When Sara Graves wakes up every morning, she hopes the federal grants supporting her climate change research have not been cut.

Graves – a doctoral student in atmospheric and oceanic sciences – works as a researcher at the UCLA Center for Climate Science, where she focuses on water conservation efforts, along with other climate-related research.

“To just wake up one day to a letter being like, ‘we are no longer funding you, goodbye,’ is crazy,” Graves said. “That is happening to a lot of scientists right now.”

President Donald Trump proposed funding cuts for major federal science agencies in early May. Among the sweeping cuts to NASA and the National Institutes of Health is a nearly $1.52 billion elimination of funds from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to reports by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Narayan Gopinathan, a doctoral student at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability who studies ways to reduce transportation carbon emissions said he was not surprised by the proposed cuts, adding that he believes they had already been outlined in Project 2025, a proposed presidential transition plan that former Trump administrators began writing in 2022.

“As soon as he (Trump) got elected, we knew that this kind of stuff was on the table,” Gopinathan said. “It is really tragic and devastating to the whole country and to the world because scientists and researchers around the world do rely on data from NOAA.”

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA, said climate science research is especially important for California – where the water cycle can vary significantly by year and region. He added that there is still uncertainty surrounding climate patterns – such as El Niño events, which cause a seasonal rise in temperature in the Pacific Ocean – that contribute to economic and ecological harm.

Universities like UCLA play an important role in advancing weather forecasting and climate change research, Swain said. They also provide the federal government with research that is high-quality and relatively inexpensive, Swain added.

“Universities live and thrive in large part off of federal grants,” Swain said. “But it isn’t charity. These are contracts for work done in the federal government, and the American people benefit greatly from those federal dollars invested in weather and climate research over decades.”

Although Graves said her lab has not yet been affected by cuts to federal grants, her lab leaders have begun to look for alternative funding options, like private donors.

Graves also said that when applying for grants, her lab is now more cautious about its project descriptions and has removed politically-charged keywords as a way to increase its chances of funding.

“We’ve definitely gone through grant submissions and removed the word ‘climate change,’ even though that is literally what we are studying,” Graves said.

Graves said scientists have institutional knowledge built from spending time in their labs and working on projects, which can be difficult to reobtain if lab funding is significantly cut and scientists are laid off. She added that if current graduate students aren’t funded, then there are fewer opportunities to train the next generation of scientists, leading to a knowledge gap.

“You cannot just fire a bunch of NOAA scientists and academics and have them come back five years later and start off from where they were, and have things be fine,” Graves said. “All this stuff is happening and it’s not recoverable.”

Similarly, Elijah Catalan, a doctoral student at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, said that in applying to future grants, he focuses less on terms related to diversity, equity and inclusion or climate change, and instead emphasizes broader terms such as “community-based work” or “global change.”

Catalan said his current work – which analyzes DNA left behind by organisms to track coastal restoration efforts – has not been affected by funding cuts, but other organizations he is involved with have been affected. Black in Marine Science’s Tidal Wave program, which covers conference costs for members, cancelled a trip to the HBCU Climate Change Conference in March due to budget concerns after the U.S. National Science Foundation cuts, he said.

The cuts also have discouraged him from applying to federal jobs, Catalan added.

“Doing science is still my dream, it’s still my passion,” Catalan said. “I’m not going to quit doing that, but I’ll have to be a bit more flexible in the types of positions that I’m open to when I’m graduating.”

In addition to impacting academia, Swain said weather forecasting has less potential to improve without continuous investment by the federal government. He added that weather forecasting was instrumental in predicting the extreme fire weather event in Los Angeles in January and the heavy rains and debris flows that followed.

Although there are alternative data sources that scientists can rely on, such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Swain said these sources cannot fully replace systems based in the United States. He added that it is encouraging to see other nations invest in climate science, but it would still be a significant loss if U.S. leadership in the field were to wane.

“For example, the weather service has stopped launching weather balloons carrying instrumentation known as radiosondes from some parts of the country to do critical understanding in the past couple of months,” Swain said. “Europe is not going to fly over the U.S. and release radiosondes in the U.S., so there is some information that is not replaceable.”

Catalan also added that funding from federal agencies like NOAA is crucial because it allows scientists to make a living.

Despite the cuts’ impacts on the scientific community, Catalan said, he is hopeful that legal challenges and activism can bring change.

“Climate change is coming for us and you,” Graves said. “Not studying it is only going to make it worse.”