Top photo: NOAA stock assessment
At first glance, the FY26 appropriations minibus looks like another chapter in Washington’s slow erosion of federal investment in science, climate, and environmental protection. NOAA research gets cut. EPA funding slips. The Department of Energy loses ground. For anyone who cares about oceans, climate resilience, or renewable energy, it is hard to identify this bill as a win for the environment. That reaction is understandable.
Measured against the political reality in Congress, however, this appropriations package represents something rare in modern Washington: a successful act of damage control. The central fact is this: Congress rejected a wholesale dismantling of federal science and environmental capacity. Looking beyond the numbers, this reveals an important win for the future of our ocean and climate. A great example of this is NOAA and funding for fisheries, habitat, and protection of marine life.
Stopping the Worst-Case Scenario
The President’s original budget proposal envisioned sweeping reorganizations, deep staffing cuts, and targeted eliminations across agencies that underpin everything from fisheries management to weather forecasting. NOAA alone faced the prospect of crippling reductions to fisheries science, marine mammal protection, habitat restoration, and climate research. Similarly, the House’s earlier version of the bill leaned into portions of that vision, rejecting some of the President’s cuts, but proposing a nearly 40 percent cut to NOAA Fisheries and slashing fisheries science by more than 40 percent. None of that made it into the final minibus.
Instead, Congress preserved overall NOAA funding near current levels, authorizing roughly $6.2 billion, and explicitly rejected the most severe cuts to fisheries management proposed by the House earlier on. Funding for the National Marine Fisheries Service is effectively maintained, safeguarding stock assessments, sustainable management, and protected species work that coastal economies depend on. That’s not a footnote. For working waterfronts, commercial and recreational fisheries, and coastal communities, it’s the difference between continuity and chaos.
Guardrails Matter More Than Headlines
The minibus includes provisions requiring congressional notification, and in some cases approval, before agencies can reduce staffing, reprogram funds, or significantly alter resource allocations. These constraints, while watered down from the Senate’s original language, still represent a meaningful check on executive overreach.
That’s a quiet but profound assertion of congressional authority at a moment when federal science agencies have been whipsawed by political interference. It’s also why the bill has drawn resistance from those hoping to use the budget process as a tool for ideological restructuring.
Counting Losses
To be clear, the bill does include real and painful cuts. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (called NOAA Research) faces a 10 percent reduction, including a severe hit to weather and atmospheric chemistry research. EPA funding drops by about 4 percent. The Department of Energy is cut by more than $200 million, with the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations eliminated outright. Those losses matter, and advocates are right to fight them.
But context matters too. Compared with the House’s earlier proposal to gut EPA by 23 percent or slash the National Science Foundation by nearly a quarter, these reductions are restrained. They preserve core operational capacity while avoiding the kind of ideological policy riders that would have mandated offshore drilling, blocked climate research, undermined whale protections, or kneecapped offshore wind development. Notably, many of the most harmful ocean and wildlife riders were pulled due to public opposition.
This Bill is Not a Victory Lap. It is a Holding Action.
In an era defined less by ambitious investment than by existential defense of public institutions, the FY26 minibus does something critically important: it keeps the lights on, the scientists employed, and the statutory missions intact. That’s why some of the loudest opposition to the bill isn’t coming from environmental advocates, but from those who wanted to go much further in dismantling federal agencies altogether.
The coming months still matter. And advocates should absolutely push for stronger investments in climate, oceans, and clean energy in the next appropriations cycle. But it’s worth saying plainly: this appropriations package avoided a far worse outcome.
