The federal government’s meticulously maintained ledger of America’s most devastating storms, floods, and wildfires has just been abruptly terminated.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database—which since 1980 has tracked how much extreme weather events cost taxpayers, businesses, and communities—will cease operations effective June 1, according to an internal memo obtained yesterday.
This decision eliminates the nation’s only comprehensive federal accounting of disaster costs at precisely the moment when such data has become most crucial. The database has documented 371 separate billion-dollar weather disasters since its inception, with costs exceeding $2.61 trillion.
Last year alone, the U.S. faced 28 separate billion-dollar weather catastrophes totaling $192.5 billion in damages—a record that shattered the previous high set just two years earlier.
“This represents the single most significant loss of climate crisis accountability infrastructure in a generation,” said Dr. Marshall Shepherd, former president of the American Meteorological Society, in response to the news. “It’s like removing the financial scoreboard during the most expensive game in history.”
The Database That Redefined Disaster Accounting
The now-shuttered program, housed within NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Asheville, North Carolina, has served as the nation’s premier source for understanding the escalating financial burden of extreme weather. Before its creation, the United States lacked any standardized method for tracking disaster costs across different agencies, insurance sectors, and affected communities.
Dr. Adam Smith, the lead scientist who has overseen the database for nearly two decades, developed methodologies that revolutionized how America accounts for disaster impacts. The tracking system doesn’t merely tally direct damages like destroyed buildings and infrastructure; it captures business interruption costs, agricultural losses, and impacts to the broader supply chain that ripple through the economy long after headlines fade.
“What makes this database so uniquely valuable is its consistency,” explained Dr. Carolyn Kousky, disaster finance expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “Using the same methodology over 45 years allows us to make meaningful comparisons between events separated by decades. No other dataset in the world offers this capability for the United States.”
The database has documented the disturbing acceleration of billion-dollar disasters, revealing that what were once considered rare catastrophic events have become increasingly commonplace:
- 1980s: 31 separate billion-dollar disasters (adjusted for inflation)
- 1990s: 55 billion-dollar disasters
- 2000s: 67 billion-dollar disasters
- 2010s: 128 billion-dollar disasters
- 2020-2024: 90 billion-dollar disasters (in just five years)
Beyond tracking events that cross the billion-dollar threshold, the database provided detailed economic impact assessments used by:
- Insurance companies setting rates and reserves
- City planners developing resilience strategies
- Emergency management agencies preparing response capabilities
- Congressional budgeting offices allocating disaster funds
- Climate scientists studying long-term trends
- Economists quantifying climate change’s expanding footprint
The Official Explanation vs. Reality
The Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, cited “budget prioritization” as the rationale for terminating the program. An official statement released late yesterday claimed the database’s functions would be “integrated into other existing operations” without specifying which operations or how the transition would maintain data consistency.
But here’s what government officials aren’t acknowledging: the database costs approximately $1.2 million annually to operate—roughly 0.0002% of the Department of Commerce budget. For context, this represents about the same amount the federal government spends every seven minutes on disaster recovery efforts. This minimal investment has provided the statistical backbone for hundreds of billions in disaster preparedness decisions across public and private sectors.
“The notion that this is about budget priorities simply doesn’t withstand scrutiny,” said former NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, who served under President Obama. “The program’s entire annual budget is less than what the government spends responding to a single hour of a major hurricane. This is about controlling which information reaches the public consciousness.”
Multiple sources inside the administration, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirm that the decision originated from political appointees in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, not from career scientists at NOAA. These sources describe increasing pressure over the past year to downplay connections between extreme weather frequency and climate change in public communications.
“There’s been a systematic effort to remove terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ from agency communications,” said one senior NOAA scientist who requested anonymity to speak freely. “But eliminating an entire dataset that has been consistently maintained through six presidential administrations represents an unprecedented escalation in the politicization of science.”
The database’s termination follows several other recent climate data restrictions, including:
- Removal of climate change information from multiple federal websites
- Cancellation of NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System
- Restrictions on climate terminology in federal grant applications
- Discontinued reporting requirements for infrastructure projects in flood-prone areas
Beyond Politics: The Practical Consequences
The decision’s timing could not be more problematic from a practical standpoint. The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1—the very day the database will cease operations. NOAA’s own seasonal forecast predicts an “extremely active” hurricane season with 18-22 named storms, including 8-11 hurricanes.
Insurance executives, who rely heavily on the database’s historical analysis, have expressed alarm about the decision’s timing and lack of transition plan.
“This database serves as the backbone for how we assess and price catastrophic risk,” said Jennifer Blackford, chief risk officer at Meridian Insurance. “Eliminating it without a replacement creates a blind spot exactly when we’re entering what’s predicted to be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record.”
State emergency management officials echo these concerns. “We use this data annually to justify our budget requests and prioritize which communities receive mitigation funding,” explained Miguel Rodriguez, deputy director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management. “Without it, we’re essentially flying blind when making multi-million dollar decisions about where to invest in resilience.”
The database has been particularly valuable for smaller communities lacking robust disaster planning resources. Town managers and county emergency coordinators across the country use NOAA’s detailed cost assessments to develop grant proposals and prepare for future events similar to those that have struck comparable communities.
The Business Community Responds
Among the most vocal critics of the database’s termination are unexpected voices from the business community. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, rarely aligned with environmental advocacy positions, expressed “significant concern” about the decision in a statement issued this morning.
“American businesses require reliable climate risk data to make sound investment decisions,” the statement reads. “This database has provided an objective, consistent benchmark against which companies assess their exposure to weather-related disruptions. Its elimination creates unnecessary uncertainty in markets already navigating complex climate risks.”
Major corporations that have incorporated the database into their risk management strategies include:
- Home Depot and Lowe’s (for inventory positioning before storms)
- Nationwide and State Farm (for insurance premium calculations)
- Cargill and ADM (for agricultural supply chain planning)
- CSX and Norfolk Southern (for railway infrastructure investments)
- Duke Energy and Southern Company (for utility resilience planning)
Even organizations typically aligned with the administration have questioned the wisdom of this particular decision. The American Petroleum Institute noted in a carefully worded statement that “access to comprehensive historical disaster data benefits energy infrastructure planning and enhances the industry’s ability to maintain reliable service during extreme weather events.”
The Information Vacuum and Who Might Fill It
As federal disaster cost tracking disappears, several organizations are scrambling to develop alternatives, though experts warn that replacing four decades of methodologically consistent data will prove challenging.
The insurance industry-funded Insurance Information Institute has announced plans to expand its catastrophe tracking capabilities, though its methodology focuses primarily on insured losses rather than total economic impact. “We can capture maybe 60% of what the NOAA database covered,” said Dale Porfilio, the Institute’s chief insurance officer. “But uninsured losses, particularly in vulnerable communities, will become statistical ghosts.”
Academic institutions including Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the University of California’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management have announced initiatives to develop alternative tracking systems. However, these efforts face significant challenges without access to the comprehensive federal data streams that fed into NOAA’s analysis.
“The federal government has unique access to disaster declaration data, Small Business Administration loan applications, FEMA assistance claims, and agricultural loss reports,” explained Dr. Rachel Winston, climate economist at the University of Michigan. “No private entity can replicate that level of data integration without federal cooperation.”
Several state climatologists have proposed forming a consortium to maintain a similar database at the state level, but questions remain about funding and methodological consistency across different states with varying resources and political pressures.
A Four-Decade Legacy at Risk
Beyond its practical applications, the database has fundamentally transformed our understanding of disaster trends. When it began in 1980, billion-dollar disasters were rare events that occurred roughly once per year. By the 2020s, they’ve become near-monthly occurrences, with multiple events sometimes happening simultaneously.
The database has allowed researchers to identify critical patterns that might otherwise remain hidden:
- The increasing concentration of damages in expanding coastal communities
- The growing frequency of compound disasters (multiple event types affecting the same region)
- The disproportionate impact of disasters on lower-income communities
- The geographic expansion of risk into previously less-affected regions
“This database has been the cornerstone of disaster economics research for a generation,” said Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University. “Its consistent methodology allowed us to separate the signal from the noise in disaster trends. Without it, we lose our clearest window into how these patterns are evolving.”
Dr. Adam Smith, who has led the database’s development for nearly two decades, declined to comment on the decision to terminate the program. Multiple sources confirm that the scientific team responsible for maintaining the database was not consulted before the announcement and learned of the decision from senior leadership at the Department of Commerce.
Downstream Effects on Policy and Planning
The ripple effects of losing this data resource extend far beyond scientific research. Federal disaster policy itself has been shaped by insights derived from the database’s long-term trends.
After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Congress authorized major changes to the National Flood Insurance Program based partly on analysis showing how dramatically flood risk had expanded beyond traditional floodplains. The database’s comprehensive accounting of drought impacts informed the 2018 Farm Bill’s expanded weather risk management provisions.
More recently, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 used the database’s identification of particularly vulnerable regions to prioritize billions in resilience funding for power grids, water systems, and transportation networks.
Local governments have perhaps been the most avid users of the resource. “We reference this database in literally every grant application for hazard mitigation funding,” said Sarah Tompkins, resilience director for Norfolk, Virginia, a coastal city facing accelerating sea level rise. “It’s how we demonstrate that investing in flood protection now saves taxpayer money later.”
Without this data resource, communities will struggle to make evidence-based cases for preventative investments. “It’s always harder to fund prevention than response,” Tompkins added. “Without hard numbers showing the cost of inaction, we’re likely to see even more emphasis on post-disaster spending rather than pre-disaster mitigation.”
What Happens Next?
The administration has provided no details about how existing data will be preserved or made accessible after the database ceases operations. The current interactive website, which allows users to analyze trends by disaster type, region, and time period, will be taken offline on June 1 according to the internal memo.
Scientists familiar with the database have expressed concern about whether the comprehensive historical record will remain publicly accessible. “This isn’t just about stopping future data collection,” said a NOAA researcher who requested anonymity. “There’s genuine concern about whether the existing four decades of data will remain available in a usable format.”
Environmental and government transparency organizations are already preparing Freedom of Information Act requests to ensure the preservation of historical records. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which tracks changes to federal environmental data access, has announced plans to create an archived version of the database if the government fails to maintain public access.
Congressional oversight committees have also taken notice. Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees NOAA, announced plans for hearings on the decision. “Eliminating our nation’s premier tool for understanding disaster costs demands explanation,” she said in a statement released this morning. “This committee intends to get answers about who made this decision and why.”
The Bigger Picture: Data in the Climate Debate
The elimination of this critical data resource occurs against the backdrop of intensifying political battles over climate policy. As weather disasters have grown more frequent and severe, the database has increasingly become a reference point in discussions about climate change impacts.
“What made this database particularly powerful in policy debates was its focus on dollars and cents rather than temperature records or emissions,” explained Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences at Princeton University. “It translated abstract climate concerns into concrete economic impacts that resonated with business leaders and fiscal conservatives.”
The database’s annual reports consistently showed the accelerating economic toll of extreme weather—a trend difficult to explain without reference to underlying climate changes. Its most recent assessment found that the U.S. has experienced more than $1 trillion in weather disaster damages in just the past four years.
“When a historically nonpartisan data source keeps pointing to the same conclusion year after year, it becomes harder to dismiss that conclusion as political,” said Andrew Dessler, atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. “Eliminating the messenger doesn’t eliminate the message, but it does make the message harder to hear.”
As communities across America brace for another season of extreme weather, they’ll do so without the nation’s most comprehensive tool for understanding disaster costs. Whether this represents a temporary gap or a permanent loss in our national climate accounting remains to be seen. What’s certain is that as disaster costs continue mounting, the absence of this critical measuring tool will be felt far beyond the walls of a small office in Asheville, North Carolina.
This article was published on May 8, 2025. The author reached out to the Department of Commerce and NOAA for additional comment, but neither had responded by publication time.
