By Emily Kennard and Claire Heddles, NOTUS
This story is part of the AJI-NOTUS Washington Bureau Initiative, which seeks to help readers in local communities understand what their elected representatives are doing in Congress — and how the actions taken by Congress, the White House and federal agencies are impacting their lives.
Ahead of what’s expected to be a dangerous Atlantic hurricane season, the Trump administration announced plans to rehire employees for some of the National Weather Service jobs cut during DOGE’s layoff frenzy and reshuffle remaining staff to critical offices.
But those jobs still haven’t been posted, and some meteorologists say the institutional knowledge loss and ongoing staffing shortages are putting lives at risk — especially if two major weather events happen at the same time.
“The consequence of this reduced staffing is that we will start to see degraded forecasts from the weather service. The quality, the timeliness of the forecasts are going to have to suffer,” Rick Spinrad, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Joe Biden, told NOTUS.
“The weather service, typically, in the past would send what are called incident meteorologists to hot spots — literally hot spots: fires — but also places where there’s extreme flooding, hurricanes. The ability to surge staff to these hotspots is severely compromised.”
Some meteorologists say the effects of reduced resources at the weather agency are already clear and worrying. The Atlantic hurricane season is from June through November.
“This type of staffing shortage is having impacts across the nation because there’s been a nearly 20% reduction in weather balloon releases,” Miami TV meteorologist John Morales said live on air June 2, referencing regional NWS offices that were understaffed by 19 to 39%.
“What we’re starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded,” he added.
As Morales’ on-air frustration with Trump’s cuts went viral, NWS announced its plans to hire back over 100 staff members. But whether it can fill those crucial positions before a potentially devastating Atlantic hurricane season is another question.
“A targeted number of permanent, mission-critical field positions will soon be advertised under an exception to the Department-wide hiring freeze to further stabilize frontline operations,” an NWS spokesperson emailed NOTUS in a statement, adding the agency was also reassigning remaining staff “to fill roles at NWS field locations with the greatest operational need.”
NWS gave the statement to other publications nearly two weeks ago, on June 2, and declined to offer a timeline for the job postings. The federal hiring process is notoriously slow because public jobs have more requirements, and it can take weeks or months for workers to start once an offer is accepted.
Separately, three weather-monitoring satellites will be decommissioned this weekend. Their phase-out has long been expected, and as a NOAA spokesperson for the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service told NOTUS, “This environmental information is now being provided by newer and more technologically advanced satellites.” But some meteorologists say the loss of the older satellite data in an understaffed moment could still have ripple effects.
“It’s a factor of uncertainty, and I think it’s a legitimate risk factor,” meteorologist Richard Rood told NOTUS. “At some level, this data transition will be a measure of how well the centers have anticipated this transition and optimized the use of newer satellites,” he also wrote on LinkedIn.
He said his bigger concern amid budget cuts and contract delays is NOAA’s ability to accurately predict weather events in the middle of the country.
“I worry more about the ability to forecast severe storms in the interior of the United States because that is something that there’s less redundancy across the world,” Rood said, referring to data collection. He added that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is “a great resource for medium-range weather forecasts on the global scales. But there’s nobody as good at forecasting severe storms in Kentucky and Missouri as NOAA.”
The staffing situation has pushed even Republican lawmakers from tornado-battered, hurricane-prone states to ask questions. Some grilled Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Capitol Hill last week during a budget hearing. (NOAA is part of the Department of Commerce.)
“What steps are being taken to ensure NOAA’s local weather forecast offices have the resources, the technology and staffing to issue timely, accurate warnings and protect lives in high-risk communities?” Rep. Hal Rogers asked, referring to staffing shortages in his state of Kentucky, where tornadoes killed 20 people in May.
Lutnick insisted that cuts haven’t affected NWS’ staffing or forecasting capabilities.
“I want to be crystal clear: Every single person, the National Weather Service — we are at full staff. We have full capacity, and we will have the best forecasting capacity that we possibly can to protect Americans, and I will not sleep if that were not true,” Lutnick said. “All weather collection technology is in full force and effect. Our satellites, our balloons, all sources, are in full force.”
But critics say evidence shows exactly the opposite, pointing to the more than 1,000 NOAA employees who took voluntary layoffs and the hundreds of fired probationary employees.
“He’s either misinformed or lying. It’s clearly not true,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
NWS field offices struggled with vacancies even before Trump took office, but the administration’s early retirement offers didn’t help. Employees weighed “fork” offers or the possibility of being fired after Trump’s much-promised massive reductions in the federal workforce.
“Across the country in National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices, they lost over 100 probationary employees and almost another 500 that accepted buy-out retirement packages from the Administration to reduce the size of the federal workforce,” Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said in a statement to NOTUS.
“Losing 600 highly talented NOAA employees has dramatically impacted staffing requirements at Weather Forecast Offices,” he said.
Lutnick tried to reassure other concerned lawmakers at the budget hearing that technology upgrades at NWS would make up for any staffing shortfalls in terms of forecasting accuracy.
A former congressional affairs director for NWS, John Sokich, told NOTUS that technology upgrades are indeed overdue at the agency, as Lutnick argued. Given how much easier data collection and sharing are in the internet age, more typical forecasting could be automated, and then individual field office staffing could be adjusted accordingly, he said.
But he added an important caveat: “It needs to be done deliberately, not with a hand grenade. You need to design it, test it and implement it.”
He acknowledged that NWS has contingency plans to move around remaining staff to provide enough coverage when hurricanes are expected — but said that NWS’ promised rehirings need to happen soon.
“If they don’t get those new people on board, and we have a few hurricanes making landfall, staff is going to get burned out,” he told NOTUS. “That’s the challenge they’re going to be facing.”
Emily Kennard and Claire Heddles are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
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