Space weather experts forecast strong support from incoming administration

NEW ORLEANS – If anything is safe from federal budget cuts in the next four years, it may be space weather, according to government officials speaking at the 2025 American Meteorological Society annual meeting here.

Efforts to better understand the sun, produce timely warnings of heightened geomagnetic activity and mitigate the terrestrial impact have been reinforced by successive Obama, Trump and Biden Administrations.

“I suspect that the incoming administration will pick up where they left off and run with it,” said Jinni Meehan, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy assistant director for space policy.

The Obama White House coordinated federal activity to prepare the nation for space weather events through a 2016 executive order. The Trump Administration’s “National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan,” released in 2019, went further, specifying how federal agencies would safeguard critical infrastructure. “That strategy is what we still use today,” Meehan said.  

PROSWIFT Act

The Biden Administration updated the implementation plan in 2023 in response to the Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow (PROSWIFT) Act. The legislation, which directed the National Science and Technology Council to establish an interagency working group to coordinate executive branch activities related to space weather, passed with bipartisan support in 2020 and was signed into law by then-President Trump.

When the second Trump administration takes office, “we do anticipate continued strong bipartisan support for space weather-related activities,” said Chris Cannizzaro, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s Space Systems and Services branch.

Space weather experts anticipate some changes, though. The second Trump administration is likely to shift the focus of national space-weather activities toward providing timely alerts and warnings to the Defense Department and increasing the resilience of military systems.

The first Trump Administration’s Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan was issued alongside an executive order calling on agencies to mitigate the impact of an electromagnetic pulse caused by geomagnetic or malicious activity.

Dodging DOGE

President-elect Trump has enlisted the help of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, former Republican presidential candidate and biotech entrepreneur, in slashing federal spending and regulation.

While some space programs are rumored to be vulnerable, space weather experts hope Musk’s familiarity with geomagnetic events will protect their work from the Department of Government Efficiency axe. Musk, after all, is well aware of the danger solar activity poses to space-based infrastructure. In 2022, 38 recently launched Starlink communications satellites reentered Earth’s atmosphere because heightened solar activity increased drag in the ionosphere.

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