Large-scale layoffs have happened at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including the National Weather Service.
Up to 1,800 staff are being fired by Drug-Addled Co-President Elon Musk’s DOGE “agency.” This includes anything from weather model scientists to staff meteorologists at a variety of NWS offices.
If you are tempted to think “no big deal, I get my weather from my phone” you might want to guess again.
“But Accu-Weather!!” They get their data from NWS. “But my local TV station has their own radar on a truck!” Sure, and they use it to fill small geographic gaps in the broader radar coverage that’s provided by NWS. “My weather app!” It’s getting its data from NWS.
— Christina Toms (@christinatoms.bsky.social) 2025-02-28T02:33:30.064Z
If you think “so what, they are never right anyway” – If you had to defend this with facts in front of an impartial judge, you’d lose, badly. Yeah, I know, that one time it rained when you wanted to have a picnic and the weather guy said sunny. Based on my experience, if you think this, the odds are pretty good the forecast actually was for rain and you either misheard it or are just making it up. In my work at AccuWeather, I learned that people often hear forecasts that don’t exist.
Meteorology is one of the science fields that many in the public, especially MAGAs, have a really bad concept of. A meteorologist friend of mine said he tells scientists in other fields it’s like being an astronomer in a world where people believe the moon is made of cheese (although that’s probably accurate). If anything good can come of this I think a lot of people are learning just what it is they do.
In any event, this is a public safety issue and an economic one. The public safety aspect is obvious. One example is cuts to the tsunami warning centers.
But there is also the very real fact that we are heading into severe weather season. We are in a very weak La Nina, which is significant because it often means a severe tornado season. There is also other weather threats that each of the forecast offices across the U.S. have to deal with and warn the public about. This includes those tornadoes in the Deep South and the Plains, hurricanes on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, monsoonal flash floods in the Desert Southwest, windstorms in the Pacific Northwest, blizzards in the Great Lakes, killer heat waves in Arizona, fire weather warnings in Colorado, avalanche warnings in the Rockies, etc.
I was pleasantly surprised that in a recent poll the NWS was one of the most approved government agencies by the public. I think the harassment their social media pages get is almost exclusively from MAGAs. Stuff like “STOP SCARING PEOPLE WITH THIS BULLSHIT” – first off, meteorologist at the NWS don’t want to scare you with a weather warning. They just want you to do simple things, like hold off on a run when a severe thunderstorm is approaching, take shelter in a tornado, Netflix-and-Chill during a snowstorm, etc.
But MAGAs hate the people who are most dedicated to the public good, like teachers, health care workers, public health officials, all government workers, and yes, meteorologists. So, the suffering must happen and NOAA/NWS is a target for people whose only goal is to enable tax cuts for billionaires. That makes us all targets, especially in a time of climate change when these storms are becoming more numerous and more destructive. It should also come as no surprise that DOGE really targeted climate research staff because, in their sick, evil minds, if no one reports it, it never happened.
God help those in the path of dangerous weather in the coming months and even years.
The last word goes to Billie Marten:
