Weather officials warn additional NOAA job cuts could put "communities in harm's way"
It's a good problem when Dakota County's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is empty, but emergency manager Kelly Miller is always on call.
"Every summer, every spring, every winter, all year round," Miller said. "The EOC brings all of the decision makers together in one room, and all the people that help us develop a plan and our response."
The last time the EOC was activated, Miller added, was for COVID-19, but more often officials are called in for potential severe weather events.
"Tornados, strong wind events, flooding, snow storms, ice storms," she said. "We exercise these scenarios all the time and when we do, we include those forecasters from the National Weather Service. They come out and they bring past incidents to the exercise."
The National Weather Service is a key branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency that researches and gathers data on weather, climate and ecosystems that affect communities across the United States and even environmental data overseas.
It's also recently joined the list of federal agencies under review by the Trump administration in their efforts to shrink the size and scope of the federal government.
More than 800 employees were dismissed in February's initial sweep across NOAA, a congressional source told CBS News after the firings. More job cuts could be coming — all as part of a federal cost-cutting initiative by the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The job cuts "jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods — putting communities in harm's way," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state who chairs the Senate subcommittee that oversees NOAA, in a statement.
One of the agency's partners, the American Meteorological Society, warned separately that "the consequences to the American people will be large and wide-ranging, including increased vulnerability to hazardous weather."
A Trump administration official told CBS News the first round of job cuts at NOAA shrunk its staff by 5% and largely spared employees with critical roles, such as weather service meteorologists. But a source at the National Weather Service had disputed that, saying some meteorologists, including radar specialists, were impacted, as were staff of the Hurricane Hunters crew, which fly airplanes into storms during hurricanes to help forecasters make accurate predications.
At least a significant portion of the cuts impacted workers in the "probation" period of their employment, which usually lasts one-to-three years after starting a full-time role, according to a NOAA source. Probationary employees aren't necessarily novices, though. A weather service source said staff with 15 years of experience at NOAA, or more, could technically be categorized that way if they were recently promoted to a higher position.
NOAA is now preparing to lose more than 1,000 additional workers in a second round of firings, sources told CBS News this week. The agency could ultimately lose about 20% of its staff along with some of the programs they work on, although it's not known which will be impacted.
DOGE has also announced it might terminate the leases of 19 NOAA offices nationwide, including key buildings that generate vital weather forecasts and maintain radar operations. Individual offices have already paused some operations because of a lack of workers.
Weather service offices in Albany, New York, Gray, Maine, and Kotzebue, Alaska, said shortly after the first wave of firings that they would stop launching weather balloons, which collect weather observations from the atmosphere and often inform the core of local forecasts, because of staff reductions.
NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory was forced to shut down its communications services.
NOAA declined to comment on the layoffs. In a statement emailed to CBS News, a spokesperson for the agency said "We are not discussing internal personnel and management matters."
"NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation's environmental and economic resilience. We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission," the spokesperson said.
Rick Spinrad, who was NOAA's administrator during the Biden administration, is worried about the impact on the National Weather Service, saying job cuts will "most assuredly" affect the availability, frequency and accuracy of weather warnings.
"I think at some point people are going to recognize we need these capabilities for the public good, which, after all, is the role of government," he said. "The question is: how much damage will we sustain before we're able to turn around the damage that's already been done?"
