The Trump administration continues its cuts to research funding, with a proposal to cut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s budgets by billions of dollars in the 2026 fiscal year.
In particular, NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research is projected to face $485 million in cuts. According to Ars Technica, NASA’s science programs will be slashed by almost 50%, from $7.5 billion in the 2025 fiscal year down to $3.9 billion.
The proposed budget must still be approved by Congress before taking effect, where the final cuts may be negotiated to a lower number.
“I’d rather sound a little bit naive, but I hope I’m not being naive; I really believe that Congress is going to step in,” said Ana Barros, professor and department head of Civil & Environmental Engineering. “I believe that, in the end, the cuts, which might still happen, will be a lot smaller than what we’re talking about.”
As department head, Barros is involved with the consortium the University has with NOAA. The federal agency initially gave $360 million in 2022 to support the union of academic research and development labs and the hydrologic side of the National Weather Service for research to operations.
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Dozens of other universities around the country and the private sector participate in the consortium research along with the University. Individual researchers come to NOAA with proposals that go through rigorous rounds of debate between NOAA administrators, and only ideas that align with the agency’s missions receive funding.
Barros’ research under the consortium deals with the assimilation of large amounts of NOAA satellite data to improve forecasting of long-term water events. This time scale of six months to a year contrasts with the NWS’s main focus of weekly weather forecasts, creating a divide-and-conquer approach.
One example of these extended events is droughts. According to Barros, droughts can cause the agricultural industry to drain stockpiles of water from wetter years and pull from groundwater deeper in the Earth’s surface.
“We’re taking advantage, or leveraging, that unique data set, which is the first time ever that we’re going to have this super high resolution data for hydrology,” Barros said. “We can use that in the National Water Model.”
The NWM mathematically represents the water cycle of the continental United States, Hawaii, southern Alaska, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The number of variables involved, such as flora and soil types or elevation, requires the NWM to run on a supercomputer so it can process data quickly enough for ever-changing weather conditions.
NOAA also works with NASA to obtain portions of these data sets. NASA data in this area is accessible to the public in the U.S. and abroad.
“As opposed to what was happening … with data from other satellite agencies, NASA data have been available to everyone in the world, free of charge,” Barros said. “All the time. Completely open. … Without all these data sets, without all this foundational work that NASA has supported over the years, it would not be possible.”
Should the proposed budget cuts pass unchanged through Congress, the work done by NOAA and NASA would be significantly diminished. Barros expressed concern about the impact that cutting research funding would have on the continual development of future scientists.
“So, the concern is that we’re making decisions now in a very rushed way without assessing the cascading impacts of those decisions,” Barros said. “And that is going to cost us a decade, because even if, in a few years, we go back (to the original budgets), we still lost that. It’s a gap that you just don’t fill by trying to fix it later.”
Academia often relies mostly on federal funding for developmental research, but can pull from the private sector to take it a step further. According to Barros, industry focuses on translational research, which takes already developed ideas and turns them into commercially available products or services.
Yet, funding from the private sector is usually not enough to sustain university research.
“Foundations are sort of the cherry on top,” Barros said. “The federal funding is essential to keep research at its best and at the frontier of what needs to be done. … Most of industry will not fund for developmental research at universities. The ones that can afford it, they have their own R&D labs.”
The NOAA consortium is not the only place at the University that could be impacted by the proposed budget cuts. Many professors on campus work with NOAA or NASA, and the University has a consortium with NASA as well.
Moreover, University RSOs could be affected, according to Rudy LaFave, senior in ACES and outgoing president of Students for Environmental Concerns. SECS focuses on both education and direct action as means to improve the environment.
Notably, SECS has pushed for University divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Its work has culminated in the creation of the Illinois General Assembly House Bill 5268. If passed, the University must divest within a year.
However, the continued push for divestment may be impacted by the proposed budget.
“Any information that we (SECS) hold about fossil fuel companies, or about the financed emissions that our University creates because they invest in fossil fuels, are based off of climate research, climate science and climate economics,” LaFave said. “All of which benefit from grants in some form or another given by the federal government, given by these agencies.”
Should this kind of information become unobtainable, SECS may be able to contact researchers in universities abroad. However, LaFave said he had “full faith in the director of the iSEE, … their ability to incorporate these budget cuts … into these goals that the University of Illinois is making.”
The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment oversees the Illinois Climate Action Plan. Renewed every five years, it guides the University toward a carbon-neutral future, at least by 2050. The iCAP is informed by many agencies and climate surveys, one of which is the National Climate Assessment.
Yet, on Monday, the Trump administration terminated all contributors to the Sixth National Climate Assessment, originally planned for 2028. The termination of those creating the Sixth Assessment could be detrimental to the 2030 iCAP.
One of SECS’s projects is holding the University accountable for sticking to the iCAP through education of the student body and getting students involved in sustainability projects.
It is still uncertain whether the proposed budget cuts to NOAA and NASA, or the gutting of the NCA, will affect SECS’s operations in the long run.
“The University is already suffering cuts … and I think that these cuts and the broader presidential administration is going to slow down progress here at Illinois,” LaFave said.
