Days after floods killed at least 135 people in Texas Hill Country, weather scientist Neil Jacobs appeared before a Senate committee as the nominee to lead the US agency that oversees forecasting. He vowed to create a cutting-edge weather modeling system while also pledging support for President Donald Trump’s plan to dramatically shrink the agency.
It’s a hard balance to strike. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has sole responsibility for issuing life-saving weather alerts in the US. The agency — which once employed 12,000 — is reeling from the departure of hundreds of staff. Dozens of forecasting offices are without a chief meteorologist or a warning coordinator who communicates with emergency managers ahead of dangerous storms. The Commerce Department has opened inquiries into the effectiveness of the Texas flood warnings and whether the agency is ready to respond to future disasters; the agency is likely to be tested again very soon, as the heart of hurricane season nears.
Other offices lack staff to launch weather balloons and track local conditions. Those shortages are creating gaps in NOAA data and tools that have been used by businesses in a wide array of industries for plotting strategy and planning day-to-day operations.
The White House’s proposed budget would eliminate NOAA’s research division, cut more than 2,200 positions and reduce funding by about 29% overall—changes that Congress must approve. Jacobs has assured senators that NOAA would still be able to continue its “mission-essential” operations if they sign off on this unprecedented transformation.
In his confirmation hearing, Jacobs said he supports Trump’s cuts, while providing few details about how NOAA plans to fund his modeling program or hire additional staffers at weather prediction centers. Still, he received enough support to advance his confirmation out of committee. While it appears likely he will return as NOAA’s boss, his appointment still requires Senate approval.
“Dr. Neil Jacobs is exceptionally qualified to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. “Having served as acting NOAA administrator during President Trump’s first term, he brings the experience and expertise needed to provide life-saving forecast predictions. We look forward to his swift confirmation.”
Unlike some of the agency chiefs appointed by Trump, Jacobs, 51, has spent his career immersed in the subject matter his new position would govern. He’s a celebrated weather modeling expert who served as NOAA’s interim chief during Trump’s first term in office, and he wants it to pursue a new weather prediction system that would be the best-performing in the world. He’s spent the last several years working on NOAA-funded research on improving forecasting capabilities, which he has said are a matter of “saving people’s lives.”
Jacobs did not respond to repeated requests for comment. NOAA did not respond to a request for comment or updated staffing numbers. Neither did its parent, the US Department of Commerce. NOAA and its parent, the US Department of Commerce, did not provide updated staffing numbers in response to a request from Bloomberg Green.
Despite being embroiled in a scandal during his tenure at NOAA known as “Sharpiegate,” he has the support of many current and former agency staff. But a dozen colleagues told Bloomberg Green that Jacobs is likely to face even more challenging circumstances now, including a demoralized workforce facing nonstop efforts to gut federal science agencies and climate research.
“I would like to think he learned an important lesson about holding your ground leading an organization,” said Rick Spinrad, a former NOAA administrator who spent more than a decade at the agency under Republican and Democratic presidents. “I’m hopeful that he’s learned how to fight within the political system—because he is going to have to fight.”
Congress created NOAA in 1970 at the direction of Republican President Richard Nixon, uniting forecasters, satellite operators, surveyors and ocean researchers from six different sections of the government. Over the last half-century, NOAA’s budget has grown to $6.7 billion. It operates an advanced hurricane prediction center, a uniformed military-style corps and a fleet of research planes and ships for mapping and measuring the ocean and atmosphere.
While other science agencies have authority over their own spending and priorities, NOAA sits within the Commerce Department and answers to a cabinet secretary selected by the president.
Jacobs joined NOAA in 2018 to lead the data and weather modeling division. An avid surfer and naturalist with a penchant for wild orchids and little interest in politics, Jacobs had previously worked at a subsidiary of Panasonic. There, he built complex weather models as a chief atmospheric scientist, turning reams of proprietary data into critical forecasts for the aviation industry. At one point, he boasted that his company’s models outperformed those created by US and European forecasting agencies.
Working inside NOAA to improve the agency’s models was a job too enticing to pass up. He advanced quickly despite commuting back and forth to Washington from North Carolina, where his wife and young children remained. After repeated leadership shakeups, Jacobs stepped into the top job at NOAA just 12 months after he arrived, assuming responsibility for briefing the White House on weather threats.
This role put Jacobs in the hot seat. In September 2019, Trump tweeted that Alabama would “likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dorian, even after Jacobs had explained to the president that the storm was likely to strike Florida. When phones began ringing at the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, Alabama, a staffer tweeted that the state faced no threat.
As the hurricane approached the Gulf Coast, Trump doubled down, showing reporters a map with a new storm track drawn through Alabama in what appeared to be black marker. The incident went viral, as late-night talk show hosts Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert mocked Trump.
According to internal emails cited by investigators, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney pushed the Commerce Department to issue “a correction or an explanation or both” for “intentionally” contradicting Trump. Jacobs approved a public statement by NOAA that chastised Alabama’s forecasters for issuing over-confident predictions.
“It was pretty well implied that this was something that was a fireable offense if you disobeyed,” Jacobs later said.
The three-sentence statement from NOAA that Jacobs approved sparked three separate probes, including a congressional investigation. Spinrad and Craig McLean, then NOAA’s acting chief scientist, each lodged a formal complaint accusing Jacobs of undermining accurate forecasts.
“If you can’t trust the most senior person in NOAA to stand up for our science,” McLean said, “who can you trust?”
After Sharpiegate, Jacobs embarked on a campaign to regain employee trust. He pledged to visit as many of NOAA’s 122 local forecasting offices as possible. When the pandemic struck amid ongoing Sharpiegate investigations, Jacobs began rising at 2 a.m. to spend hours emailing individual NOAA staff, recognizing their work.
Investigators eventually concluded that Jacobs had engaged in misconduct and acted “intentionally, knowingly, or in reckless disregard” of NOAA’s scientific integrity standards. Jacobs issued a response challenging those findings, while noting he was open to other “critique and criticism” regarding his handling of the incident.
The scandal seemed to exhaust Jacobs, according to his mentor and former graduate adviser Gary Lackmann. “He was trying so hard to do the right thing,” Lackmann said. “There was just no way he could do the right thing and do his job and keep protecting the organization.”
Trump’s proposed cuts to NOAA are a sharp departure from how the agency fared in his first term. While skeptics have long attacked NOAA’s climate change research, the agency’s work on long-term local weather — otherwise known as the climate — was largely left alone.
“I was never directed to not support climate or to defund anything climate related,” said Tim Gallaudet, who spent more than a year as NOAA’s acting chief and served as Jacobs’s deputy from 2019 to 2021. “It was just not prioritizing it.” But “this time around,” he said, “it’s all different. Everything is being targeted.”
The Trump administration’s find-and-delete approach to stamping out diversity, equity and inclusion programs appears to have engulfed work on global warming and climate as a whole, a pattern noticed by both Spinrad and McLean. While the White House has proposed funding some weather-related research, the former NOAA scientists say the president’s budget eliminates projects that improve predictions of fire conditions and storms in a changing climate.
The agency is changing its priorities, according to a NOAA official, focusing on weather prediction and other responsibilities in its portfolio.
Jacobs’s plans for weather forecasting at NOAA are ambitious. “One reason he wants to go back is that he wasn’t done,” said Mary Glackin, a former executive at The Weather Company who spent the bulk of her career at NOAA and supports Jacobs for the top job.
Over the last decade, NOAA has largely eked out improvements by tweaking existing models and running them on more powerful supercomputers. But Jacobs has said a streamlined, cloud-based modeling system capable of running on a laptop would deliver better results—and be easier for private companies to use and customize. Integrating artificial intelligence can help NOAA develop faster tools, Jacobs testified to the Senate committee.
Though Jacobs has the expertise to do the work himself, “that’s not necessarily what you need in an administrator” at NOAA, Spinrad said, especially in “an administration that has shown clear antagonism for many of the aspects of the NOAA mission.”
NOAA faced hurdles even before Trump took office: The agency was seeking nearly $800 million from Congress to upgrade its aging satellites, and the National Weather Service was already understaffed in key areas, according to the union that represents many of its workers.
Jacobs has called for expanding NOAA’s catalog of data. But recent staffing losses have since eaten into basic measurements used in federal forecasts and across the private sector.
As of late June, balloon launches that help measure wind, humidity and pressure in the upper layers of the atmosphere had been scaled back or completely halted in more than two-dozen locations out of a total 102 launch sites, according to the weather service, which has warned “staffing limitations or operational priorities” could trigger further reductions.
Any data gaps will eventually degrade forecasts, said John Dean, CEO and co-founder of WindBorne Systems, an AI weather forecasting firm that sells some supplemental data to NOAA. “I don’t like seeing us losing weather observations,” Dean said.
Recently departed staff have expressed fear that Trump is gearing up to privatize an overextended weather service, as called for in the conservative Project 2025 policy document from the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 calls for breaking NOAA into pieces and downsizing its research division—a step down from what Trump has proposed—to prevent the agency from spreading “climate alarmism.” Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, but he has also enacted many of its suggestions since retaking the White House.
Jacobs had seemed unwilling to consider these possibilities. Speaking on a weather podcast in July 2024, Jacobs said it would be “almost impossible to implement” Project 2025’s vision for NOAA. If the agency’s staff still felt anxious, Jacobs said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Your mission is way too essential to the US economy and the safety of all the citizens, so, you know, you’re not going anywhere.”
Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Jacobs’s credentials to run NOAA are solid, but his previous run at the agency raises questions about whether he’s prepared to “be responsible for the staff and the ability to do their work without political interference.”
“That’s why his track record in Trump’s first administration is concerning,” Cleetus said. “There’s an even greater assault underway.”
Photo: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Weather and Climate Prediction headquarters in College Park, Maryland. Photographer: Michael A. McCoy/Bloomberg
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