NOAA and Weather Service gutted for saving too many lives

No, I haven’t really sold to the Onion. But Onion — if you’re reading, let’s talk. Watching the dominoes fall across critical government agencies, we knew NOAA was unlikely to be spared. And yet the initial cuts still sting, just like the thousands of others that will eventually bleed us out if we’re not careful.

Weather Watch

A foggier future. There are probably storms out there, but we should get used to knowing less about them given the situation.

WTF Friday

The horrors abound. After facing weeks of psychological warfare while waiting for the inevitable guillotine, another group of America’s finest was just thrown out on the street with an hour notice.

This time the axe fell on NOAA and the National Weather Service late Thursday. Reports indicate about 900 people were dismissed and that more firings are on the way. In similar fashion to other agencies, those cut loose were largely classified as probationary.

Here are just a few:

• “After nearly two weeks of overwhelming uncertainty, today it happened. I was fired from my dream of working at NOAA. I'm so sorry to everyone also affected.” -scientist Zack Labe

• “Being a part of the environmental modeling center is all I have ever known in my career. It is where I always wanted to be.” -scientist Mallory Row

• “8 years as an AWIPS contractor previously, I finally got the Fed job I had been wanting. Worked on implementing the next generation of capabilities for AWIPS.” -scientist Richard Barnhill

• “I just got fired from NWS. This email is all I know.” -scientist Cole Hood

Whether or not Trump fully understands that probationary employees include scientists with the highest accomplishments — people who strived for their jobs for years — his Project 2025 friends certainly did. During the Trumpian interregnum, they were evilly scheming for “easy” terminations without care about anything else, other than an added bonus of teaching climate change believers a lesson.

As someone driven by logic, sometimes to a fault, it is hard to find any in what the administration is doing. Even regimes deemed rogue states, or an axis of evil, tend to believe in self-preservation. What this team is doing may end up having uncorrectable, catastrophic consequences for numerous fields the United States is a global leader in.

The NOAA and Weather Service moves are a microcosm, but also perhaps uniquely highlight the disregard the administration has for its own.

Saturday is the beginning of meteorological spring and Weather Service meteorologists at the Storm Prediction Center — top experts in the field on earth — are monitoring the risk for severe weather across the South. It’s probably just an opening volley.

Coming out of a La Nina winter, odds are higher than normal that severe weather will be intense in the Southeast early in the spring season. There most likely won’t be a super outbreak such as the one that killed more than 300 in 2011, but that was also a La Nina spring. 

Then there’s hurricane season.

Recent years have delivered punishing hits from mega storms, including 2024’s Helene, which unleashed hell from Florida to the Carolinas. In the midst of a climate favoring increased water temperatures, rapid intensification and shorter return time between monster storms, we’d be best off fostering science rather than dismantling it.

This is especially true given that the world has entered an era of compounding disasters, thanks to multiple factors including rises in vulnerable population. Even before these reckless moves, sustained periods of extreme weather featuring multiple major events in short order have stretched resources to the breaking point, not only at NOAA but at FEMA and other agencies.

These facts make a properly staffed weather and climate apparatus not only essential at home to minimize threats to life and property but necessary to stave off growing national security risks from increasingly devastating storms.

Instead, offices that are already understaffed have to make more out of even less. Since much of the core data originates with government, and the United States is far ahead most others in that arena, chances that private sector picks up all the slack are very low.

While it shouldn’t matter, since we are all supposed to be one nation, it’s worth remembering that severe thunderstorms and hurricanes strike Republican-voting red states far harder than blue states most years. As with other measures, Trump is not only punishing his so-called adversaries, but he is gambling with the lives of those who voted for him.

I was never a believer in our president being a puppet of Russia, partly because it was such a far-fetched tale. I still wouldn’t call myself a believer, but I do know that our near-peer competitors like Russia and China must be stunned by their good fortune. The United States is unilaterally walking the plank while proclaiming the starving sharks circling beneath will greet us as friends.

Please share this important information with friends and family who may not be fully aware of the situation.

Raise your voice

I live in D.C., and it’s lately been repeatedly obvious how few rights we have in this military district. If you have more, I suggest calling your senator or representative and sharing thoughts. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. If Washington lines are busy, look into state offices of your senator or representative.

About

Weekday morning newsletter by a journalist/forecaster that connects weather and climate change dots while occasionally stirring the pot.