The DOGE Subcommittee Hearing on Weather Modification Was a Nest of Conspiracy Theorizing

“Instead of dismissing these questions and concerns as ‘baseless conspiracies,’ we’re meeting them head-on,” administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video announcement on the resource.

Many of the conspiracy theories that circulated after the floods in July centered around a company called Rainmaker, a cloud-seeding startup with buzzy Silicon Valley backers, that was doing cloud-seeding operations in Texas days before the storms, more than 100 miles south of where the heavy rains hit. Following the floods, Greene tweeted a screenshot of an interview with Augustus Doricko, the CEO of Rainmaker. “I’m introducing legislation to stop weather modification and geoengineering,” she wrote. “People have had enough of chemicals manipulating our weather. And the governments and the industries that profit from controlling it.” (Doricko tells WIRED that the company was not invited to Tuesday’s hearing: “Outright refusing to have us makes it seem like it’s just a grandstanding for a click war on Twitter, as per usual,” he says.)

While cloud seeding is mostly regulated at the state level, some federal laws require that operators report their activities to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Existing research shows that injecting silver iodide into clouds has no harmful effects; however, according to a December 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office, that research is “limited to a handful of recent studies.” It has historically been difficult to evaluate the efficacy of cloud seeding: the GAO report cites between 0 and 20 percent increased rainfall from cloud-seeding projects based on research it reviewed. Still, Dessler emphasizes that this technique can’t cause massive weather modification—as online conspiracy theorists have claimed in the wake of the Texas floods.

“People argue that humans are controlling the weather—that’s nonsense,” he says.

Solar geoengineering, meanwhile, has never been deployed at scale—and historically has been a contentious topic within the climate science and policy community. If it’s deployed over a large geographic area, solar geoengineering could create a wide range of risks, from biodiversity loss to a weakened ozone layer to extreme weather. There’s also no way to test large-scale deployment of these techniques in advance, and the world has never tried to govern a scenario in which one country deploys technology that causes droughts and hurricanes in another part of the globe. Critics also say that focusing on geoengineering detracts from the real solution to climate change: drawing down emissions.

But proponents say that looking into solar geoengineering technology may be necessary as climate change keeps getting worse. “You can imagine a scenario where it’s 2040 and climate change is out of control, and it’s the last tool in the toolbox,” Dessler says. “Most serious people view solar geoengineering as like the airbags in your car. They are for emergencies only. No one wants to use their airbags on a daily basis, but you can imagine a situation where you’re glad you have it.”

Anti-weather-modification bills of all different types have proliferated at the state level over the past few years. According to SRM360, a website that tracks data on solar geoengineering policy and science, three states have banned solar radiation modification since 2024, while more than two dozen states have had bills introduced into state legislatures. At least two states—Tennessee and Florida—have explicitly banned cloud seeding in that time period. The December 2024 GAO report cited one official from Kansas, who told the office that the state no longer has a cloud-seeding program “because of negative public perception and pressure on local officials.”