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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten.

Today in the podcast, we're checking in on the latest science news, starting with a look at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

How is this agency faring with widespread federal cuts to science? My next guest has reported on NOAA

and how cuts may affect our access to information about weather and future climate events.

Umer Orfan is a senior correspondent at Vox covering science, climate change,

and the environment, and he's based in Washington, D.C. Umair, welcome back to Science Friday.

Hey, Flora. All right, let's dig into Noah here. Remind us what Noah does. Well, Noah is the main

agency responsible for analyzing the skies, the seas, and getting data to provide

valuable information like weather forecast, as well as long-term predictions of climate and

lots of other useful things for the economy and for industry. And who works there? Well, NOAA has a

staff of about 12,000 people around the world, but more than half of them are scientists and engineers.

This is an agency whose core mission is research and development.

It has a $6.8 billion budget.

It operates satellites, a fleet of ships, underwater probes, and research stations around the world.

What's the state of NOAA right now?

Well, they've been facing a swath of cuts. Like other federal agencies, they've lost a lot of

probationary employees. That's about 10% of their workforce. And so they've already lost about 880

workers. And now the agency is facing about a thousand more job cuts and that's starting to affect its operations.

You know, NOAA launches 92 weather balloons every day from various sites across the U.S. to get weather

data and some of those balloon launches have been cut back. They've been cutting back now on their

monthly climate forecasts and reports. And there are reports now that other bigger research projects

...