NOAA firings spark fears about long-term damage
The Trump administration has made drastic cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that threaten to impact weather forecasting and other key services provided by the agency.
In the wake of the wave of dismissals this week, lawmakers and former officials raised concerns about potential damage to services ranging from extreme weather responses to efforts to prevent objects from colliding in space.
Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.), the sole meteorologist in Congress, said in an interview with The Hill that the firings are “going to put the lives of my constituents in danger, period, full stop.”
NOAA and the Commerce Department, which houses it, have not disclosed how many people were cut or which offices they belonged to.
Nevertheless, a source with direct knowledge told The Hill that the original list of probationary employees submitted for dismissal comprised some 1,100 workers, and the original Thursday round of firings affected up to 800 people.
Speaking with reporters on Friday, Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA under the Biden administration, put the figure at at least 600.
These numbers put the cuts at between 5 percent and 9 percent of the agency’s 12,000-person staff.
Spinrad said all six of NOAA’s line offices were affected.
These offices are the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, National Ocean Service, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.
Another source with knowledge also told The Hill that the National Weather Service was impacted, though it’s not clear how many of its employees were cut.
The service already appeared to be seeing some effects by the end of the week. It released a statement Friday saying that weather balloon launches at its office in Kotzebue, Alaska, would be suspended indefinitely “due to a lack of … staffing.”
“That is less data. That data goes directly into our weather models,” Tom Di Liberto, one of the employees who was let go from the agency this week, told The Hill in an interview.
On Thursday, when the firings began, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said in a statement that they “jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods.”
Cantwell also called the firings “a direct hit to our economy” because the agency’s staff “provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s" gross domestic product.
While it’s not entirely clear how many people in any given office will be impacted, Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, told The Hill that if he had lost that quantity of staff while at the agency, it would have likely had significant impacts on his office’s ability to function.
“If I lost 10 to 20 percent of my staff, I would be cutting programs back … and people would be screaming down the phone line to me, saying, ‘how come I don’t get my permits on time, how come I don’t get my science estimates on time, how come the data isn’t coming?’” said Rosenberg, who is now the co-editor of SciLight on Substack.
Sorensen, the House member and meteorologist, said he was aware of at least one electrician who had been affected by the firing, which he said was a particular practical risk. Every National Weather Service office, he noted, has complex Doppler radar equipment — used in weather forecasting — that has historically been maintained by in-house electricians, and if those electricians are fired, the offices must contract out those services.
“[That] means, when the Doppler radar goes down, that they're going to have to make a request to somebody in Washington to get an electrician scheduled to come back out, [and] the Doppler radar, instead of being down for hours, will be down for months,” he said. “We can't go through severe weather season with that risk, because that means that tornadoes will not be seen.”
Spinrad, meanwhile, told reporters Friday that the Office of Space Commerce, which he said prevents objects in space from colliding, lost about 30 percent of its staff in the layoffs.
“This one is really remarkable in terms of the indiscriminate nature of the terminations,” he said.
Di Liberto, who the agency laid off this week, was both a climate scientist and a public affairs specialist. He wrote for a popular agency blog that informed the public about the El Niño weather phenomenon.
“It's important to be able to talk about what we do, because a lot of what we do is trying to make people more prepared for the extremes and the things that happen,” he said.
For example, he said, “We work with and we communicate with farmers. We build relationships with them so that we can know that our information is being used by them to help them make the best decisions they can for their farm.”
Di Liberto was just two weeks away from ending his two-year probationary period after serving for more than a decade as a NOAA contractor when he was notified that he was being laid off.
And more cuts may be coming. President Trump issued an executive order earlier this month directing agencies to prepare for "large-scale reductions in force.”
“This round of layoffs is going to hurt. It's going to start to degrade the services that people depend on,” said Jeff Watters, vice president of external affairs at Ocean Conservancy.
But, he noted, “the more you whack at NOAA, the more you hurt the services that rely on day in and day out.”
In the meantime, some companies that rely on data from the agency are already expressing concern.
“It is very unclear as to where these cuts really are,” said Rahul Dubey, chief technology officer of Rhizome, which uses NOAA data to help utility companies make the grid more resilient.
“But if the cuts are being made, where some of these data services ... then definitely there will be impact to those services, which will have downstream impact on us and a whole bunch of other industries,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) told reporters that commercial fishermen and shellfish industry representatives he was speaking to were “apoplectic” because they, too, rely on NOAA information.
“They are being unceremoniously ratf‑‑‑ed by the Trump administration,” Huffman said.
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