When Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE boys started snipping wires across DC, they took out critical programs like the government’s premier climate research website and the hurricane-hunter aircraft gathering data on dangerous storms.
While they were at it, the Trump administration also ripped up a project that would have vastly improved the country’s ability to monitor wildfires. The GeoXO program was a project originally encompassing six satellites that would greatly improve the resolution available to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor atmospheric conditions like wildfire smoke, as well as weather events like lightning strikes, and climate observations such as color changes in the ocean’s surface.
The six satellites were meant to encompass three regions split between the US West, Central, and East. Starting in April 2025, however, the Trump administration directed the NOAA to make drastic cuts to GeoXO. These included cutting two satellites from the mission altogether — scrapping the central observation region entirely — and canceling major contracts for existing GeoXO instruments. The purported goal was to refocus the program on a “core weather mission,” as opposed to long-term climate monitoring, following the administration’s broader attacks on any effort to mitigate or even mention climate change.
One of those cancelled instruments, the GeoXO Atmospheric Composition device, was a high-resolution spectrometer designed to give the NOAA advanced capabilities to monitor air pollutants, like ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and excess particulate matter. In the long term, the tool would have helped scientists paint a clearer picture of how particular weather events relate to broader climate shifts, an NOAA report explains.
Of course, the timing of the cancellation couldn’t have been worse. Huge swaths of the United States and Canada are currently being smoked out by noxious fumes emanating from hundreds of wildfires across North America.
Though the GeoXO program wouldn’t have gone live until the 2030s, Trump’s decision represents a devastating loss for our future ability to monitor this exact phenomenon, which is becoming something of an annual tradition for millions of people.
As Susan Anenberg, chair of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University observed, the NOAA “had spent years planning an air pollution instrument on the GeoXO satellite which would provide near-real-time, location-specific data on smoke levels, giving people the information they need to avoid exposure.”
Anenberg explained that the public health benefits this kind of monitoring would provide “could amount to about $13 billion per year.”
“As smoke events happen more often,” Anenberg continued, “we need more data, not less.”
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