Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 25, 2025
Already, the two institutes — the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University — are preparing for potential layoffs should money held up in new federal approval processes not materialize in the coming weeks…Both institutes for decades have partnered with the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides the majority of the budget for both facilities. The federal agency’s weather prediction and air and ocean monitoring impact nearly every industry and provide critical severe weather tracking, including through the National Weather Service. Its work is advanced by research from a network of 16 cooperative institutes, like those in Fort Collins and Boulder.
A memo by the White House Office of Management and Budget for the 2026 fiscal year — which begins Oct. 1 — proposes reducing funding for NOAA by 27%, effectively eliminating the agency’s research arm and ending support for the cooperative institutes. The budget reductions are part of a wide-ranging effort by the Trump administration to slash the size of government. Project 2025 — a conservative think tank’s outline for Trump’s second presidency — called for the dismantling of NOAA and for its functions to be privatized. The policy document identified the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, (it) is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” The White House plan prompted three of Colorado’s Democratic congressional leaders — Rep. Joe Neguse and Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet — on Wednesday to send a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to urge him not to cut cooperative institutes’ funding.
“CIs are home to experienced researchers and long-standing data collection programs with major impacts on human societies, (and) moreover they are instrumental in training future generations of workers who continue to contribute to societal needs,” the letter states. “It is our fear that if sweeping cuts are made, the damage will be irreversible. Even short-term interruptions in their research could threaten the safety and economies of the communities that CIs serve across the nation.”
Congress would have to approve the White House’s plan for the next fiscal year, but cooperative institute leaders also worry about more immediate funding problems. The memo directs NOAA to align its spending through fiscal year 2025 with the priorities in the document. The administration could strangle funding to the cooperative institutes even before the 2026 budget is set, said Waleed Abdalati, the director of CIRES at CU Boulder. Already, institutes are struggling to get money previously approved for research projects.