NOAA Great Lakes Lab Loses Key Funding

Funding cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are impacting labs that test and monitor water quality in the Great Lakes, putting key resources for coastal communities in peril.

As Anna Clark explains in a report for ProPublica, data collected by NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory “has helped to successfully avoid a repeat of a 2014 crisis in Toledo, Ohio, when nearly half a million people were warned to not drink the water or even touch it.”

The lab now faces “serious gaps” in its monitoring of algal blooms, having lost 35 percent of its workforce since February. “An earlier document obtained by ProPublica and reported widely proposed a 74% funding cut to NOAA’s research office, home of the Great Lakes lab.”

NOAA is a target of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan that has influenced much of the Trump administration’s policy decisions. Project 2025 suggests the administration should consider whether NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”