The Trump administration has ended NOAA's support and coordination for the Arctic Report Card, the peer-reviewed annual assessment of the state of the Arctic that the agency has published every year since 2006. According to CNN, citing two people familiar with the situation, NOAA informed some of the report's scientists on the afternoon of Monday, August 10, 2026, and gave no reason. Eos reported that three non-NOAA editors learned of it in a regular meeting with staff of NOAA's Arctic Research Program, which had coordinated and financially supported the report.
NOAA communications director Kim Doster said, “Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA. All data historically contributed by NOAA to the product will continue to be collected and will remain publicly available.” The underlying measurements continue, but the agency will no longer provide the coordinating editor, the peer-review coordination, or the web hosting, graphics and publicity it supplied, and the report will no longer appear as a NOAA technical report, according to CNN and Eos.
Zack Labe, a climate scientist who has been an author of the report since 2020, wrote on social media that the decision “is truly devastating,” and told Eos that “the loss of the Arctic Report Card would be significant not only for the scientific community, but also for decision-makers and the public.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement that the move “reflects a troubling federal trend” of “the undercutting of scientific research at a pivotal time for the Arctic.” CNN placed the decision within the administration's pattern of canceling climate programs, including ending NOAA's billion-dollar disaster database and halting updates to climate.gov.
Update (October 2, 2026): The report will survive without the government. The American Geophysical Union announced in September that it has taken over management of the Arctic Report Card, with the same editorial team and with the Arctic Council's Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme handling peer review, and plans to release the 2026 edition at its annual meeting in December, according to the Alaska Beacon and Eos. One of the lead editors, Matthew Druckenmiller, said the team still needs to close a remaining funding gap.
Correction (October 2, 2026): An earlier version called Kim Doster NOAA's director (she is director of NOAA Communications), rendered Zack Labe's quote as “significant for the scientific community, decision-makers and the public” (his words were “significant not only for the scientific community, but also for decision-makers and the public”), and described the report as the government's flagship climate assessment; CNN notes it is a broader compendium on the Arctic, not exclusively a climate report. Those passages have been corrected.