When Brian Ritchie takes his 53-foot charter fishing boat into the cold, choppy waters of the Cook Inlet near Homer, Alaska, carrying a dozen or more anglers hoping to catch Pacific halibut, he’s paying extra attention to weather conditions. That’s because an automated National Weather Service station that provided detailed local wind reports is offline and won’t be operational until at least November.

“It's a long season and we've gone half a year without knowing what the wind is doing in a part of the inlet that we fish a lot,” said Ritchie. “That's pretty important, especially for charter fishing. Because the people that I take out like watching ‘The Deadliest Catch,’ but they don't like living it.”

Ritchie’s weather station issue, which hasn’t resulted in any disasters so far, isn’t an isolated headache. Nationwide, launches of weather balloons have dropped, decreasing the amount of data on temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction that feeds into weather prediction models, fire and marine weather forecasts and aids the aviation industry. Off U.S. coasts, fewer buoys are measuring wave conditions than in 2024. As wildfires rage across western states, there’s a tight supply of specialized meteorologists to provide detailed weather data that helps communities and firefighters make lifesaving, tactical decisions, people familiar with the matter told Forbes. A 20-year-old program that measures arctic ice just got cut, and plans for next-generation weather satellites to replace two critical ones that may begin to fail in the early 2030s have been halted.

This is what happens when the government dismantles the country’s vast environmental intelligence system. Built over decades, NOAA’s sprawling network of satellites, balloons, buoys, radar stations and scientists underpin much of the U.S. economy. Fishermen use it to decide whether waters are safe to sail. Farmers use it to determine when to plant and harvest. Airlines use it to route flights. Insurers and reinsurers use it to assess risk of losses from major events like hurricanes, fires and large-scale accidents. Utilities, builders and emergency officials use it to manage power grids, protect infrastructure and keep people alive.

“Sometimes its impacts are a little bit more diffuse unless you're directly employed by those sectors,” said Costa Samaras, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, who advised the Biden administration on upgrading infrastructure for a warming climate. “There are also simple things like, ‘Will my street flood? Is there a hurricane approaching? Am I safe from tornadoes? These are all very tangible impacts people around the country tend to understand.”

Up to 6% of U.S. GDP is impacted by weather conditions, worth as much as $1.34 trillion annually

Up to 6% of U.S. GDP is impacted by weather conditions, worth as much as $1.34 trillion annually

NOAA’s systems rarely announced their value. They just worked—until they didn’t. Now failures are arriving quietly: one dead weather station, one missing balloon, one stale map, one climate website at a time.

In dozens of interviews with current and former NOAA employees and representatives of industries that depend on its data, Forbes found that as America’s environmental intelligence goes dark piece by piece, it raises risks to lives and property while pushing new costs onto businesses and consumers. The systems and cuts made to them may seem obscure; the bill won’t be.

The root cause is Elon Musk’s DOGE program, which in early 2025 slashed jobs, budgets and programs in a Red Wedding massacre across all federal agencies. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service and is responsible for providing crucial intel about weather and climate patterns, it began with a 10% budget cut and the elimination of about 17% of staff, totalling about 2,500 people. Worse, among those who left were several hundred veteran NOAA and NWS researchers........

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