs for better protection of life and property from natural hazards, and for a better understanding of the total environment—an understanding which will enable us more effectively to monitor and predict its actions, and ultimately, perhaps to exercise some degree of control over them.

If that was true then, then it’s triply true now. It’s NOAA that keeps track of the rapid heating of our planet, with all its attendant dangers. And now it will be reduced to a shadow of itself, just as Project 2025 promised. Why would any rational person do this? Over two centuries it worked to understand the world around us, and that understanding was, among other things, key to our prosperity.

Because it committed the sin of helping to figure out the greatest danger to that prosperity: It was NOAA, after all, that maintained the world’s most important scientific instrument, the carbon dioxide monitor on the flank of Mauna Loa that first disclosed that carbon dioxide was accumulating in the atmosphere as we combusted coal and gas and oil. And it’s maintained the network of weather stations, satellites, and marine buoys that have shown that that carbon is driving a pervasive shift in our climate, one that is melting the poles. This is the very definition of “the public interest,” but it cuts against the private interest of the fossil fuel industry, and so it must be neutered. Elon Musk can insist all he wants that he’s doing it to save the taxpayers money, but the agency in total costs barely $6 billion a year—or one-sixth the cost of the federal government’s contracts with Musk’s agencies, which The Washington Postdetailed in an important investigation Wednesday.

Once this agency is broken, it won’t be rebuilt. Its centuries of institutional memory will be slowly forgotten. (There are good histories of NOAA on its website, here and here; if they’re of interest, download them right now). Musk is an impulsive child who has been handed an intricate toy, and whose only impulse is to break it, for the pure satisfaction of the crash. And so he can get a tax cut, and yet more money, whatever that even means to someone approaching the half-trillion dollar mark.

If you want just one tiny example of what he is destroying, look through the Bluesky feed of Zack Labe, a young climate scientist laid off Thursday afternoon. He was not just good at his job, he was good at explaining it: Day after day he would lay out the latest news from the cryosphere, explaining in careful detail what was happening on the frozen portions of this Earth. On Wednesday, for interest, he’d explained that Arctic sea ice was setting new lows for this date; on Monday he’d produced a graphic showing the steady loss of ice in glaciers around the world. He is our chronicler of thaw, of melt—and what could be more important, since that thaw and melt raises sea levels, disrupts the jet stream and the Gulf stream. He wasn’t an activist or an advocate, unless you count charting, say, the increased methane in the atmosphere as activism. Clearly the oil industry does; Project 2025 had promised to gut NOAA precisely because, as it put it in a moment of complete candor, those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

In other words, Big Oil is trying to wrap a blindfold around the eyes of the nation, so it won’t see what’s happening. I confess to feeling a quiet rage at this vandalism (some of which is almost literal—the administration is disconnecting EV chargers, already bought and paid for, from federal parking lots). It won’t work, not in the long run—people will notice when their neighborhoods burn and flood. But it will make it harder to understand what’s going on, and to pin the blame where it belongs. The fossil fuel industry is committing an ongoing crime against the planet; this is an effort to paint over the lens of the security camera that’s been recording its trespasses.

At least as of this morning the vandals at DOGE hadn’t managed to sack the NOAA website. It was still reporting on the hottest January in history, and offering guides to “building climate resilience in your community.” As they had for 218 years the people in this enterprise were serving their fellow citizens with the information they needed to survive and to thrive. Take a look at it if it’s still there, just to remind yourself what good things humans are capable of. It will inspire you to fight harder against the bad things humans—in this case Musk and Trump—are capable of.