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At dozens of National Weather Services offices across the country, staffing levels were low well before President Donald Trump took office. As the new administration announced mass terminations this week, current and former staffers said an exodus of new hires and veterans will hinder the agency’s ability to monitor and predict weather hazards.
The administration let go of meteorologists, hydrologists and technicians that help inform daily weather forecasts in places including Boston and Boise, Idaho. It fired scientists who build, improve and maintain weather models that form the backbone of weather forecasting around the globe. Staff at offices responsible for warning the public about tsunamis, tornadoes and hurricanes lost their jobs, as did an entire team dedicated to communicating NOAA’s work and science to the public.
Combined with Thursday’s firings the government climate and weather enterprise’s workforce contracted by more than 6 percent in two days. NOAA’s workforce is still large — starting this year at about 13,000 employees, including about 4,300 who work for the Weather Service — and a spokeswoman said Thursday the agency “remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public.”
About half of the Weather Service’s forecast offices were already understaffed, according to a congressional analysis released last year. When Trump took office and instituted a government-wide hiring freeze, it further strained staffs, forcing some to work double shifts to ensure all-day coverage, current and former Weather Service staff told The Washington Post.
Termination notices reviewed by The Post told NOAA and Weather Service staffers they were “not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.” Louis Uccellini, who served as Weather Service director from 2013 to 2022 said that is far from the truth: “These are exactly the people we need,” he said.
Jobs were also eliminated at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center and Storm Prediction Center. The offices produce forecasts and analysis that inform work done by meteorologists in local forecast offices around the country — as well as private sector meteorologists and the media. The cuts also impacted NOAA’s tsunami warning centers in Alaska and Hawaii, according to a person familiar with those offices. Even before those layoffs, scientists at the centers logged overtime hours to ensure the public is apprised of tsunami threats, the person said.
Technicians who repair radar systems across the country lost their jobs, as did several from a team who handled larger repair projects at the Weather Service’s National Reconditioning Center in Missouri, said Jeran Krska, who was fired Thursday after leaving the private sector to join the center as director in September. “We’re falling even more into, we just can’t support the mission anymore,” Krska said. “Now they just terminated all the probationary people? We’re screwed.”
Krska’s office is responsible for major repairs to systems that gather weather observations to help issue forecasts. Budgets were already tight for many repair parts, and now repair technicians across the country are also among those fired, Krska said. “We were barely Band-Aided together as it was,” he said.
As much as 25 percent of the staff at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center was cut Thursday, Spinrad said — a blow to an office that faces a complex task of building, improving and maintaining the computer models that serve as a foundation for weather prediction.
The center handles more than 20 numerical weather prediction systems — programs that combine mathematical models of earth systems with observations of current conditions to produce weather predictions. Already, low staffing has affected the operations of at least one weather balloon station in Alaska that collects data on current conditions. Without information from sources like these, experts said the accuracy of models key to forecasts across the country and globe could be affected.
The modeling center is central to work championed by Neil Jacobs, Trump’s nominee to lead NOAA. The work is meant to improve U.S. weather models, generally outperformed by rival systems developed in Europe and the United Kingdom. The center is collaborating on efforts to build what is known as the Unified Forecast System, of which Jacobs serves as chief science adviser and that he has spearheaded as a means of improving forecasting accuracy.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
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Comments
1. Leaving NATO and the UN
2. Shutting down foreign aid
3. Dismantling the professional USA bureaucracy
4. Removing safeguards for epidemics and disease
The enemy within, indeed ...
And if you provide a “link” here to an off-topic discussion you are well aware it will still be discussed in the investment section due to the failings of “Vanilla” you explained earlier.
Much as I value your contributions, I do not think railing against Prez Musk is going to do anything to attract readers who are looking for mutual fund / investment information. Or has that type of content ceased to be the primary function of Mutual Fund Observer?
Just like an article in NYT today about the non partisan scientists fired at Department of Agriculture who do research to prevent crop and animal diseases
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/us/politics/federal-workers-scientists-firings-trump.html
And the NIH supposedly will be lead by a man who has no background in medicine or biology except a few medical school course years ago.Never seen a patient as a physician in his life.
don't you think that will set back biotech companies by decades?
With respect to Trump, please note that he is mentioned only once, and that was to point out that NOAA staffing levels were low well before he took office. I deliberately edited any other references to the current president's name.
I haven’t seen any serious post here yet about what we as investors should do to protect our portfolios or grow our assets in light of the NOAA issue. Say what? Should we short agriculture or farmland? Maybe unload our U.S. securities and invest in foreign assets? Likely Musk’s Starlink can provide the same services for a fee or would be able to. Shall we invest in Starlink?
The problem is twofold: Threads like this distract attention away from the board’s purpose of helping investors make investment decisions. And because they go out all over the internet and surface in search queries they attract posters like the Big Bang guy who come here primarily to take sides and participate in the free-for-all.
So I respect you very much. But I don’t understand why posts loaded with political inferences should be on the investment side. Some say OT is a “wasteland”. Yeah, probably correct. Look at the 90% political threads there. Do we want this side of the forum to resemble that?
Is this thread going to change my portfolio next week or month?
No. It belongs in the OT forum.
You know very well where this thread is going.
Not every report about the economy or politics means something to the investment world.
What's so hard to use the OT forum?
All I can suggest for investing in this very uncertain environment is to follow David's sage advice from February 1:
1. Do not count on the stock market – valuations are at epic levels, with speculative funds like ARK Innovation ETF popping up 10% in the month of January, far more than the 2-3% gains of more mainstream market indexes. Such markets tend to be incredibly fragile.
2. Prefer quality over momentum – “momentum” comes down to “what was working will continue working,” which has been an intermittently disastrous assumption. While quality rarely soars, it also is typically underpriced and resilient.
3. Consider a small position in a hedge-like fund – they tend to be expensive and few have justified their existence, but we’ve tracked a handful of well-run funds that have succeeded with hedged equity positions or with a managed futures strategy that uses very short-term signals to short falling classes while investing in rising ones. Standpoint Multi-Asset charges 1.49% with a five-year return of 12%, a beta of 23, and a downside capture of 22. Dynamic Alpha Macro, meanwhile, weighs in with a 1.98% e.r. but booked top percentile returns in its Morningstar peer group during its first year of operation. The argument here is simple: it’s far easier to remain calm and focused when something in your portfolio is holding up as the little voice in your head shouts “run! Run! Runnnnn!”
4. Do not rule out bonds as a competitor to stocks – while I’m skeptical of debt-weighted bond index funds, Lynn makes a strong argument for the asset class just now.
5. Fund your emergency account – really, knowing that you’ve got the next two to three months’ worth of bills covered buys a lot of peace of mind. My portfolio uses RiverPark Short Term High Yield for that role, but Schwab has a bunch of money market funds yielding over 4% just now.
You don't really need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.