WASHINGTON (AP) — Former federal officials and outside experts have warned for months that President Donald Trump’s deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service could endanger lives.
The NWS office responsible for that region had five staffers on duty as thunderstorms formed over Texas Thursday evening, the usual number for an overnight shift when severe weather is expected. Current and former NWS officials defended the agency, pointing to urgent flash flood warnings issued in the pre-dawn hours before the river rose.
“This was an exceptional service to come out first with the catastrophic flash flood warning and this shows the awareness of the meteorologists on shift at the NWS office,” said Brian LaMarre, who retired at the end of April as the meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS forecast office in Tampa, Florida. ″There is always the challenge of pinpointing extreme values, however, the fact the catastrophic warning was issued first showed the level of urgency.”
The White House also has proposed slashing its parent agency’s budget by 27% and eliminating federal research centers focused on studying the world’s weather, climate and oceans.
Meanwhile, Trump said the job eliminations did not hamper any weather forecasting. The raging waters, he said Sunday, were “a thing that happened in seconds. No one expected it. Nobody saw it.”
Former federal officials and experts have said Trump’s indiscriminate job reductions at NWS and other weather-related agencies will result in brain drain that imperils the federal government’s ability to issue timely and accurate forecasts. Such predictions can save lives, particularly for those in the path of quick-moving storms.
“This situation is getting to the point where something could break,” said Louis Uccellini, a meteorologist who served as NWS director under three presidents, including during Trump’s first term. “The people are being tired out, working through the night and then being there during the day because the next shift is short staffed. Anything like that could create a situation in which important elements of forecasts and warnings are missed.”
The cuts follow a decade-long Republican effort to dismantle and privatize many of the duties of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency within the Commerce Department that includes the NWS. The reductions have come as Trump has handed top public posts to officials with ties to private companies that stand to profit from hobbling the taxpayer-funded system for predicting the weather.
NOAA’s main satellite operations center briefly appeared earlier this year on a list of surplus government real estate set to be sold. Trump’s proposed budget also seeks to shutter key facilities for tracking climate change. The proposed cuts include the observatory atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that for decades has documented the steady rise in plant-warming carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
“Removing data from the defense satellite is similar to removing another piece to the public safety puzzle for hurricane intensity forecasting,” said LaMarre, now a private consultant. ”The more pieces removed, the less clear the picture becomes which can reduce the quality of life-saving warnings.”
“We are fully staffed with forecasters and scientists,” Lutnick said June 4 before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. “Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.”
Asked by AP how the NWS could simultaneously be fully staffed and still advertise “mission critical positions” as open, Commerce spokesperson Kristen Eichamer said the “National Hurricane Center is fully staffed to meet this season’s demand, and any recruitment efforts are simply meant to deepen our talent pool.”
“The secretary is committed to providing Americans with the most accurate, up-to-date weather data by ensuring the National Weather Service is fully equipped with the personnel and technology it needs,” Eichamer said. “For the first time, we are integrating technology that’s more accurate and agile than ever before to achieve this goal, and with it the NWS is poised to deliver critical weather information to Americans.”
Uccellini and the four prior NWS directors who served under Democratic and Republican presidents criticized the Trump cuts in an open letter issued in May; they said the administration’s actions resulted in the departures of about 550 employees — an overall reduction of more than 10 percent.
“NWS staff will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services,” they wrote. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life. We know that’s a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines – and by the people who depend on their efforts.”
NOAA’s budget for fiscal year 2024 was just under $6.4 billion, of which less than $1.4 billion went to NWS.
While experts say it would be illegal for Trump to eliminate NOAA without Congressional approval, some former federal officials worry the cuts could result in a patchwork system where taxpayers finance the operation of satellites and collection of atmospheric data but are left to pay private services that would issue forecasts and severe weather warnings. That arrangement, critics say, could lead to delays or missed emergency alerts that, in turn, could result in avoidable deaths.
D. James Baker, who served as NOAA’s administrator during the Clinton administration, questioned whether private forecasting companies would provide the public with services that don’t generate profits.
“Would they be interested in serving small communities in Maine, let’s say?” Baker asked. “Is there a business model that gets data to all citizens that need it? Will companies take on legal risks, share information with disaster management agencies, be held accountable as government agencies are? Simply cutting NOAA without identifying how the forecasts will continue to be provided is dangerous.”
Though the National Hurricane Center in Miami has been largely spared staff reductions like those at regional NWS offices, some professionals who depend on federal forecasts and data greeted the June start of the tropical weather season with profound worry.
“What we are starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded,” Morales said. “And we may not know exactly how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline.”
