Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has reportedly infiltrated the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that collects and shares vital weather and climate information. Sources have told The Verge, as well as other news outlets, that they’re worried about drastic changes that could impact the public’s access to weather forecasts, jeopardize cybersecurity, and gut employee morale.

NOAA houses the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, which produce forecasts and warn people about approaching storms. News that DOGE has barged into national headquarters has raised fears that the ad hoc group Musk is leading to remake the federal government is about to take a sledgehammer to NOAA — potentially hobbling the agency’s ability to keep the public safe during disasters. One current employee tells The Verge they’re staying on despite “demoralizing” changes at the agency because of how vital their work is — people rely on NOAA for accurate forecasts every day.   

“It seems like a hostile corporate takeover of a government agency that provides a suite of services to the public to protect lives and to protect property,” Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), tells The Verge.

“They blew through security”

DOGE representatives arrived at NOAA offices in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Tuesday, Axios reports, citing anonymous sources. 

“They blew through security … they walked in and they said, basically, take me to your IT,” says Andrew Rosenberg, a marine scientist who previously held leadership roles at the National Marine Fisheries Service at NOAA and UCS, based on news he’s heard from former and current employees. “This is basically like doing a major computer hack attack, but doing it inside the agency, because, you know, somebody gave you a badge,” Rosenberg tells The Verge.

Rosenberg says DOGE is trying to sniff out anything that “vaguely mentions diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) — initiatives that President Donald Trump and Musk are trying to stomp out of existence.

A current NOAA employee, who was granted anonymity because of the risk of retaliation, tells The Verge that ahead of an “external audit,” staff have been instructed to fully delete or take down any materials related to diversity and equity, whether that’s publicly available online, on internal sites, or in physical office spaces. Government webpages for other federal agencies have already removed content that discusses race, gender, and equity issues. 

The employee tells The Verge that posters with information about how to report sexual assault and harassment had also been taken down from their office. Chatrooms and websites for employee resource groups, including one for women, have also gone down.

“To have those supportive spaces just … gone [is] incredibly hard,” the NOAA employee who identifies as queer and neurodivergent said in a message to The Verge. “It’s demoralizing.”

At least one person at the agency was put on administrative leave, that employee says. Similarly, Wired reports that a staff member who leads diversity and inclusion efforts within NOAA was placed on leave on Tuesday. The person had reportedly worked there for decades and was scheduled to retire in a few weeks. 

NOAA employees were told to give DOGE engineer Nikhil Rajpal editor access to NOAA Google sites, according to Wired, citing anonymous sources who say the directive came from acting Secretary of Commerce Jeremy Pelter. A NOAA spokesperson referred The Verge to the public affairs contact for the Commerce Department, which houses NOAA. The Department of Commerce didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge.

Rosenberg says his contacts tell him that DOGE has gotten into the agency’s email system to monitor employees to make sure nobody leaks information. The report, which The Verge could not independently confirm, would tally with news from other federal agencies. Employees at other agencies tell The Verge they’ve been told to remove gender pronouns from email signatures. Musk aides have reportedly also kicked workers out of their own computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management. These kinds of incursions into communications and IT systems at federal agencies and the Trump administration’s rushed attempts at slashing the workforce have also raised cybersecurity concerns. 

“They’re into the data systems, but nobody really knows what they’re doing there,” Rosenberg says. “Who knows, you know what is carried along with tapping into these systems? We worked on cybersecurity now for how many decades? And they’re just ignoring that.”

Federal employees received an email last week from the Office of Personnel Management telling them they could opt to take a “deferred resignation” by February 6th or face drastic workplace changes should they choose to stay. Soon after receiving that email, NOAA employees got a rush of spam mail in their inboxes, according to the employee The Verge contacted. The person shared screenshots of some of those emails that included advertising for denim jeans and Scientology Today, as well as other messages containing homophobic and misogynistic slurs. The spam emails were reportedly deleted from staff inboxes by someone within NOAA about an hour after they were sent. 

“Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers are ransacking their way through the federal government, unlawfully gaining unfettered access to Americans’ private information and gutting programs people depend on,” Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) said in a statement, The Hill reports.

“Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers are ransacking their way through the federal government”

The turmoil at NOAA comes after DOGE stormed the Treasury Department and is attempting to shut down the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. And on Tuesday, Trump nominated Neil Jacobs to lead NOAA, who was found to have violated the agency’s scientific integrity policy during the notorious “Sharpiegate” scandal of Trump’s first term. Trump reportedly used a Sharpie to erroneously alter a National Hurricane Center map depicting the expected path of Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Jacobs was acting administrator at the time.

Only around 20,000 workers have reportedly chosen to take deferred resignation as of January 5th across the federal government, which is made up of around 3 million workers. Sweeping layoffs could start soon, Trump administration officials told CNN. 

DOGE intends to slash NOAA’s workforce in half and reduce its budget by 30 percent, Rosenberg wrote in the SciLight newsletter. Since its data also informs resources related to climate change like flood maps, NOAA has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay the consequences of climate change. Project 2025, the right-wing manifesto for a second Trump administration, said NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

Privatizing weather forecasts could put more Americans at risk during extreme weather, sources tell The Verge. Private companies — and new AI tools for weather forecasting — still rely on data collected by NOAA. One alternative would be to keep collecting data through NOAA but then turn it over to private companies to share with the public. That would turn a free service, weather forecasts, into something for which people would have to pay. And that could have grave consequences if only those who can afford to access that information have it as disasters unfold, sources say.

“How will they know if they need to evacuate and when?” the UCS’s Declet-Barreto says. “Or how hot it’s going to get during a heat wave and when? That is all public information paid by your tax dollars, and that information protects people and saves lives. Project 2025 wants to put that behind a paywall.”

The NOAA employee told The Verge that they have no plans of leaving unless they’re fired and “they physically remove me from the building … I know the work we do is incredibly important.”

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