CNN
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The survivor’s guilt-stricken remaining employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are trying to “pick up the pieces” and figure out how to continue delivering life-saving information to the public, after the shock firing of hundreds of America’s foremost experts in weather forecasting and earth sciences on Thursday.
“This is an enormous self-inflicted wound. This is a hard day,” said an employee at the National Weather Service, which is under NOAA. “It’s a bleak day and I don’t know what the solution is.”
Hundreds of employees were terminated — potentially as many as 800, sources close to the agency said. Most divisions of the agency, which employs scientists and specialists in weather, oceans, biodiversity, climate and other research and planetary monitoring fields, were affected.
The full extent of the damage wrought by the cuts is still coming into focus, but cracks are already starting to form. Scientists and politicians are sounding the alarm about its potential consequences on everything from keeping people safe to the economy.
“Ships will not be able to safely navigate through our waterways. Farmers will not have the data they need to manage their crops. NOAA’s workforce keeps people alive and provides communities with the scientific support tools to protect their families and grow their businesses,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, said in a statement. “This action is a direct hit to our economy, because NOAA’s specialized workforce provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s GDP.”
Many of the impacted scientists and staff vented frustration, sadness, surprise and anger after losing “dream jobs” in civil service so suddenly.
Elon Musk and the Trump administration “just don’t understand the concept of, like, helping people for the sake of helping people without having some ulterior motives,” said Tom Di Liberto, a public affairs specialist and climate scientist fired from NOAA on Thursday. “They don’t understand the concept of what NOAA is about, which is just service to others.”
More than 100 of the employees cut were in the National Weather Service, former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said at a news conference. CNN previously reported the terminations seemed to have been done in a way to minimize a paper trail, leaving it difficult for employee organizations and even direct supervisors to know who was fired and when.
The cuts were made, with few exceptions, to probationary employees in job functions across the board, and included forecasters who issue life-saving warnings to the public for tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme weather threats — the same warnings that feed the alerts you receive on your weather app of-choice.
“Without the warnings of extreme weather events, hurricanes, tsunamis, people will die,” Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen said at a Friday news conference, “and others will suffer greatly, including huge property loss.”
The cuts struck so-called probationary employees, though they weren’t necessarily early in their careers or short on expertise. Some of NOAA’s long-standing employees, who were recently promoted or finally found a permanent position after years of contract work, were fired indiscriminately.
“We’re the group that has the unique combination of early career motivation/drive but also enough expertise to be quickly effective as we are promoted into new roles,” Andrew Hazelton, a researcher with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, said on X. “This is not the group you’d get rid of if you wanted to make an organization more efficient — it’s what you’d do if you want to destroy an organization.”
They included Zack Labe, whose work was to use AI and machine learning to improve long-range forecasts — an early career specialist Di Liberto characterized as a “get” for NOAA. “The folks that we just got in the last year or so? Oh my god, everyone was just so excited for them to be here, to work on that sort of stuff, because it was expertise that we didn’t have.”
Beyond the terminations, some of the National Weather Service’s most experienced forecasters took the so-called “fork-in-the-road” buyout offered to all federal employees in late January. It went into effect Friday, compounding losses at the agency. They include around a dozen out of the 40 chief meteorologists at offices in the Central US, CNN has learned — a region which includes Nebraska and other tornado-prone states.
At least four meteorologists with more than 30 years of experience at the NWS announced on social media that Friday was their last day.
“It takes years for people to understand how things work,” said a weather service employee, adding that these chief meteorologists are deep troves of local knowledge, including which places are most likely to flood locally to every county emergency manager.
This week’s cuts also affected a team whose work has proved vital for hurricane forecast accuracy.
The National Hurricane Center issues forecasts, but their predictions are based on weather models, including one developed and fine-tuned by scientists like Hazelton, who worked on NOAA’s Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System until he was cut from the agency on Thursday due to his probationary status, he shared on social media. The program is the next generation of hurricane forecasting technology working to improve track and intensity forecasts.
The National Hurricane Center’s storm track forecasts during the 2024 season set new records for accuracy at every timeframe from 12 hours to five days into the future, according to a preliminary report released Monday.
The center also made strides in predicting rapid intensification, one of the most difficult research challenges still to conquer in the field. Nine of 11 hurricanes rapidly intensified in the Atlantic last season, something that is becoming more likely as the world warms due to fossil fuel pollution.
The center’s ever-improving handle on where hurricanes will track and how strong they will be when they hit land is because of the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, of which Hazelton’s former team is a part.
“This is legitimately a major scientific improvement,” Hazelton said on social media of the center’s forecasting results that his work helped to achieve — just three days before he was cut.
Thursday’s layoffs also included newly hired employees in an area Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have said they support: growing America’s AI dominance.
Pairing weather forecasting with state-of-the-art machine learning is a cutting-edge area of research that computer modelers have been eyeing for years. Europe’s weather prediction agency, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, has shown remarkable results in AI forecasting. On Tuesday, the center announced its AI-driven weather model outperformed the accuracy of the conventional models by as much as 20%.
Current and former NOAA employees told CNN the agency’s forecast modeling divisions were gutted by the layoffs.
“Everyone complains about how the American (GFS) model isn’t the best. Well, you’re not going to make it the best by firing a bunch of people who are working on it,” said Di Liberto. “It just sets the United States so far back.”
There are 122 local National Weather Service offices that mark up the US map like a patchwork blanket. Each has meteorologists and other staff with specialized knowledge of the weather and climate of their designated area, which they typically exclusively issue forecasts and warnings for.
But staffing shortages — even before the cuts — had forced some offices to take over the duties of others. The practice is typically employed for short-term, emergency situations, like a computer upgrade, or if a tornado was bearing down on the office and the meteorologists themselves needed to take cover.
It could become a more permanent thing after this week’s cuts, and it comes at a cost, with stress compounding over time, leading to attrition or additional staffing losses, a weather service employee said.
“This is intense shift work, and the stress just increased exponentially,” said climate scientist Di Liberto. “These people are not magicians; the burnout is real.”
Future cuts loom, even while the NWS and other NOAA agencies try to figure out how to operate in the wake of the current losses. A recent memo from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management outline how to make targeted cuts across the federal government in the coming weeks.
“We’re at stage one,” an NWS employee said. “When will we hit bottom? I don’t know. It just keeps going, again and again and again.”
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