Congress passed a spending package directing approximately $198 million to NOAA's climate and weather research laboratories. That money was appropriated by law. It was specifically protected after Congress rejected the Trump administration's attempt to slash NOAA's budget on a bipartisan basis. And now the White House Office of Management and Budget is refusing to release it.

Forty-two scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Colorado have been put on furlough notice. If the funds do not arrive by May 15, they will stop working. The data they collect, atmospheric composition, greenhouse gas concentrations, ozone recovery, weather variability, will stop being gathered. And according to CIRES director Waleed Abdalati, that is not simply a temporary gap that can be filled later.

"It's much easier to break than it is to reconstitute," he said. Some work is already stopping.

This matters far beyond the laboratories in Colorado. NOAA's atmospheric monitoring data informs the seasonal weather forecasting that farmers use to plan crops, that ranchers use to manage cattle, that fishing industries depend on to understand ocean conditions, and that coastal communities rely on to prepare for extreme weather. When these observations stop, the downstream effects move through the entire economy. The data does not exist in a vacuum. It exists because scientists have been continuously collecting it for decades, and continuity is part of what makes it valuable.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NOAA, has said explicitly that withholding these funds violates the law. He has pointed directly at OMB Director Russell Vought as the person responsible. A former NOAA deputy director described the freeze as abnormal and said he believes the administration is using the budget as a weapon to fundamentally change what the government does and what the public has access to.

That assessment is consistent with what the administration has said it wants to do. A leaked document showed the Trump administration eyeing the elimination of NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and a 74 percent cut to its funding. The latest White House budget proposes a $1.6 billion cut to NOAA operations, research, and grants. Congress rejected those cuts. OMB is now achieving them through a different mechanism, by simply not releasing money that Congress already appropriated and directed to be spent.

That is not a budget disagreement. It is a violation of the law. And it is one that Congress has both the authority and the obligation to stop.

Sign this petition to demand OMB Director Russell Vought immediately release all congressionally appropriated NOAA grant funding, call on Congress to hold Vought accountable for defying its spending directives, and protect NOAA's atmospheric monitoring capability from politically motivated funding freezes that cause irreversible damage to decades of continuous scientific data collection.