The House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), held a contentious hearing Tuesday on geoengineering and weather modification, spotlighting concerns over cloud seeding, solar radiation management, and federal transparency.
Titled “Playing God with the Weather — a Disastrous Forecast,” the hearing featured Greene warning that efforts to counter climate change through large-scale weather intervention risk stripping Americans of their “God-given rights over the Earth.”
“Do we believe in God and that he has dominion over his perfect creation of planet Earth? Or do you believe in man’s claim of authority over the weather?” Greene asked in her opening remarks, citing past military weather modification experiments, including Operation Popeye during the Vietnam War.
NO MORE PLAYING GOD WITH OUR WEATHER
For centuries, humans have tried to control the weather. Now the Left wants to play God by blocking the sun and re-engineering Earth’s climate in the name of their fake “climate change” agenda.
These dangerous experiments risk our… pic.twitter.com/JNmisbzAm3
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
(@RepMTG) September 16, 2025
Greene introduced her Clear Skies Act earlier this year, which seeks to shut down federal weather modification programs, warning that projects like solar geoengineering to block sunlight could have “unknown consequences that no scientific model could ever predict.”
Democrats on the panel dismissed GOP warnings as alarmist. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), the subcommittee’s ranking member, said Republicans were exaggerating fears and criticized past GOP moves to cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency.
The panel heard testimony from Roger Pielke Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute, meteorologist Christopher Martz, and Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute.
The witnesses said cloud seeding is not responsible for recent extreme weather events, including flooding in Texas, but acknowledged the federal government’s research in this area waned in the 1980s, even as nine states continued to regulate local seeding programs.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recently announced the agency would publish all of its resources on contrails and geoengineering, vowing “total transparency” and seeking to debunk long-standing conspiracy theories.
“For years, people who asked questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified,” Zeldin said in a video played at the hearing. “That era is over.”
Greene highlighted past U.S. military programs, including Project Stormfury in the 1960s and 1970s, which attempted to weaken hurricanes through cloud seeding, and Operation Popeye, a Vietnam War-era campaign to extend monsoon rains over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“While those events were scattered throughout history, today’s push for geoengineering is vastly larger in scope and potentially profitable,” Greene warned, citing venture capital investment in companies like Make Sunsets, which inject aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight.
Politico reported in July that researchers quietly tested cloud-creation equipment last year on a retired aircraft carrier in Alameda, Calif., in an experiment that lasted only 20 minutes before being shut down by local officials who were never notified. Documents later obtained by E&E News revealed that the trial was only a prelude to a much larger study — a multimillion-dollar project to spray salt water into the atmosphere in hopes of “producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.”
The plan, tied to the University of Washington’s Marine Cloud Brightening Program and supported by billionaire-backed groups, envisioned large-scale experiments off the coasts of North America, Chile, or Africa. Experts criticized the lack of transparency and community engagement.
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The documents also showed that the project had sought federal support, including ships and aircraft, raising further questions about oversight of privately funded geoengineering research.
Tuesday’s hearing underscored the deep partisan divide over climate interventions, with Republicans warning of “playing God with the weather” and Democrats pushing back on questions about weather modification experiments.