
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could close all four of its Boulder laboratories and CU Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences (CIRES) under a proposed 2026 budget. The plan comes after the agency cut hundreds of jobs earlier this year.
The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), which operates at Colorado State University, will also be eliminated.
The proposed budget is $4.5 billion, some 30% smaller than 2025’s spending plan, and comes with a 17% reduction in total jobs. The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research has been eliminated in its entirety from NOAA under the plan; some of its operations will be transferred to other offices, according to the budget document released by NOAA on Monday.
Four Boulder labs operate under that office at the David Skaggs Research Center: the Chemical Sciences Laboratory, the Global Monitoring Laboratory, the Global Systems Laboratory and the Physical Sciences Laboratory.
NOAA hosts the National Weather Service and is central to research on climate change, making it a target of the Trump administration. Project 2025, the policy roadmap written by conservative D.C. think-tank The Heritage Foundation, called for the “break up” of the agency and for its climate research arms to be “disbanded" as part "of the climate change alarm industry."
It’s unclear how many jobs will be impacted in Boulder. CIRES employs more than 900 people in Boulder, according to the organization’s website.