It was only a matter of time before the wrecking ball that is the Department of Government Efficiency came for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The target on NOAA dates back to April 2023, when Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook to reshape the federal government and consolidate executive power, was first released. Despite President Donald Trump distancing himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, it appears to be a guiding light for his administration.

In the playbook, NOAA is decried as “the source of … climate alarmism” and “should be broken up and downsized.” The National Weather Service, which is one of NOAA’s six offices, “should focus on its data-gathering services” and “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”

The writing, then, has been on the walls for some time.

Still, amid all the disheartening destruction to our federal government over the last six weeks, the news late last month that roughly 10% of NOAA’s workforce would be cut was hard to stomach.

To be clear, the scale and scope of government bureaucracy is not sacrosanct. In any institution the size of our government, there is bound to be bloat and waste. As such, trimming back the federal workforce and reducing spending are not inherently bad things — done right, they could serve to help get us on the path to a balanced budget while simultaneously making government more efficient.

The key words here, though, are “done right.” Careful, considered cuts to eliminate waste and increase efficiency would be done with a scalpel. As we’ve all seen, Elon Musk and DOGE have preferred the chainsaw.

The cuts implemented so far have crippled vital programs and shut off funding for programs like USAID, that make up a small fraction of spending but do outsized work in making the world a better place. And in targeting probationary employees, our government has been stripped of the next generation of its workforce.

If that leaves you wondering, “Well, what happens when more seasoned employees start retiring? Who will replace them?” That answer appears to be, “No one.” And that seems to be the point.

Chaos is the order of the day.

The cuts to NOAA bring all of this home to Boulder.

The NOAA labs here make up part of the innovation economy that we so pride ourselves on. Those who work in the labs are scientists who have devoted themselves to helping us better understand the world around us — and to sharing that knowledge with the public.

And the people losing their jobs are our community members. They are our neighbors and our friends and our family members. And their only apparent misstep was that they wanted to use their scientific prowess for the common good.

These are people who play an important role in our local economy. Boulder has 17 federal labs that employ roughly 3,600 people. Losing these jobs — especially if more cuts are made as Project 2025 seems to propose — will reverberate in our community.

But more than the local impact, the most troubling element of the NOAA layoffs is what it means regarding the work that NOAA does and how this administration disregards the value of science.

Listing everything that NOAA does would take this entire column. To keep it concise, we’ll highlight just a few: weather forecasting, including hurricane and tornado warnings; climate monitoring; and coastal restoration and supporting marine commerce.

“NOAA’s job is to protect people from the things that nature can bring: flash floods, tornadoes and hurricanes,” said Dr. Alexander “Sandy” MacDonald, the former director of the Earth System Research Lab in Boulder.

According to Project 2025, these are things that should be privatized. Some of it, of course, can be. Many private weather forecasting services have cropped up to provide forecasts for farmers and others who rely on such information. However, these private companies still rely on the infrastructure and data provided by NOAA.

The cuts to NOAA, MacDonald said, were like saying, “We don’t need farmers, I just go to the supermarket to get my food.”

Additionally, there are quite simply some things that NOAA does that the private industry won’t do because there isn’t money in it, including research that contributes to our understanding of climate change.

According to MacDonald, climate change research, like public safety, is not something the private sector pays for. More often than not, it’s something the government pays the private sector to help with.

This is exactly why cutting NOAA’s workforce is so troubling. Because whether we like it or not, our climate is changing.

In 2024, one organization counted 27 billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. — the second-highest number since 1980 — which resulted in the deaths of 568 people. The organization that collected this data? NOAA, obviously.

But instead of seeing climate change as the humanity-threatening problem that it is, our government appears to see the work that acknowledges climate change to be the issue.

In addition to cuts to organizations like NOAA that provide us invaluable data on climate change, the Trump administration has also deleted critical data and environmental resources from federal agency websites, including removing mentions of the phrase “climate change” from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

Part and parcel with this is the apparent effort to keep Americans in the dark about all of this work. Throughout the layoffs at NOAA, the agency has seemingly implemented a complete media blackout. NOAA is a publicly funded government entity, which should mean that it has a responsibility to be transparent with taxpayers — the people who are supposedly saving money because of these cuts. The agency, though, has refused to provide even the most basic details about the layoffs to Camera reporters, which is depriving the public of vital information.

It’s hard not to feel like that is the point. Chaos and mistrust are tools that the current administration apparently sees as of great value. The sheer absurdity and the indiscriminate nature of the cuts and layoffs implemented by DOGE have sown confusion, which helps to prevent a coordinated and effective response. And the inability to access reliable information — because the government refuses to supply it and because it is likely to change based on the president’s whims — means it is hard to trust what you read.

If nothing is true, anything can be true.

NOAA is an integral part of our community. The layoffs there have cut at the heart of what we value. More alarming, though, is the broader picture that they help make up: a government intent on undermining the inconvenience of reality.

— Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board