By Brooke Stephenson, Boulder Reporting Lab
About half of the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Lab in Boulder will be furloughed in May if federal funding is not released.
The lab tracks and analyzes greenhouse gases, solar radiation, aerosols and ozone levels. More than half of the scientists at the lab work through CU Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), one of 16 cooperative institutes affiliated with NOAA. Their work and salaries are funded through federal grants that were paused Feb. 27, according to CIRES Director Waleed Abdalati.
Abdalati said that the federal government typically funds the labs several months to a year in advance, and in the past, when funding lagged, the university trusted “that the government was good for it.”
“But given the current funding environment, that’s a risk that we just can’t take,” he said. “So when the money runs out, we need to stop the work.”
Funding officially ran out for CIRES Global Monitoring Lab employees on March 24. The university informed 42 employees this week that they would be furloughed without pay on May 15 unless federal funding comes through — in which case the furloughs would be rescinded.
Abdalati said they did not receive official notification of a funding pause, but were told by their “finance counterparts” at the federal level that most NOAA grants were frozen. The grants would likely not move forward until the Trump administration outlines how it intends to spend money Congress appropriated for NOAA.
“Congress has appropriated the funds, the Secretary of Commerce has approved the movement of the funds. It’s just that they’re not being released by the Office of Management and Budget,” he said.
An April 1 CU Boulder statement said that the university, along with CIRES and NOAA leadership, is “actively engaged at multiple levels to advocate for the release of these funds so the important work at GML can continue.”
In previous budget guidance, the Trump administration directed Congress to terminate “climate-dominated research” within NOAA and end programs that “spread environmental alarm.” Congress opted not to adhere to much of the Trump administration’s requests to reduce NOAA funding.
The stalled funding comes as the Office of Management and Budget has delayed the release of appropriated funds to numerous scientific agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and NASA, according to the journal Nature. As a result, the NIH and NSF have only awarded a fraction of the grants they typically award.
Congress approved a budget for most federal agencies in late January. In the past, U.S. agencies received permission from OMB to spend portions of their funding in 30-day increments until a final spending plan was approved. But OMB has changed that process this year, allowing it to limit the release of funds during those 30-day periods, Nature reports.
OMB Director Russell Vought has written in Project 2025 that the OMB’s role in distributing government funding can be an “indispensable statutory tool” to “ensure against waste, fraud, and abuse and ensure consistency with the President’s agenda and applicable laws.”
All of NOAA’s cooperative institutes are funded through federal grants like the one that supports Global Monitoring Lab employees. Abdalati said the lab’s grant may be among the first affected by the Feb. 27 pause, and that other cooperative institutes could be vulnerable to financial hardship and staff cuts if the pause continues.
NOAA’s Global Monitoring Lab tracks carbon emissions and uptake, as well as how carbon moves through the atmosphere, which informs work on carbon capture and other efforts to address climate change. It also researches ozone levels and monitors the recovery of the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.
The lab also monitors and analyzes changes in radiation, clouds and aerosols, all of which impact weather and climate.
“The work they do is the gold standard against which all other types of measurements tend to be compared,” Abdalati said.
“Understanding the radiation distribution, cloud movements and formation and aerosol characteristics help us understand not just the weather of today, and not just the climate of 10 years from now, but the implications for farmers, for ranchers, for tourism,” he said. “Everyone should appreciate the value of knowing what’s going on. It’s like trying to decide what to wear without a thermometer.”
Losing half of the lab’s scientists would cripple much of its work.
Friends Kate Weinstein, center left, and Laura Coleman, center, hold signs during a site demonstration Monday, March 3, 2025, outside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) campus in Boulder. The protest was organized by former U.S. Representative David Skaggs following the mass firing of probationary federal workers at NOAA. “The rest of the world uses the information, the data, that the NOAA produces,” says Coleman. “Including weather data for hurricanes. It’s really critical,” adds Weinstein. (Alyte Katilius, Special to The Colorado Sun)If funding doesn’t come in before May 15 and CIRES employees are placed on furlough, they can be called back immediately if and when the money is released. But Abdalati said just issuing the furlough notices has a negative impact on scientists.
“A lot of damage is being done when you tell people the government is choosing not to release the funds that pay your salary,” he said. “That’s terrible for morale. And once that die is cast, sometimes it’s hard to uncast it.”
Abdalati said the university is “doing all we can” to support employees but cannot make up for the funding shortfall for more than the next 45 days.
“Frankly, it breaks my heart as an employer, as a citizen,” he said. “It is very upsetting to know that Congress has allocated the resources to carry out these critical functions, and yet here we are having run out of funding to do the work.”
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