White House Satellite Cuts Could Endanger Weather Data

White House-directed changes to a weather satellite program could leave the US without critical data for severe storm and fire warnings, former officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say.

The Office of Management and Budget directed deep cuts to the GeoXO program’s budget and capabilities in April 2025, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office this month.

GeoXO is among several programs that have been subject to cuts due to the Trump administration’s desire to draw a hard line between weather prediction and climate science and “deliver exclusively” on weather-related needs, as stated in OMB budget documents.

NOAA’s geostationary satellites provide constant observations for weather forecasting and environmental monitoring. GeoXO is the next generation of these satellites, replacing the GOES-R series as it nears the end of its operational lifetime. NOAA currently aims to launch the first GeoXO satellite in 2032.

OMB proposed halving the program’s budget and eliminating at least two of its five instruments. The Commerce Department ultimately cut the total budget by 33%, from $19.6 billion to $13 billion, and reduced the annual budget from $1.2 billion to $500 million. The department also eliminated two of the program’s six satellites and three of its instruments — about a quarter of the program’s content, according to Pam Sullivan, the GeoXO program manager from 2018 to 2024.

The current plan for GeoXO does not meet the original goals of the mission, said Stephen Volz, former assistant administrator of NOAA’s environmental satellite division. The cuts to the program’s annual funding could delay the 2032 launch date, increasing the risk of a gap in data collection. And with the cuts to the instruments, the satellites will collect less data overall.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), the chair of the House Science Committee, called for continued oversight of GeoXO in response to the GAO report. Committee Democrats criticized the program cuts as one of “the White House’s irrational and ideological attacks on core NOAA functions.” They also requested further information from NOAA on the state of the program.

“It’s not going to make any difference because they’re not getting any complaints from the majority right now,” Volz said. “If there is a changeover, I think hearings and having presentations and testimonies from experts on the real risks involved here would be necessary.”

Possible launch delays

A launch delay is “the number one thing that we worry about with these satellites,” Sullivan said. A delay would lengthen any gap in observations if one of the current satellites fails. Without the satellites’ constant observations, the National Weather Service’s forecasting would be “severely handicapped, and a lot more people would be at risk,” she said.

“I’m really worried, with the annual budget cut out of proportion to the content cut, that they’re not going to have enough money to build everything on time,” Sullivan added.

The GAO report lays out a timeline that maintains a 2032 launch for the first satellite despite an 18-month delay in the authorization to start building. “You can’t delay and change a program for two or three straight years and not move a launch date,” Volz said. “You can do that by papering over it, as they say, but it ain’t gonna hold. You build in a bunch of risk into this, and a bunch of failure scenarios and probabilities of failure and costs and schedule overruns that are going to come to haunt you not too far into the future.”

If the launch is delayed, two of the current satellites will continue collecting observations, but they would have no backup; if either of those satellites fail, there would be no way to collect that environmental data until a new satellite is in orbit and operational.

Sullivan said Congress can support the program by providing more than $500 million in annual appropriations. “My belief is, sooner or later the program will be in trouble, and it will be obvious that that needs to happen,” she said. “It would be great if the funding could come along before they got into trouble.”

Fewer observations

The current plan removes three instruments: ocean color, which was expected to analyze water quality and ecosystem change; atmospheric composition, expected to monitor air quality; and lightning mapper, expected to aid storm warnings. The first two instruments would have provided new capabilities for NOAA, while the third is a current capability.

NOAA developed the new capabilities in response to its review of data users’ needs, Volz said. “With the given scope reduction, there will not be delivery of critical measurements as defined by the NOAA mission,” he said. “We will not only not meet the needs of 10 years ago, we will be far short of the needs in five years when this is supposed to be in space.”

Sullivan agreed that the new capabilities were “reasonable” to propose based on users’ needs and noted that countries in Europe and Asia have air quality sensors and an ocean color sensor in orbit. These new instruments were also likely the most exciting for scientists, because similar US instruments have flown in low-Earth orbit (LEO) but not in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), she added. Satellites in LEO drift over the area of interest once or twice a day, while those in GEO are stationary and provide constant observations of a single area.

Scientists were excited to see what they could do with these constant observations, Sullivan said. “The great thing about science is, sometimes you don’t even know what you’re going to find,” she said.