CREW wants to know why the Bush administration cut funds to earth sciences programs at NASA and NOAA. Those programs provide critical data for hurricane prediction and climate change observation. Our interest was generated by a disturbing report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The FOIA requests and the NAS Report's Executive Summary can be found on our main website.

The NAS report, commissioned by NASA, NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey to provide an assessment of current earth-observation capabilities as well as a 10-year projection of those capabilities, reiterates alarms that were raised in an interim report published in April 2005: due to funding cuts, U.S. satellite and other earth-observation programs will be unable to provide crucial weather and climate data to scientists for some amount of time in the coming decade, an amount that will increase if current funding trends continue. Among the concerns that the report specifically raises is that the government's ability to forecast hurricanes and El Nino patterns will be compromised. Unless funding for one particular program is restored, the report notes, NOAA will be unable to fulfill its obligations under the Clean Air Act. The authors also note that the outlook may be even worse than projected, since the cuts were still being finalized as the report went to print.

Given the seriousness of the concerns raised by the NAS report, we want to know how and why those funding decisions were made.