Cuts to National Weather Service leave forecasters reeling

Twice a day for years, meteorologists in Kotzebue, Alaska, have launched weather balloons far into the sky to measure data like wind speed, humidity and temperature, and translated the information the balloons sent back into weather forecasts and models. It’s a ritual repeated at dozens of weather stations around the United States.

On Thursday morning, the National Weather Service, which for years has struggled with worker shortages around the country, announced that it had “indefinitely suspended” the launches from Kotzebue because of a lack of staffing.

Hours later, word of mass layoffs began to spread at the weather service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. More than 800 people were expected to lose their jobs, the latest cuts in the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal workforce. As they have elsewhere, the cuts appeared to have been focused on probationary employees who are easier to dismiss.

Though not entirely unexpected, the terminations were shocking to employees of the weather service, the government agency responsible for issuing warnings, generating daily forecasts, advising local authorities and collecting the weather data that make these functions possible. The news provoked swift condemnation from people in the field, some lawmakers and the public.

Kayla Besong, a scientist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, a part of the weather service, said she had hoped her status as an “essential” employee — which required her to continue working without pay in the event of a government shutdown — would mean her job would be spared.

But on Thursday, Besong, who had begun her role in September, received a termination notice. She said her bosses at the warning center, which monitors earthquake and ocean data around the clock to prepare for possible tsunamis, did not appear to have received advance notice. “I have been waiting for that email for what feels like four weeks,” Besong said.

There are 122 weather service offices across the country that provide regional forecasting and issue warnings for things like violent storms. It was unclear this past week just how many of the roughly 4,000 weather service employees had lost their jobs.

A meteorologist at a weather service office in California, who declined to be identified out of fear of retribution, said there were a lot of tears on Thursday among the team. The office lost three probationary employees, an administrative assistant, a new meteorologist who had been on the job for six weeks and a facilities electronics technician, they said.

A blueprint for privatization

The weather service collects observations of the land, ocean and atmosphere using tools like satellites, radar and weather balloons, and that data is used by researchers and private companies nationwide. It’s where many tech companies get the information for their weather apps.

In 2023, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published Project 2025, a 900-page policy blueprint that envisioned a significantly pared-down federal government. Many of the Trump administration’s early actions have followed that plan. When it comes to NOAA, the plan calls for the agency to be dismantled, and proposes that the weather service focus on its data-gathering services and “fully commercialize” its forecasting operations.

Some critics of the cuts said they would lead to the loss of employees most likely to help the agency navigate that future. Others raised concerns for public safety.

Louis Uccellini, who served as director of the weather service between 2013 and 2022, called the terminations “cruel” and said many of the newest employees had been hired to address serious local staffing shortages. “The weather service is trying to fill critical needs with these new hires,” he said.

Justin Mankin, a climate scientist and associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, called the layoffs an “astounding move” and said the expertise that would be lost was essential to the functioning of the economy.

“This is not trivial expertise that can be recovered with a few well-placed LinkedIn ads,” said Mankin, who uses NOAA data in his research on drought variability and what it implies for ranchers, farmers and municipalities that face water shortfalls.

Neil Lareau studies wildfire behavior at the University of Nevada, Reno, and he has seen many of his students go on to work as meteorologists for the weather service. He said many of them could find higher-paying jobs in the private sector but were drawn to public service.

Lareau said young forecasters are integral to the agency’s relevancy as they have the technological skills that their more established colleagues may lack and have familiarity with cutting-edge technology including artificial intelligence, programming and big data.

“These are the people that have that skill set more than anybody else,” he said.

John Toohey-Morales, a longtime television meteorologist in Miami and former weather service forecaster, said that the firings raised serious public safety concerns. “I am telling you, the American people are going to suffer from all this,” he said. “Lives are being put in danger.”

As a broadcast meteorologist in a hurricane-prone area,Toohey-Morales said he relied continuously on the whole of the weather service to do his work. “I can’t do my job without the entire scaffolding that NOAA and National Weather Service provides,” he added.

Specialists who study some of the country’s most severe weather events feared that the weather service staff reductions would hurt the ability to predict those moments in the future.

In a statement Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said the Trump administration’s cutting of federal workers at NOAA was “flatly illegal,” citing a recent ruling by the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent review agency that restored the jobs of six federal workers fired from different agencies. “I can guarantee we will be fighting this action in Congress and in the courts,” he said.

Another Democrat, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, criticized the terminations at NOAA in a statement Thursday. “The firings jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods — putting communities in harm’s way,” she said.

Cantwell had questioned Howard Lutnick, now the secretary of commerce, whose department oversees NOAA, during Lutnick’s confirmation hearing, about the plan to break apart NOAA and privatize much of the weather service outlined by Project 2025. Lutnick affirmed that he believed in “keeping NOAA together.”

But in an exchange with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., during the same hearing, Lutnick appeared to allow for the possibility that the private sector could take up the forecasts that have traditionally been the work of the weather service. “I think we can deliver the product more efficiently and less expensively, dramatically less expensively,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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