It’s being held together by duct tape and twist ties, and it’s all the fault of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, all those Project 2025 assholes, and every cowardly Republican in Congress.
Some National Weather Service staffers are working double shifts to keep forecasting offices open. Others are operating under a “buddy system,” in which adjacent offices help monitor severe weather in understaffed regions. Still others are jettisoning services deemed not absolutely necessary, such as making presentations to schoolchildren.
The Trump administration’s cuts to the Weather Service — where nearly 600 workers, or about 1 in every 7, have left through firings, resignations or retirements — are pushing the agency to its limits, according to interviews with current and former staffers.
The incoming head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has promised to prioritize filling those jobs, and the White House recently granted the Weather Service an exemption from a government-wide hiring freeze. But as the Atlantic hurricane season peaks and wildfires ramp up in the West, hundreds of positions remain vacant, staff said. Forecasters are currently watching two storms, including one that could pose a threat for the eastern United States by early next week.
So far, exhausted employees have maintained weather monitoring and forecasting almost without interruption, staff said. But many are wondering how much longer they can keep it up. If the government shuts down next week when funding runs out, many employees could also find themselves working without pay, at least temporarily.
“We have a strained and severely stretched situation,” said Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents the agency’s workers. The Weather Service has a famously dedicated workforce, he said, but workers can put in only so many long hours and extra shifts. “There’s a breaking point.”
Fahy said two offices — one in California’s Central Valley and another in western Kansas — no longer have enough staffing to operate around the clock. And, he added, “there are still a dozen offices across the country that are operating on reduced staffs.”
John Sokich, who worked for the Weather Service for 45 years before retiring in January, said the agency is “unfortunately, incredibly adept” at keeping its forecasts and warnings going in strained circumstances. Still, he compared the Weather Service these days to a sprinter forced to extend an all-out race from 200 yards to a mile.
“They’re going to run out of gas,” Sokich said. “They’re going to start missing things. They can’t sustain that level of effort for much longer. You just can’t sprint a mile.”
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Even before this year’s losses, the Weather Service was considered understaffed, employing roughly 4,300 people — 200 below ideal personnel levels, agency leaders said at the time. But the sudden cuts were unprecedented in the agency’s recent history, Fahy said. Between 2010 and 2015, for example, roughly 600 workers left the Weather Service through attrition and retirement — this year, the same number vanished in a matter of months.
“In my time here, the agency has never, ever been below 4,000,” said Brian LaMarre, who worked for the Weather Service for more than three decades before taking a position as chief meteorologist with Inspire Weather. “This is uncharted waters.”
As a result, some local forecasting offices lost the ability to operate 24/7, cut back on launching weather balloons or staggered shifts ahead of extreme weather. Over the summer, the Weather Service grew so concerned about diminished forecasting teams that the agency offered to cover moving expenses for any workers willing to transfer to hard-hit offices in coastal Texas and Louisiana, among other places.
Now, midway through a hurricane season that forecasters initially expected to bring as many as 19 named storms, staff are finding ways to keep things running, they said — often at significant cost to their work-life balance and physical and mental health. Managers are picking up forecasting shifts. In a bid to ensure robust forecasting, some offices are sharing their employees remotely with understaffed locations, at times requiring those staffers to work overtime or through weekends.
I’ve said multiple times that we’ve been very lucky to avoid a major hurricane so far this year. Big storms like Gabrielle and Humberto have gone out to sea. That luck may be running out. We may pull through this time, but who knows how much longer the overworked staff at the NWS can hold on. Just imagine the next big storm entering the Gulf of Mexico and bearing down on our shoreline. How much confidence would any of us have in the information available? It’s just a matter of time before we find out.