NOAA made 229 new grants by Sept. 2, a 74% drop from past years, a grant tracker finds
Grant Witness, which tracks federal science funding, counts 26 NOAA grants terminated since April 2025, four of them since restored. A New Orleans nonprofit lost $1.2 million for a regional water plan.
Washington. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made 229 new grants in the 2026 fiscal year through Sept. 2, according to Grant Witness, a group that tracks federal science grants. In the 2021 through 2024 fiscal years, the agency had made an average of 891 by the same date, so this year's count is 74% lower. Grant Witness counts new awards in federal spending data, and its NOAA figures run to Sept. 2; the fiscal year ended Sept. 30. Mongabay reported the figures on Oct. 14.
New NOAA grants made by Sept. 2, average year and fiscal 2026
Grants ended early
The tracker also lists 26 NOAA grants that were terminated, 22 of them in April 2025. Four have since been restored. Many of the terminated grants, Grant Witness says, dealt with how floods, droughts and other climate events affect local communities. Most went to universities and state agencies; several went to nonprofits.
New Orleans Community Support Foundation held $1,208,108 from NOAA's Climate Resilience Regional Challenge, a one-time competitive program for which NOAA announced almost $573 million in July 2024. The grant, signed Aug. 18, 2024, was to help the greater New Orleans region build a shared water management plan: open climate and water data to the public, write a policy manual for green infrastructure and hold workshops. Federal spending records now show it ending May 5, 2025, and the project no longer appears among the Louisiana awards on NOAA's page of funded projects.
Elizabeth River Project in Norfolk, Va., lost a $150,000 grant for watershed lessons for fourth graders in Portsmouth, and Manomet, based in Plymouth, Mass., a $483,173 grant to build outdoor learning spaces and climate resilience lessons in Brockton schools.
One restored, after layoffs
The University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group said NOAA ended its Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative effective May 5, 2025. It was the group's largest source of funding for work with rural communities and tribes in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and two positions were eliminated. Grant Witness lists the grant as reinstated in December 2025. Mongabay, citing a Grant Witness press release, reported that it and three others were reinstated after litigation or congressional pressure.
Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA when many of the grants were made, called the cuts "stunningly short-sighted and quite disturbing" in an email to Mongabay. Scott Delaney, a co-founder of Grant Witness, told Mongabay that cutting programs now would cost more later.
“The damage from these cuts isn't just to this fiscal year. It will last for well beyond this administration and then on some level for a generation or more.”
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