As California recovers from devastating wildfires and hurricane season fast approaches, President Donald Trump and the White House DOGE team are slashing the workforce at the federal agency responsible for monitoring extreme weather.
Business Insider spoke to more than a dozen current and former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who said that staff and policy changes were making their day-to-day jobs more challenging. They worried about how the upheaval would affect Americans’ safety — especially as hurricane and tornado seasons rapidly approach.
Andrew Hazelton, a former NOAA hurricane modeler who was fired in February alongside other probationary employees, was blunt: If forecasts and hurricane warnings go downhill, he told BI, “we could see loss of life as a result.”
The agency’s reach extends across the country and the globe. Besides its work on extreme climate conditions, NOAA provides the data that powers the weather app on your phone, alerts pilots to turbulence, and helps farmers know when to plant to keep American agriculture rolling.
“It really, truly affects every single American every day,” a former probationary employee said. (Some employees we spoke to asked to remain anonymous.)
Before Trump took office in January, NOAA employed around 12,430 people, according to a congressional report. More than 1,000 employees have departed through layoffs or buyouts, said JoAnn Becker, the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing NOAA employees. More than 600 were terminated in February and about 500 took the administration’s buyout offer, according to previous reporting.
Between the uncertain future for probationary employees, voluntary early retirements and buyouts, and Trump’s ongoing government-wide reduction-in-force effort, the agency may shrink further.
“We would like to just go on and do our jobs and save people’s lives,” an employee at the National Weather Service, a department within NOAA, said.
Outside of staffing cuts, some employees said stricter rules around travel and expense budgets have made it difficult to do the jobs that are vital to protecting people from natural disasters. Expiration dates for contracts marked as “urgent” are also coming up soon, according to internal documents viewed by BI.
An “extensive process was conducted to ensure that mission-critical functions to fulfill NOAA’s statutory responsibilities weren’t compromised,” a Trump administration spokesperson told BI in a statement. The spokesperson declined to provide additional details about the process.
Susan Buchanan, a NOAA spokeswoman, said that the agency remains dedicated to its mission. A spokesperson for the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
For those who remain, the show must go on, even as resources and staff dwindle.
“We are catching a lot of balls, with very little people,” a NOAA employee said. “Eventually one of them is probably going to fall.”
Aviation at risk
Several people who spoke to BI expressed unease over how the staffing cuts and operational changes at NOAA could affect the aviation industry.
Though flying remains the safest mode of transportation, a National Weather Service employee who’s worked at the agency for more than a decade said that if the turmoil at the agency continues long term, “I don’t know if I’d trust getting on a plane.”
NOAA assists with running aviation-specific weather models for pilots, helping them track things like turbulence. Its data “ripples right through the whole system,” Brad Colman, the former president of the American Meteorological Society, said.
“If systems are degraded, a turbulence forecast may go down in quality, and uncertainty is increased,” Colman said. “There’s more exposure, more risk.”
A spokesperson for the Airline Dispatchers Federation told BI in an email that NOAA provides dispatchers with “essential tools,” including turbulence, wind, and weather forecasts.
“Virtually all” of the weather data for domestic flights comes from NOAA, and its data is “fundamental” to daily operations, the spokesperson said. The organization hasn’t yet noticed operational impacts but warned that “even subtle degradations could affect our operations.”
The Federal Aviation Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Meteorologists who work for airlines receive foundational data from NOAA to develop their forecasts, the spokesperson added, noting that smaller airlines will likely face more challenges if NOAA’s data degrades — potentially creating a disparity in safety across the industry.
Or as Tom Di Liberto, a former public affairs official and climate scientist who was fired in February, put it: “There’s a reason why a lot of weather forecast offices are close by or at a major airport.”
Less reliable forecasts
Staffers affected by the terminations weren’t just at NOAA’s headquarters in Maryland; they were stationed in regional offices across the country.
One office in Alaska stopped launching daily weather balloons to collect data for forecasts, Larry Hubble, an upper air program manager in the state, said. On March 20, the National Weather Service temporarily suspended weather balloon launches at offices in Nebraska and South Dakota, while seven other sites are scaling back to one launch a day instead of two because of staffing shortages.
Other instruments, like radars on commercial aircraft and satellites, also collect data. The NWS employee of more than a decade said that balloons are one of the most accurate methods of weather measurement, and if they’re scaled back, “they’re going to start seeing the degradation of the models and the forecast is going to lose its accuracy.”
“If you degrade our capabilities, our warnings get weaker and people and property get compromised,” a NOAA employee told BI. “Damages are going to increase, people are not going to get out of harm’s way, and they’re going to die.”
The Government and Accountability Office said in a March report that staffing shortages and aircraft maintenance problems in recent years had already hampered hurricane hunters’ ability to perform their jobs — well before DOGE ever came knocking on doors.
The private sector depends on NOAA
The changes at NOAA will likely ripple across the private sector, affecting a range of industries, some employees told BI. The reinsurance industry, for example, uses NOAA data to help confirm damages from natural disasters and dole out funds. Construction workers rely on NOAA data to figure out where to build new projects.
The economic implications are vast — NOAA’s products impact more than one-third of the country’s GDP, according to the agency’s website.
“If you take out NOAA, the private sector cannot do what NOAA does,” Di Liberto said. The agency operates thousands of weather balloons, hundreds of buoys, 10 airplanes, and 18 satellites and makes that information accessible to the entire public — not just those who can pay for it.
The spokesperson from the Airline Dispatchers Federation said that private weather companies provide helpful supplemental services, but they ultimately rely on NOAA’s raw data.
“There is simply no replacement for NOAA’s comprehensive data collection infrastructure,” the spokesperson said.
Additional reporting by Juliana Kaplan.
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