The Trump administration has shut off funding to at least two government-sponsored university centers researching ways to help communities adapt to droughts, wildfires, flooding and sea level rise.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Adaptation Center in the Pacific Northwest and another center that declined to be named lost funding as of May 5, NOTUS confirmed. Eleven more centers across the country remain funded.
Representatives for many of the remaining centers declined to comment for fear that the Trump administration would also cancel their funding. Two described a “sword hanging over our head.” None would identify the second center that had been cut on the record.
These center representatives also did not know why only two out of 11 programs were shut down. Several center representatives expressed surprise that the center in the Pacific Northwest had been shut down specifically, because it served many rural communities the Trump administration has repeatedly said it supports.
That includes small farmers in Idaho battling droughts and who are increasingly being pressured to sell their land to urban developers, as well as tribes along the coasts of Oregon and Washington at risk of losing their villages to the eroding shoreline.
The Trump administration’s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year includes significant cuts to the arm of NOAA that funds the remaining centers. The Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment.
These funding cancellations are the latest in a series of funding terminations and pauses on the government’s climate- and weather-related work conducted in partnership with universities. In April alone, Commerce cancelled the funding for Princeton University’s highly regarded earth and water modelling; the Department of Homeland Security closed almost all of its university-affiliated research centers, including one at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that provided tools on flooding during hurricanes; and the Department of Energy issued a stop-work order for an advanced offshore wind project at the University of Maine.
The University of Washington’s climate adaptation center was one of 13 similar programs, some of which have been funded by NOAA since 1995. The NOAA website touts the programs as “proof that federal science, when guided by local priorities, works for the American people” and lists the hundreds of communities and partners served by their work over the years.
The Trump administration’s attitudes regarding climate science and continued negativity toward NOAA had leaders of the centers worried for months. In early April, about half of the directors across the country flew to Washington, D.C., to lobby with both NOAA political appointees and members of Congress on behalf of their continued existence.
“We were met with some pretty grim feedback” from lawmakers, who urged the center leadership to find Republican advocates, said Jason Vogel, the leader of the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative.
“Republican legislators may actually care about what kind of services we provide. Just because our program got cut doesn’t mean that the whole program stopped. The program is still alive, our efforts are continuing and I am able to speak up in part because they cut us,” he said.
The remaining centers are still lobbying for protection from Congress, and their leaders helped draft a “Dear Colleague” letter — led by Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado — currently circulating for signatures among House members.
The letter, reviewed by NOTUS, describes the centers’ local efforts in great detail, especially in more conservative areas. In Arizona, the regional center has created an easy-to-use wildfire burn tracker that has proven invaluable for firefighters fighting active fires; across the middle of the country, researchers are assessing stormwater flooding vulnerability for local towns in both the Great Lakes and in the region that represents Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas; the mountain West team is working on helping communities become more resilient to wildfires.
“NOAA’s investment in CAP program was one of the very few to say, very explicitly, go see if you can solve problems in your region, full stop,” said one researcher who has been involved with the program for more than a decade. “We are funded to go deal with issues that are too big for a community to deal with. We’re a group of scientists who were actually working pretty hard to figure out how your town or rural community or city can deal with drought and sea level rise and flooding.”
The first iteration of the now-shuttered Pacific Northwest center was formed directly in response to the first United States disaster declared based on a climate fluctuation: the collapse of the salmon fisheries in the Columbia River basin.
In the months before it was shuttered, the Pacific Northwest center was helping Washington state prepare to implement its first formal plan for extreme heat days, funding work to investigate why small farms were going under in Idaho and planning to provide air filtering tools for a tribal community dealing with wildfire smoke. The team was also about to begin helping coastal tribes craft plans to deal with their most pressing infrastructure issues, after more than two years of engagement to understand the scale of the problem.
“That work can’t be funded now,” Vogel said. “A lot of our partners are community-based organizations. We were working with communities that are already pretty vulnerable. It feels cruel to have to just yank funding for projects that are ongoing.”
The center’s closure has also left Washington’s public health agency worried about where to turn for weather and climate change research on the local level. “They are making sense of it for our region. Nobody else does that, and so those resources are invaluable to us,” said Rad Cunningham, a senior epidemiologist at the state health department who worked with Vogel on recommendations for the state’s extreme heat response plan.
“The Trump administration’s senseless decision to terminate UW’s climate adaptation program is an affront to everyone who thinks we should be trying to protect people’s health and save lives from extreme heat, wildfire smoke and other climate events that are only becoming more and more deadly,” said Washington Sen. Patty Murray. “This is a tremendous loss for the Pacific Northwest.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.