Key Senate Committee Advances Bill to Restore Funding for Hurricane Forecasts

On Thursday, a bipartisan Senate committee advanced a bill that would thwart proposed cuts to NOAA

U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Markup on Thursday, July 10, 2025. Photo Credit: Senate.gov

In the latest snub of the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to NOAA – cuts which would devastate hurricane forecasting and could slash forecast accuracy by as much as 40 percent – a key Senate committee on Thursday advanced a bill that, if passed, would restore nearly all funding back to NOAA and federal hurricane forecasts for the new fiscal year starting in October.

The bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday still needs to pass the full Senate and be adjudicated with the House version passed on Tuesday, but both chambers of Congress signal strong legislative support for weather prediction and the future of hurricane forecasting.

As we reported on Tuesday, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies – otherwise known as the CJS Subcommittee – hit a roadblock last Thursday on its version of a bill to fund spending at several federal departments that includes the Department of Commerce, the parent agency of NOAA and the National Weather Service. They were able to resolve the sticking point that involved the future location of the FBI headquarters for the Department of Justice, and advanced the legislation on a 19-10 vote.

As discussed on Tuesday, the bipartisan Senate committee expressed strong backing for NOAA and the National Weather Service in its markup meeting last week, so the favorable bill is less of a surprise, unlike the House version advanced Tuesday.

The Senate bill funds NOAA at $6.12 billion – nearly its full 2025 levels – compared to the House version that shaves the budget by 6% in 2026 to $5.8 billion. Both bills offer significantly more money to NOAA than the budget proposed by the Trump administration that guts NOAA by 27%, reducing its budget to $4.5 billion.

Most egregiously, the Trump administration recommended defunding NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research or OAR, a roughly $650 million line item in its annual budget. The office funds dozens of critical weather and climate labs, many of which are indispensable to operational hurricane forecasts. This includes the Atlantic Oceanographic and Atmospheric Lab (AOML), Hurricane Research Division in Miami, and their cooperative institutes which support hurricane hunter flights and maintain our best, state-of-the-art hurricane models.

Notably, the Senate bill explicitly funds OAR at $657 million, in line with previous years, and even slightly increases (by 1%) funding to the weather and climate labs the Trump administration proposes eliminating. The bill also expresses concern for the recent staffing losses at NOAA and the National Weather Service and requires NOAA leadership to submit a detailed staffing plan to the committee within three months of the bill’s enactment.

In short, both spending bills advanced by the House and Senate this week are what you might expect for NOAA and NWS in normal times and offer a full-throated admonition of the cuts proposed by the administration. For a detailed summary of other weather and climate programs outlined in the bill, I encourage you to read this excellent summary posted earlier today from my colleague Alan Gerard over at Balanced Weather.

As Alan and others rightly point out, the Trump administration’s budget chief Russell Vought – chief architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto from which many of the proposed cuts are taken – has made it clear the administration is considering other measures to circumvent legislative approval to ensure their proposed cuts are enacted.

For now, the developments this week are encouraging, but caution is warranted in assuming bipartisan Congressional support will be enough to save the 50-plus years of hurricane forecast improvement at risk of being lost.