Science Committee Democrats Hold Roundtable After Trump Administration Cancels NOAA's Billion Dollar Disaster Report
(Washington, DC) – Today, Democratic Members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hosted a roundtable to discuss the Trump administration's cancellation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Billion-Dollar Disasters Report. During the roundtable, Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Ranking Member Emilia Sykes (D-OH), Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Environment Subcommittee Ranking Member Gabe Amo (D-RI), and Congresswoman Luz Rivas (D-CA) discussed with expert witness and former NOAA employee, Mr. Tom Di Liberto, the impacts of this product's cancellation and what it means for Americans across the country.
The Committee was scheduled to meet today for a hearing titled, Forecasting Disaster: NOAA's Transparency, Trust, and Scientific Integrity in Crisis. However, that hearing was postponed indefinitely late last week. Democratic Members of the Committee moved forward with planning a roundtable to better understand the consequences of ending this critical report.
Ranking Member Sykes (D-OH) of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight delivered the following remarks at today's roundtable:
Thank you to my colleagues and to Mr. Di Liberto for joining me today to discuss the Billion-Dollar Disaster report and the destruction of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, writ large.
The Billion-Dollar Disaster report has been retired. The report is critical for producing information to understand the impact of extreme weather on our communities. And let’s be clear – the cancellation of this report has nothing to do with its quality. In the last year, NOAA responded to quality concerns about the report by holding it to higher standards, and it passed those standards with flying colors. Then over the past four months, the Trump Administration did everything it could to demoralize its workforce, fire employees indiscriminately, and coerce NOAA scientists into taking early retirement and deferred resignation. NOAA no longer has the expertise it needs to continue publishing the Billion-Dollar Disaster report.
There are some out there, including our colleagues in the Majority, who want to spin this cancellation as a victory for scientific integrity. That gets it exactly backwards. The Billion-Dollar Disaster report is gone because the Trump Administration wants to take NOAA apart piece by piece and is attacking the agency every way it can think of. Cuts to NOAA affect every corner in the country, including my home, Ohio’s 13th District. NOAA supports habitat restoration across the Great Lakes water basin, including work in the Cuyahoga River in Akron to restore fish populations.
Cuts to NOAA will also inhibit the work of the National Weather Service, which provides vital weather data to Americans. Last summer, when remnants of Hurricane Debbie brought heavy rainfall and flooding across Northeast Ohio, the National Weather Service issued flood warnings in six counties. For the advisories in my district, Hudson, Twinsburg, Streetsboro, and Reminderville, they warned that the flash floods could be “life-threatening.” Roads in Akron, Bath, Barberton, Cuyahoga Falls, and Silver Lake were closed overnight due to flooding. We are still recovering from those floods, but I am grateful that we had a warning from the National Weather Service to allow us to prepare. I truly cannot imagine how much worse things would be for my constituents without the National Weather Service.
The cancellation of this report is part and parcel with the chaos and demoralization of the federal scientific workforce, and the consequence is going to be the destruction of American scientific leadership. But more importantly, it leaves us vulnerable without accurate and timely information. Nothing could be more offensive to scientific integrity than that. Thank you to Mr. Di Liberto for joining us today to share his perspective as a fired NOAA employee and a climate scientist by training. Mr. Di Liberto, we’re so sorry that you have been caught up in this chaos, and we appreciate you coming today to educate us on the valuable NOAA services that are imperiled by this Administration.
Ranking Member Lofgren (D-CA) delivered the following remarks at today's roundtable:
Thank you, Ranking Member Sykes. I want to echo everything you said about the Billion-Dollar Disaster report, and I want to zoom out a bit. NOAA is being torn apart, limb from limb. Between the NOAA passback and the skinny budget, this Administration has laid out its intention to eliminate the products and services Americans rely on every day. The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service’s website is now a graveyard of discontinued products, spanning critical topics including earthquakes, ocean temperatures, and coastlines. The passback revealed Trump’s plan to eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, following through on Project 2025’s targeting of OAR because of the political inconvenience of its research on climate change. The National Weather Service staff has been so diminished that it is preparing for “degraded operations” – that means less frequent, less precise weather forecasting, which could spell disaster when the next extreme weather event rolls around.
This Administration seeks to dispose of everything not in alignment with its anti-science agenda, and to privatize anything that’s left. Dedicated public servants, like Mr. Di Liberto, are indiscriminately fired; others are coerced into resigning, under threat of shuttering their office; and, mass layoffs face the public servants who remain. The federal workforce loses; the American scientific enterprise loses; the American people lose. Chaos, destruction, and climate deniers win. We’re here today because this is wrong, and we need to call it out.
Ranking Member Amo (D-RI) of the Subcommittee on Environment delivered the following remarks at today's roundtable:
Well, thank you, Ranking Member. I'm grateful to be here and honored to serve as a Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on the Environment, on this great committee—the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
And Mr. Di Liberto, thank you for being here. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your commitment. Thank you for your consistency— amidst a time where there are challenges for so many great public servants who are standing up. That makes a huge difference amidst chaos, confusion, corruption, and real the challenges that we've seen.
I think folks know the reason we're here. It's because our Republican colleagues canceled an Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee hearing that was supposed to be this morning. Why did they do that? They did it because President Trump beat House Republicans to the punch—you know, he's the bandleader—and canceled this vital dataset, this NOAA billion-dollar disaster report, before Republicans could try to trash it. He beat them at their own game—this nefarious game.
And so instead of the bad political theater that we would have seen in the form of a hearing—instead, we're here seeking answers as to why Trump canceled a report that documents weather disasters that cause more than a billion dollars in damages to our states, communities, our neighbors, and small businesses.
Thanks to those reports, we know that there were 27 billion-dollar disasters last year. As you've said, Mr. Di Liberto, in reality, these disasters actually cost Americans over $182 billion in damages—and, importantly, cost us and took away 568 lives.
Thanks to NOAA’s data, we know that the extreme flooding that rocked Rhode Island, the Ocean State—my great state—in December 2023 was part of a forceful East Coast storm that caused $1.3 billion in damage from Florida to Maine and took five precious lives.
The cancellation of these reports and this data does not sweep away the devastation and destruction of these extreme storms. All it does is ignore and impede our efforts to understand and respond to the vast damage of the climate crisis. This is yet another blow in the Republican nonstop drumbeat against science and against an important agency to so many of our critical functions—NOAA.
From slashing budgets to firing scientists to scrapping datasets scientists rely on, Trump is both obscuring the actual costs of climate change and rejecting reality. And my Republican friends, they are misguided in their thinking and their thought that data ignorance will save them. They want to delete funding, delete staff, delete data. They will do anything to delete data about our climate, which will ultimately eliminate our ability to have this vital capacity to act in the future.
But it's something they can't delete—they can't delete the impact of climate change. Climate change is here. It's real. It's happening, whether or not they want to quantify it. We are experiencing it. No matter how many people Republicans fire or hearings they cancel, the sea levels are rising, temperatures are increasing, and extreme storms are becoming more frequent and intense.
People will still lose their homes, their livelihoods, and lose their lives. We'll see insurance markets disrupted. We will see instability for every aspect of our lives. So Republicans are deleting any chance we have to understand the extreme weather events and to better future responses that we have to protect people, to protect property, to protect our way of life.
Their crusade against facts will make us ill-prepared—that is a fact. But my Republican colleagues simply don't care. Today, they're demonstrating that, they are saying it doesn't matter what happens to their constituents at home, facing wildfires, floods, tropical storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and so much more.
So I'm just grateful that we're here today, because to get progress, we're going to need a little bit of struggle. And for all the work that you're doing, Mr. Di Liberto—to not stick your head in the sand. You are, you are out here. And despite the, you know, the mishaps, the failures, the DOJ, the HR catastrophe of the moment—your courage and the courage of so many of your colleagues who I've seen outside of buildings, on the steps of the Capitol—that's going to get us through this.
Congresswoman Rivas (D-CA) delivered the following remarks at today's roundtable:
Thank you, Ranking Member Lofgren.
Mr. Di Liberto, I’m sorry to hear about your situation, and want you to know that your work at NOAA helped save lives, and that includes the Billion Dollar Disaster report, which was just retired.
The Eaton and Palisades wildfires in L.A. earlier this year were the costliest wildfires in recent history, however, data from those wildfires will not be included in this report moving forward. Failing to capture data like this would hinder any community’s ability to prepare for, and recover from, natural disasters. Without the BDD report, it would be much harder to understand and assess the evolving risk of extreme weather for our country, especially the economic effects extreme weather would have on disadvantaged communities like mine.
The Trump Administration thinks it can just close its eyes and magically pretend climate change and its subsequent climate disasters aren’t happening – but they are happening, and they will only get more costly if we neglect to properly prepare our communities. As communities like mine face more frequent and costlier climate disasters, discontinuing the BDD report will negatively impact the public and environmental justice communities.
The Trump Administration’s gutting of the federal science workforce will erase years of progress we made to tackling climate disasters and addressing climate change – it will take years to rebuild that workforce. I’m committed to working with House Democrats to find solutions to protect our communities from the reckless, chaotic, and destructive actions of this Administration.
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