This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
Supervisors began carrying out potentially illegal orders to terminate many probationary workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Thursday.
Forecasters with the National Weather Service were among those who lost their jobs, raising questions about the service’s ability to continue providing the free, accurate, up-to-the minute information on potential hazards like heat waves, blizzards, tornadoes and hurricanes that is critical to industries such as agriculture and aviation, as well as the weather reports the general public relies on.
During a press conference Friday afternoon, former NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad said about 650 employees were summarily fired Thursday. He warned that the cuts could erode the quality of hurricane forecasts in the months ahead.
“NOAA’s improved capability for predictions of hurricanes is the data that NOAA collects from the hurricane hunters and from the observations at sea,” he said.
“Those data will probably be compromised right now because of the cuts that have been made to NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations.”
Because of the cuts, he said, “it’s not clear whether the airplanes will be able to fly and the ships will be able to go to sea, and certainly not at the same kind of operational tempo as they have before.” That means data won’t be as abundant, “and so the quality of the forecast is likely to go down to some degree.”
“Every office in NOAA was hit by these indiscriminate, misguided, ill-informed terminations,” Spinrad said, warning of additional impacts ahead that will have economic ripple effects across the country.
“NOAA either owns or leases roughly 620 facilities around the country,” he said. “And it is my understanding that there is an effort underway right now to do an early termination of leases on many of those facilities.”
Watchdog groups, policy experts and recently retired high level NOAA scientists said the cuts are also likely to harm the American public by creating public uncertainty about the agency, as well as severely undermining morale in a shrinking team. In worst-case scenarios, the firings could result in avoidable losses of lives and property, they warn.
The cuts affected senior researchers like Sarah Cooley, who studies how emissions from burning fossil fuels are harming the oceans.
Cooley told Newsweek that efficiency is simply a pretense for “as much slash and burn as possible.”
In addition to the National Weather Service, NOAA manages fisheries, vast ocean protected areas and the monitoring of space weather that can disrupt communications technologies and the electrical grid.
The Heart and Soul of U.S. Climate Research
NOAA and its data are the foundation of U.S. climate science. Starting in 1978, its satellite missions led the way to understanding how Earth’s climate system works and how greenhouse gases are affecting the atmosphere and oceans.
“It’s hard to point to every way in which [the layoffs] will affect marine science,” said Catherine Macdonald, a conservation biologist who studies coastal sharks and tropical marine systems. “But it is pretty straightforward to say that NOAA scientists are public servants who help manage natural resources on behalf of the American people, and that we are less safe and less sustainable without them on the job.”
The agency’s assessment of fish stocks provides crucial data to fisheries managers across the country, and helps determine sustainable catch limits that help prevent overfishing.
“We need to know the status of a fish stock for management, and to understand that, you have to have fisheries data in order to assess how the species is doing, then you can figure out how many fish you can take out of the water for long term sustainable management,” said Toni Kerns, the fisheries policy director for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which works closely with the NOAA on assessments of fish populations.
“Without all of the different entities and partners doing their job to collect that information, then you could potentially start to see a breakdown of that system,” she said.
In a Feb. 14 fact sheet, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said that the layoffs of probationary employees could impact fishing data, as many of the survey vessels are staffed by temporary employees.
NOAA has been accused of promoting climate alarmism by the rightwing think tanks that compiled Project 2025, a policy guideline for the second Trump administration that promotes the dismantling of NOAA. Leaders and employees of the agency have strongly refuted such claims while highlighting NOAA’s contributions to U.S. industry and the nation’s economy.
Many private companies that deliver weather forecasts to the general public rely on the National Weather Service. Project 2025 calls for the National Weather Service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” effectively selling its data that was previously free and publicly available.
U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said the firings were indiscriminate and illegal and “will only hurt vital services that Americans depend on.” He plans to fight against the cuts in Congress and the courts.
In a Feb. 27 letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Van Hollen wrote that the Commerce Department was overstepping its legal authority in trying to cut positions authorized by Congress.
“Public grassroots mobilization is absolutely essential to stopping this law-breaking spree, to making sure that we win these battles, because winning the battle in the court of public opinion will have an impact on, ultimately, what we can do in the United States Congress,” he said at a Friday press conference to highlight the threats to NOAA.
It’s vital that Americans “understand that what is happening is undermining their own public safety and compromising our ability as a country to serve the interests of the American people,” he said.
Same-day Terminations
Some employees said they received the termination emails at 4 p.m. Thursday informing them that their employment would end an hour later at the end of the work day, a tactic often used in administrative take-overs to try and stymy organized legal resistance.
Zack Labe, a NOAA atmospheric scientist, received his termination email from NOAA Acting Under Secretary for Operations Nancy Hann on Thursday.
“I admittedly thought it was coming just based on memos and rumors and news,” said Labe, who worked in NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. “It was very stressful for several weeks.”
For Labe, working full-time at NOAA was a dream job—the perfect outcome of his many years as a child watching the weather channel and giving weather forecasts during his middle school’s morning announcements.
Though he was technically a probationary employee because he started his full-time role with the agency last June, Labe had worked with the organization for many years as part of one of the agency’s Cooperative Institutes.
“The people I sat next to who were affected work on developing some of the most high resolution models in the world to better understand things like extreme weather, which impact communities all across the United States,” said Labe. “All of this excitement and energy and new ideas and technological advances and skills that they bring are lost from the outcome of this.”
Asked how many employees are affected, a NOAA spokesperson wrote in an email, “Per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters. The agency remains dedicated to providing timely information and other resources to serve the American public, and continues to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission.”
Congressional staffers who track the agency say that NOAA has about 1,200 probationary employees possibly at risk of being fired.
According to screenshots posted by terminated employees on the social media app Bluesky, the emails they received said: “The Agency finds you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”
According to federal regulations, probationary employees do not just include recent hires, but also employees who were recently reassigned or promoted.
“We’ve lost both the people with the best connections and the most knowledge of how the system works and how to get things done,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist who studies the impacts of extreme weather events. “At the same time, we’ve lost almost everybody who was new and had been hired in recent years to fill these personnel gaps that were causing problems to begin with.”
The layoffs come after a Feb. 26 joint memo from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management that directed agencies to “focus on the maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated while driving the highest-quality, most efficient delivery of their statutorily-required functions.”
Advice on fulfilling this directive includes letting temporary employees’ contracts expire without renewing them and “continuing to evaluate probationary employees.”
On Thursday, as people at NOAA were being fired, a U.S. district court judge said the orders from the Office of Personnel Management that triggered mass firings were probably illegal, The Washington Post reported.
William Alsup, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California, said Thursday in a temporary oral ruling that the federal directives from the Office of Personnel Management that triggered mass firings were probably illegal, and ordered the OPM to rescind the directives for now, pending additional review and a written ruling.
Will There Be Resistance?
The chaos of the legal and administrative situation could give NOAA some time to fight back, said Craig McClean, who was the agency’s acting science director during the first Trump administration.
In 2017, when he felt there was a preemptive rush to cleanse the word “climate” from the agency’s website, he told his staff that NOAA would not go along.
“I said, this is what we do and there are laws telling us we have to do it. We’re going to stand fast and if they tell us to shut it down, I’ll be in the front of the building, on top of two milk crates with CNN and everybody else and telling them what’s going on.”
NOAA’s mandates to study the climate come from Congress and can’t simply be shut down without congressional action, he said.
“There are so many authorizations that tell NOAA to do so many things,” he said. “When an authorization is passed as law and an appropriation is passed to address that authorization, the agency is compelled to perform those duties.”
There was pressure to change the climate program from 2017 to 2020, he said, but the threat is even greater this time.
“Now, Trump, too, seems to be coming in with a heavy fist and a sledge hammer and just smashing the programs and trying to get rid of the people,” he said.
During the first Trump administration, the regulatory framework held, but this time around, “they seem to be bypassing the law and just going for the crunch move,” he said.
When the first Trump administration ordered NOAA to simply post data without context or explanation, he said his response was to stick with what the law tells NOAA to do.
“Number one, the law requires us not to just collect and produce the data, but to analyze it, explain what it means, and also give an outlook of what that would mean for the country,” he said. “Doing any less than that, especially when the money’s been appropriated, we’re violating the law. So you want me to violate the law? I won’t.”
He said NOAA seems to have been caught flat-footed last month, partly because nobody envisioned the Trump-Musk alliance in advance. “Musk came in with such recklessness and damage and unlawful guidance and potential conflicts of interests,” McClean said.
In the past, NOAA has always had enough bipartisan support to survive the intermittent ideological shifts, he said, but that may not be the case anymore.
“Here’s the problem,” he said. “The entire Republican House and Senate have become invertebrates. They have lost their spine, and they’re totally beholden to the fear that they won’t get reelected. So they’re lying with Trump, and they don’t want to get outspent in their campaigns, so they’re hoping to tap into Musk’s money.”
An immediate and large outcry from the public contacting their elected representatives might still be helpful, he said.
“We need to have people in red, purple and blue states,” he said, “communicating with their elected representatives.”
Climate of Fear
During the first Trump administration, there was, at times, a climate of fear at NOAA, said Mark Eakin, former director of the NOAA Coral Reef Watch program who retired in 2020 after 28 years with the agency. He noted that, when he started with the agency, climate research was not a partisan issue. In fact, he said, the U.S. Global Change Research Program was initiated by Republican President George H.W. Bush.
“He was actually engaged in us needing to deal with climate change,” Eakin said, “and especially digging into the science in an unfettered way to find out what was going on.”
The politicization came about 10 years later, under President George W. Bush, the son of H.W. Bush, he added.
While some policy changes are expected after elections, Eakin said that he never expected to see some of the “more severe limitations that came on during George W. Bush and Trump. “And I certainly didn’t expect there to be a president who would use a sharpie to redraw hurricane maps. I never would have thought that would happen.”
Eakin was referring to an incident in September 2019 when President Trump used a marker to alter a map from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center so that it inaccurately suggested that Hurricane Dorian posed a threat to Alabama. Several top NOAA officials later were found to have violated agency integrity policies after they released an official, but unsigned NOAA statement that seemed to support the president’s false claim.
He said NOAA’s science efforts were chilled during the first Trump administration, even without overt interference by the White House.
“What we could do in terms of science, what we could say, what we could publish, that was not passed down in official documents and instructions, but instead just came about through an environment of fear that developed,” he said. “Political appointees were feeling the pressure to not upset the administration, and therefore they wanted their people to not upset the administration, and it got passed down.”
Eakin said he is concerned that the new efforts to damage NOAA are much more organized.
“It seemed almost as though the previous Trump administration was not ready to actually take over,” he said. “They didn’t really get going on a lot of things until well into the term, and they also had problems with the Senate and were not able to get all their appointments confirmed.”
This time, it looks different, he added.
“From what I’ve seen of the current confirmation process, I think they can get just about anyone through, so that’s much more dangerous,” he said. “I’m worried that this administration is going to have the ability to do greater harm to the ability of NOAA and other agencies to do good science.”
Shattering a Historic Scientific Legacy
NOAA’s scientific roots go back more than 200 years to 1807 when President Thomas Jefferson founded the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to map safe passage into American ports and along its coastline. The Weather Bureau was established in 1870 and The U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries a year later.
Those were the first three scientific agencies in the U.S. and much of the work they’ve been doing since then is still performed by various parts of NOAA, which took formal shape in 1970 with Congressional approval of a governmental reorganization plan aimed at boosting government efficiency under President Richard Nixon.
On the research side, NOAA has developed, deployed and maintained thousands of sensitive instruments to measure every conceivable aspect of Earth systems, including inch-by-inch changes in the elevations of polar ice caps and mountain glaciers, and the rise of sea level that occurs as they melt. Hundreds of buoys and remotely operated vehicles measure ocean temperature, salinity and the strength of major ocean currents that regulate the climate. Instruments aboard planes and satellites track greenhouse gas emissions, other pollutants and smoke from wildfire emissions.
That research has been fundamental to understanding how global warming is a growing threat to the U.S. and the rest of the world, said McClean, who spent several years of his time with NOAA working with international partners.
During the George W. Bush administration, when “the color of America’s cowboy hat started to shift from the white hat to the black hat,” trust in U.S. science began to erode, he said. “Do people really want to partner up with the United States? If we lose that edge, it will be hard to gain it back, because China is going to jump right into our socks and take it away.”
If U.S. climate data from NOAA and other agencies, including NASA, become less accessible or available internationally, it increases the challenges of sustaining the long-term global datasets needed to address the planetary issue of global warming, said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
“Regardless of particular governments, there has been a challenge associated with the long-term sustainability of datasets and instruments,” he said.
One concern associated with a potential loss of NOAA climate data are potential short-term data gaps that “will generate issues for many generations to come, which is why we need stronger international coordination on global observations,” he said, adding that Copernicus is open to continued scientific collaboration and has been designed to be able to guarantee continuity of the climate record.
“We are looking to keep cooperating with our scientific counterparts across the Atlantic and across the whole planet,” he said. “Ensuring that essential data on global climate is shared publicly and is kept for posterity is essential for our future, regardless of which institution is carrying the torch.”
Jason Box, an American climate scientist with the Geological Survey of Greenland and Denmark, said that the role of U.S. data in global climate models is less significant now than just a few decades ago, and that the EO Copernicus program hosts leading global climate datasets and operates a constellation of satellites to provide multi-decade climate monitoring.
He thinks some of NOAA’s essential climate research missions will persist because they are so critical to the entire country.
“NOAA’s role as a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce will always have value in providing climate and environmental intelligence to U.S. industry and the public,” he said. “An example is monitoring snow, with snow’s role in charging reservoirs that provides … highly valuable downstream services including agriculture, energy and recreation.”
The Copernicus program now covers a large part of the data collected by NOAA, said Xavier Fettweiss, an ice researcher at the University of Liege who uses data from NOAA and other sources to make detailed measurements of how much ice is melting in Greenland Antarctica.
“If the NOAA funding is drastically cut, climate researchers could switch to the Copernicus-based data sets which are already largely used in Europe,” he said.
“But, it is clear that a NOAA funding cut is a very bad thing for climate research in the USA.”
A Blunted Emergency Response
According to Swain, the layoffs are touching the National Weather Service’s ability to collect, analyze and disseminate crucial weather-related information.
“If you go to weather.com and look at the weather channel forecast, or go to AccuWeather, or use your smartphone weather app—all of these depend on the weather predictions made by these predictive numerical models run on government funded supercomputers, using government funded scientists to develop government funded models to produce these government disseminated forecasts,” said Swain. “We’ve lost people already at every single step in that process.”
The National Weather Service has 122 local forecast offices to provide residents across the U.S. with local weather forecasts and to issue weather warnings when the need arises. The meteorologists at these offices are usually very familiar with their area’s topography, which enables them to give more specific information to municipalities about weather events.
Many employees at these offices, often understaffed, are now being laid off. This could impact not only local residents’ knowledge of upcoming weather events, but also the amount of information collected on the ground that would facilitate federal responses when they are needed.
Jim Whittington, who worked for many years on fire prevention at the National Parks Service and was a part of multiple national incident management teams that responded to wildfires, said that these local offices are crucial for understanding how a fire might spread in a specific area.
Response teams need hyper-specific information about meteorological conditions—spot weather forecasts—before they can respond. They are also needed for prescribed burns, which are fires intentionally lit to avoid later uncontrollable burning.
“We will have fewer people who have the experience of doing that level of spot forecast,” said Whittington. “I think cumulative fatigue is going to be a big deal going forward.”
When there is a large fire, an incident meteorologist is often called to the scene to provide on-site weather and environmental information. They even work with first responders to increase safety in the affected areas and keep them abreast of weather conditions.
Experts with close ties to NOAA like Swain and Whittington are reporting that some incident meteorologists were included in the purge of probationary employees. In the summer and fall, these employees are crucial to emergency responses to wildfires across the country.
“Without an [incident meteorologist], we are operating essentially with one eye blind,” said Whittington.
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