The Year the U.S. Abandoned Extreme Weather Preparedness
Federal websites, data tools, and monitoring systems that help communities deal with droughts, storms, floods, wildfires and other extreme weather hazards have been shut down or left in limbo. The federal grants and regional research programs that local and state governments count on to figure out which neighborhoods flood and what disasters to prepare for have been canceled, closed, or are barely operating. The staff and funding behind these data systems and programs are vanishing too. Without them, information we’re relying on to stay safe before, during, and after extreme weather events becomes outdated and unreliable, and right when we need it most. That’s why we need to protect what federal expertise and funding we have left if we care about keeping communities safe.
In less than a year, we’ve lost access to some of our most vital extreme weather and climate resources. Here’s the timeline of some key losses:
April 4, 2025: The federal government canceled billions of dollars in grants through the BRIC (Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities) and FMA (Flood Mitigation Assistance) programs. These programs funded local flood mapping and disaster risk assessments. That means local governments - especially rural communities and Tribal nations - can’t afford to figure out who’s at risk. This is a big problem because as First Street research has shown, for flood risk alone, nearly twice as many Americans live in flood zones than FEMA maps currently show.
May 9, 2025: NOAA announced that its National Centers for Environmental Information would stop updating its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster database - a tool that tracked major weather disasters since 1980. Local governments used this to plan budgets, write grants, and figure out which disasters were most likely to hit. Climate Central has since stepped in to restore access to this critical climate data tool outside of government channels, making the information available to communities that had lost it.
May 31, 2025: The entire NOAA team behind Climate.gov was let go. The site was visited by nearly one million people every month to understand weather patterns, check drought conditions, and learn how to prepare for extreme weather. Local officials used its tools and data for resilience planning and decision-making. Now, no additional content or updates will be added to the government-owned site. However, the critical contents were recently relaunched by Climate.us, a new nonprofit organization formed by former members of NOAA’s Climate.gov team.
July, 2025: The US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) website, which housed each National Climate Assessment as well as other climate reports for policy-makers and the general public, was taken offline. The USGCRP remains under an ‘operations and structure review’ with no clear timeline for activity to resume. The site contains years of research on how climate change affects different regions of the country, including key economic sectors.
September 30, 2025: Three out of nine regional USGS Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASC) announced a reduction or suspension of their operations due to lack of funding from the Department of Interior (DOI). These centers work out of universities like the University of Oklahoma. They help Tribal nations, state agencies, and local governments with tasks like mapping wildfire hazard and designing stormwater infrastructure that can manage extreme flood events. CASC also plays a vital role with collecting data on how climate change impacts ecosystems, natural resources, and wildlife.
What’s Been Lost
The Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Database, Climate.gov, and Globalclimatechange.gov all provided disaster risk and climate data used by communities for infrastructure resilience planning and prioritizing critical investments for extreme weather risk reduction. The cancellation of BRIC and FMA programs were major sources of funding that allowed communities to act on disaster risk reduction data. These cancellations fit a trend of federal retreat from disaster preparedness. We are losing both the data communities need to understand risks and the funding to do something about it. [Note: Great teams have re-stood up access to several of these resources, see here, but we remain concerned about the pullback of federal resources towards developing, maintaining, and using disaster risk and climate data.]
Losing these resources also means we’re moving backward to an outdated way of thinking about disaster planning. For decades, we planned by looking at the past. If your town’s worst flood happened in 1980, engineers designed levees or drainage systems based on that flood level. That approach doesn’t work anymore.
Storms are getting stronger; rainfall is getting more intense. Coastal areas that used to flood only during big storms now flood on sunny days with high tides. What used to be your town’s “worst case scenario” flood event might now happen several times in a decade. When communities lack data about what is currently happening, they have to make safety decisions based on conditions that no longer exist, and people will get hurt.
Action is Needed
Funding and capacity are needed before a crisis hits, not just after. Pre-disaster preparedness and resilience have always been underfunded, but now, even those limited resources are being cut. We need urgent funding to protect the existing federal teams and expertise we still have. We need to build state-level capacity to collect and analyze extreme weather risk data. And we need to preserve data and tools that are at risk of being pulled down, so communities, businesses, and policy-makers can continue to use these resources.
At the Public Environmental Data Partners, we are preserving data and tools and working to support people, programs and data infrastructure that keeps communities safe. Whether your company or organization can fund climate and extreme weather research and disaster preparedness, or you can raise your voice and rally for science, everyone has a role to play to help make sure we still have the tools, data, and expertise to see the next disaster coming, and prepare for it before it hits.