The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA

NOAA was assembled on October 3, 1970, from agencies far older than itself. The Survey of the Coast, founded by Jefferson in 1807, is the oldest scientific agency in the federal government. The Weather Bureau began in the Army Signal Corps in 1870. The Bureau of Fisheries dates to 1871. Richard Nixon's Reorganization Plan No. 4 gathered them into a single agency in the Commerce Department, declining a proposal to pair it with the new Environmental Protection Agency, and the result is a science agency whose products reach more Americans every day than almost any other part of government.

The National Weather Service is the piece everyone uses. Its 122 forecast offices, river forecast centers, National Hurricane Center, Storm Prediction Center, and other centers issue the forecasts and warnings that every weather app, broadcaster, and emergency manager draws on, free of charge. The National Environmental Satellite service operates the geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites that feed those forecasts and track hurricanes from space. The National Marine Fisheries Service manages the commercial and recreational fisheries in federal waters and enforces the Endangered Species Act for marine life. The National Ocean Service produces the nautical charts, tide tables, and coastal surveys that ships depend on.

Beneath the services sits a research enterprise that includes the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, where modern climate models were born, the hurricane hunter aircraft that fly into storms, a fleet of research ships, and the global observing networks of buoys, tide gauges, and weather balloons. NOAA keeps the nation's climate records, going back to the 1800s, and publishes the monthly and annual temperature summaries that are the official measure of how the climate is changing. About 12,000 people work for the agency, nearly 7,000 of them scientists and engineers, on a budget near 6.5 billion dollars.

The agency's budget is small for the economic value it generates, and private weather companies that build on its free data have periodically argued the government should leave forecasting to them. Its climate work has made it a target: 2025 brought proposals to dismantle its research arm, deep staff cuts that left some forecast offices short-handed, and the cancellation of programs tracking the cost of billion-dollar disasters. Supporters, including many in the shipping, farming, and insurance industries, argue the agency's observations cannot be replaced.