Lawmakers highlighted concerns about weather forecasting used by farmers and fishermen and the management of fisheries.
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Lawmakers highlighted concerns about weather forecasting used by farmers and fishermen and the management of fisheries.
April 4, 2025
April 4, 2025 – On Wednesday, a group of leading Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources hosted an unofficial forum to call attention to the potential impacts of significant staff cuts and office closures at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s workforce is slated for about a 20 percent reduction in size, with more than 1,000 employees already gone. DOGE is also planning to close 34 agency offices in 17 states and territories.
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Representative Seth Magaziner (D-Rhode Island) said that one of those offices is a branch of the National Marine Fisheries Service in his district, noting that NOAA is an “economic engine” for fishing and agriculture, two industries that depend on weather and climate data. “Fishermen rely on accurate weather predictions to safely navigate our waters,” he said. “Farmers rely on NOAA’s climate models to make informed decisions that affect their crops and livelihoods.”
Mary Glackin, a 30-year NOAA employee who is now retired, emphasized that NOAA’s National Weather Service data underpins all private weather forecasting in the country.
NOAA is also the primary regulator of fisheries, and witnesses said they are already seeing impacts from cuts. Elizabeth L. Lewis, at attorney at Eubanks & Associates, told the lawmakers that Atlantic bluefin tuna was overfished by 125 percent this year because NOAA failed to close the fishery on time and that several other fisheries, including scallops and Pacific salmon, likely face delayed openings.
Sarah Schumann, a commercial fisherman from Rhode Island, said she had approached Trump’s populist rise with cautious optimism but now she believes DOGE’s cuts threaten the livelihoods of Americans who work the waterfronts.
“All of the ambitious and visionary things that fishermen desperately need—the faster, more collaborative data collection and decision making, the greater attention to the multitude of stressors affecting fishery habitats, the supports for young people to enter thriving fishing careers—will be vastly more difficult to achieve with a diminished and distressed NOAA workforce,” she said. “How can NOAA and other agencies possibly ever solidify and sustain the kind of partnership with working people in coastal communities that is so urgently needed when the agency is being terrorized by oligarchs and their minions who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives?”
Schumann had previously volunteered to serve on NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee, which the agency disbanded on February 28 along with two other committees that served as interfaces between the fishing industry and NOAA.
Representatives Sarah Elfreth (D-Maryland), Melanie Stansburg (D-New Mexico), Val Hoyle (D-Oregon), Julia Brownley (D-California), Maxine Dexter (D-Oregon), and ranking member Jared Huffman (D-California) also attended the forum. (Link to this post.)
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