For decades, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been the beating heart of weather forecasts that keep our society safe.
Its employees regularly collect weather data that help scientists monitor daily forecasts, track hurricanes, support air traffic control, operate marine vessels, enhance wildfire relief efforts and, of course, keep the weather application on your mobile phone accurate. This information is also shared freely with nations worldwide, including those most vulnerable to climate disasters.
In a sense, NOAA has been seamlessly — almost invisibly — threaded into countless aspects of global infrastructure. But about two weeks ago, its largely inconspicuous role was thrust into the spotlight when more than 800 staff members were abruptly dismissed from the agency’s already understaffed workforce of 13,000. The agency has also been told it could lose an additional 1,000 employees.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is among several experts who worry that further cuts — potentially as high as 50% — are imminent. There is credible reason to believe that those deeper cuts are coming at NOAA, Swain said, citing concerns that they could be made in a rush to help fund the government ahead of a possible shutdown that could occur by the end of today (March 14). These cuts, he added, would be “catastrophic” for NOAA, as it would equate to a 90 to 100% cut in the agency’s ability to carry out its work.
Among those already fired are local meteorologists at NOAA’s National Weather Service, who provided lifesaving forecasts during disaster events not only to the public but also to fire departments, sheriff’s offices and transportation agencies.
“It affects everyone, every day, in far more ways than many folks realize,” Swain told Space.com. “Even if we don’t care about people’s lives — which, I don’t really understand how we get to this point — but even if we only care about the money, this has huge consequences for both American and global economies.”
The NOAA layoffs are part of a wider effort by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by billionaire SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, to implement large-scale cuts aimed at significantly downsizing the federal government in an effort to save what the administration considers “wasted” taxpayer money. Many who were dismissed from NOAA had been recently hired to fill essential staffing gaps, said Swain, raising concerns that there may not be staff to maintain critical systems or fix them as quickly as necessary.
“We don’t want to find out exactly how quickly things break, because once they break they’re going to be much harder to fix,” he said.
‘It’s hard to tell what consequences we’ll face first’
While the long-term consequences of a reduced NOAA workforce will unfold with time, some impacts are already evident.
On Feb. 27, the day NOAA began its first round of layoffs, weather balloon launches — which collect raw data that improve weather models — were suspended indefinitely in Alaska due to staffing shortages, with New York and Maine following suit this week. The closure of these weather balloon launch sites means fewer localized observations, and scientists warn that these gaps will undermine the overall accuracy of weather forecasting, much like trying to complete a puzzle with missing pieces.
These layoffs come just as extreme weather season approaches, causing scientists to worry that a reduced number of experienced staff working on improving weather and climate models could impede their ability to effectively warn the public about hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters worsened by climate change.
In fact, some of the employees let go were scientists responsible for running monthly forecasts aimed at predicting upcoming heat waves and droughts, Zack Labe, a former employee at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory who was affected by the layoffs, told Space.com. Additionally, twenty employees at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), a NOAA branch that maintains the world’s largest archive of weather, oceanographic and climate data dating back to 1870, were either fired or enticed to leave. With reduced staffing, monthly press calls in which scientists briefed reporters on the previous month’s global climate conditions have been suspended indefinitely.
“Their service helped us all, and their loss diminishes us all,” David Shiffman, an ocean conservation scientist in Washington, D.C., told Space.com.
NOAA officials have so far declined to comment on “internal personnel and management matters.”
Andy Hazelton, a former NOAA employee who worked on improving computer models that help scientists forecast hurricanes, told Space.com that about eight or nine probationary employees were fired from his lab, called the AOML, short for the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab. Combined with others who accepted deferred resignations, his division lost about a quarter of its staff with expertise ranging from hurricanes to computer architecture, which could lead to slower improvements or even a decline in forecast accuracy, he said: “It’s a lot of expertise lost across the board, and it makes our country less safe.”
“Making us less able to fight the biggest problem of the 21st century doesn’t make anything more efficient and doesn’t make anything great,” Shiffman said.
A source at NOAA who requested anonymity pointed out that some processes that were already moving through molasses seem to be becoming even more inefficient. Federal employees planning any work-related, reimbursable travel are required to go through multiple levels of approval. However, “that process has become so much more muddled and bogged down over the last couple of weeks,” the source said. The Trump administration has also frozen federal travel cards used by agency employees amid a push to curb government spending.
While the weather service is NOAA’s best-known arm, the agency also watches over other factors that impact Earth. For instance, NOAA monitors space weather that could damage electrical grids or threaten astronauts on the International Space Station. Some NOAA employees fly planes into hurricanes to better understand how severe storms work, and some respond to hazardous oil or chemical spills in U.S. waters. Others are working to mitigate human-driven greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming or assisting fisheries across the country by monitoring catch levels to prevent overfishing, and still others help provide navigation data to ships at sea — including those that transport cargo.
Fired workers include meteorologists with local expertise who issue daily weather forecasts, communications experts who relay information to the public about impending disasters, engineers who keep climate models running and scientists who monitor ocean temperatures. In short, the recent layoffs have pierced through NOAA from all directions.
“If it’s not reversed, it could be really bad — forecast improvements could reverse, resulting in more deaths and loss of property as a direct result,” said Hazelton.
In addition to these layoffs, the Trump administration has pushed to end the leases of two major NOAA buildings, as reported by Axios, one of which houses telecommunications equipment used to send weather information across the U.S. and several other nations that adapt its data into their own weather forecasting models.
India is one such nation that relies on extensive ocean observations funded and maintained by NOAA. For example, scientists in India combine NOAA data with the country’s own ocean observations to forecast monsoon-related disasters. Roxy Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, told Space.com that lapses in NOAA’s ocean monitoring systems could lead to inaccuracies in India’s weather forecasts, such as underestimating a cyclone’s strength or misjudging its path — both of which can be tragic for the country’s densely populated coastline.
“While there are alternative observation networks, NOAA remains a key player in funding and maintaining these systems globally,” he said. “Already, global warming is making weather patterns more erratic and difficult to predict. In the long run, if observational gaps persist, the accuracy of climate and weather predictions worldwide — including in India — could suffer.”
“Climate change is a shared challenge, and weakening a key pillar of global observations could set us back at a time when we need better predictions more than ever,” he added.
“The problem is that when you systematically break everything without caring how it’s supposed to work, it’s hard to tell what consequences we’ll face first,” Shiffman said.
No ‘rhyme or reason’
The mood at NOAA was one of shock and alarm, according to sources who spoke with Space.com, when hundreds of employees received an email signed by Nancy Hann, who is the agency’s chief operating officer.
“The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs,” the email stated.
“No one, at least in my ecosystem, had any idea it was coming,” said Labe, who was part of a team working on a state-of-the-art climate model for the U.S. “Certainly, it caught my supervisors and leadership off guard.”
Some staff members were only given about 45 minutes’ notice before being laid off and had to scramble to download key documents from their computers, the source at NOAA who requested anonymity told Space.com.
“A lot of us are just kind of in the dark,” the source said. “In the almost 10 years that I’ve worked for NOAA, morale is at its lowest point that it’s ever been.”
Like many actions taken by DOGE in recent weeks, the abrupt downsizing of NOAA’s workforce align with the vision of “Project 2025,” a policy blueprint laid out by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. This document describes NOAA as being part of the “climate change alarm industry,” and calls for it to be dismantled and its weather forecasting operations fully commercialized.
Moreover, a major issue with these mass layoffs has to do with the fact that — as with firings spearheaded by DOGE at other federal agencies across the government — they were directed at probationary employees: workers who have been in their current positions for roughly one to two years. Because probationary workers are considered to be on “trial periods,” they have limited job protections typically afforded to staff, making them a lot easier to fire.
However, there’s a caveat. “Probationary” status doesn’t only apply to new hires. Long-term employees who were recently promoted would also be required to serve mandatory probationary periods, as would those who had been working in contract positions that recently transitioned to full-fledged federal employment. “I think for the majority of us that were impacted, we’ve actually been associated with NOAA for a very long time — many years,” Labe said.
“NOAA has lost people across the board,” said Hazelton, who spent nearly a decade at NOAA before he was let go. “There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason.”
Hazelton and other scientists who spoke to Space.com described a chaotic and opaque firing process at NOAA, leaving both those who were let go and those who survived the agency’s layoffs feeling exhausted by the sudden disarray and uncertain about the future. The randomness of these cuts has led to the loss of many senior employees and the dismantling of entire teams, leaving behind huge intellectual gaps that may have set the agency back years, experts say.
“They got rid of both the people who were filling critical needs and many of the most experienced people in one move,” said Swain. “It’s exactly the opposite of people you would not remove for efficiency.”
Members of Labe’s team who were fired include some who built “the core of weather models for the United States,” Labe said, including “one of very few people in the country that can actually go into the core of this model and improve it to make better forecasts so we can get the warning out there for extreme weather and related societal impacts.”
Labe, Swain and others interviewed for this story also emphasized how specialized — and not easily replaceable — each NOAA worker’s role tends to be.
“If somebody calls in sick one day, we don’t exactly have a deep bench of people that we can just call up and say, ‘Hey, can you fill in?'” the anonymous source at NOAA told Space.com.
What will come next?
The rapid and seemingly arbitrary downsizing effort was further marked by some dismissed workers being rehired after being told their termination notice “regrettably was sent in error.” Laid-off NOAA workers also aren’t the only ones witnessing such rehiring attempts; some employees fired under DOGE orders from the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Energy were also offered their jobs back after the fact.
“Even if some of the folks we lost get reinstated, there’s this lingering fear about broader reductions in force,” the anonymous NOAA employee said. “We’re certainly thin in a lot of important positions right now.”
Meanwhile, scientists across the world have been vocal, both online and in person, about how Trump’s decision to slash the NOAA workforce is “spectacularly short-sighted” and will deal a “major self-inflicted wound to the public safety of Americans” that could lead to preventable deaths during weather-related disasters.
“These types of positions,” Labe said, “most people stay there their entire career. That’s kind of what I was hoping to do. This type of situation has not happened before, so there are not many protocols to figure out what to do going forward.”
Protests erupted across the U.S. after the mass firings were announced, including at an NOAA building in Boulder, Colorado, outside its headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland and outside the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) building in Washington, D.C. (OPM is the governmental department that DOGE is essentially using to enable the mass federal employee layoffs.) Many climate experts have taken to social media to express solidarity with their peers, and some have written open letters outlining the urgency of the situation and requesting that government officials work to find a solution.
“From our perspective down in the trenches actually working for the government, it feels like the people up top just have no clue about anything,” the anonymous NOAA source said.
Multiple labor unions filed lawsuits against OPM as a result of the mass federal layoffs; shortly thereafter, a federal judge in San Francisco said OPM doesn’t have the authority to hire or fire individuals who are not its own. In response, lawyers for the government argued that OPM didn’t directly fire anyone but rather directed agencies to review and determine which probationary employees should be let go.
On Thursday (March 13), that San Francisco federal judge ordered the Trump administration to rehire thousands of federal employees across the government who were dismissed. Hours later, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the same.
“A lot hinges on what comes next,” said Swain.
