CLIMATEWIRE | A growing backlog of hundreds of unsigned NOAA contracts has slowed agency operations to a crawl — so much so that even Sen. Ted Cruz, a staunch ally of the Trump administration, has raised concerns about the gridlock.
The bottleneck is due largely to one man: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose portfolio includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After taking office in February, Lutnick insisted that he personally review any contract in excess of $100,000.
Intended as an attempt to identify waste and redundancy, the policy instead has sown chaos at the nation’s preeminent climate and weather agency, say former and current NOAA officials.
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More than 200 NOAA contracts — including one aimed at helping local communities prepare for extreme weather events — are now stuck in limbo, waiting for Lutnick to make a decision. The impasse has forced NOAA to furlough employees, and it has created a work environment where NOAA staffers spend much of their time trying to justify their work — rather than doing it, they say.
“Everything has ground to a halt,” said one NOAA official who was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “We prepare briefings and fill out new forms, nothing is addressed until the very last minute (or later), stress and urgency is very high.”
The NOAA contracts that do make it through the wicket often are done at the eleventh hour, such as one designed to ensure two polar weather satellites receive the flight software updates they need. Others languish for days or weeks beyond their expiration before any action is taken.
Both Cruz and a second NOAA official, who also was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal, say Lutnick typically reviews about two dozen contracts a week — a tiny fraction of the total.
And Cruz warned the backlog could get worse — and cause trouble in his home state of Texas.
“NOAA alone has 5,700 contracts set to expire this year,” said the Republican lawmaker at a Senate hearing earlier this month.
“These contracts include everything from post-hurricane flood assessment to janitorial services,” Cruz said. He added that a data center at Texas A&M University was shut down for days, “depriving Texas emergency and water managers of critical drought forecasts that help them manage reservoirs and track storm surge data and hurricane forecasts in real time.”
Cruz’s office did not respond to requests for further comment.
Commerce Department officials did not make Lutnick available for an interview, nor did they respond to a list of questions from POLITICO’s E&E News. But Kristen Eichamer, a Commerce spokeswoman, defended the agency’s approach in a statement.
“NOAA is focused on modernizing the department by implementing cutting-edge modern technology,” Eichamer said. “We are immersed in NOAA’s mission-critical services and this administration will continue on delivering for the American people.”
Former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said it’s perfectly reasonable for administration officials to review outside contracts to ensure they are an effective use of taxpayer money — especially if they cost millions of dollars.
But he questioned whether it made sense for Lutnick to review every NOAA contract that exceeded the $100,000 mark, especially if he can’t keep pace with the paperwork. NOAA operations rely on a significant number of contractors, he noted.
“The agency ceases and stops operations if the contracts are stuck and so that’s what you’re starting to see,” Spinrad said.
He said too that Lutnick’s policy might be sending the wrong message to NOAA employees.
“There’s an inherent distrust in this, too, if you don’t trust your staff to be making the right decisions, you start doing that,” Spinrad said.
To be sure, Lutnick isn’t doing it all on his own.
To even land on Lutnick’s desk, NOAA contracts must first go through an approval process led in part by Keegan McLaughlin, a former Temple University student who worked as a food hall monitor last year and lists his Eagle Scout award on his LinkedIn résumé.
According to internal documents obtained by E&E News, NOAA officials who want to renew outside contracts typically must make their pitch to McLaughlin and Bryton Shang, who was part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) operation championed by Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and Trump ally.
NOAA officials — many with decades of government experience — have been asked to pitch their requests in the form of a slide show or to write a few bullet points, the documents show.
“Keegan and Bryton will ask questions and make a ‘next steps’ decision at the end of the meeting, including requesting any follow-up needed (including needing the program manager to request another meeting),” the document states.
McLaughlin and Shang reject some contracts, but any they do approve go to Lutnick’s desk for a final sign-off, according to one current NOAA official.
And that’s where they sit.
The contracts currently in limbo run the gamut. One has to do with shoreline mapping. Another deals with flood inundation modeling and networks for tsunami warning buoys. Others encompass internet maintenance that ensure key weather data can be distributed during critical events.
Though Lutnick promised to keep NOAA intact during his Senate confirmation hearing in January, he hasn’t engaged much with the agency in his short tenure.
Part of this is by design: NOAA composes only a piece of the Commerce secretary’s portfolio. Other divisions of Commerce include the Census Bureau, the Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
And Lutnick has taken on other responsibilities too. In recent weeks, he has been a mouthpiece for the Trump administration’s push to implement new tariffs on foreign goods. And he recently joined President Donald Trump on part of his tour of the Middle East.
When Lutnick does get a chance to review NOAA contracts, agency officials say his default setting is to either reject them — or demand partial cuts to the ones he does approve.
Also notable: The paralysis created by the contract delays is separate from the Trump White House budget proposal to effectively break up and dismantle NOAA.
Taken together, it’s a problematic mix, said Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, not just because potentially vital programs could be cut, but because the officials making those decisions often lack the institutional knowledge to understand the consequences.
“If people don’t know the history and don’t understand the rules and regulations with respect to how you acquire things with contrasts, they’re going to make mistakes,” he said. “And so I think the probability of mistakes is going up when you have inexperienced people doing this kind of thing.”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
