At dozens of National Weather Services offices across the country, staffing levels were low well before President Donald Trump took office. As the new administration announced mass terminations this week, current and former staffers said an exodus of new hires and veterans will hinder the agency’s ability to monitor and predict weather hazards.
The administration let go of meteorologists, hydrologists and technicians that help inform daily weather forecasts in places including Boston and Boise, Idaho. It fired scientists who build, improve and maintain weather models that form the backbone of weather forecasting around the globe. Staff at offices responsible for warning the public about tsunamis, tornadoes and hurricanes lost their jobs, as did an entire team dedicated to communicating NOAA’s work and science to the public.
Combined with Thursday’s firings the government climate and weather enterprise’s workforce contracted by more than 6 percent in two days. NOAA’s workforce is still large — starting this year at about 13,000 employees, including about 4,300 who work for the Weather Service — and a spokeswoman said Thursday the agency “remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public.”
About half of the Weather Service’s forecast offices were already understaffed, according to a congressional analysis released last year. When Trump took office and instituted a government-wide hiring freeze, it further strained staffs, forcing some to work double shifts to ensure all-day coverage, current and former Weather Service staff told The Washington Post.
Termination notices reviewed by The Post told NOAA and Weather Service staffers they were “not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.” Louis Uccellini, who served as Weather Service director from 2013 to 2022 said that is far from the truth: “These are exactly the people we need,” he said.
Jobs were also eliminated at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center and Storm Prediction Center. The offices produce forecasts and analysis that inform work done by meteorologists in local forecast offices around the country — as well as private sector meteorologists and the media. The cuts also impacted NOAA’s tsunami warning centers in Alaska and Hawaii, according to a person familiar with those offices. Even before those layoffs, scientists at the centers logged overtime hours to ensure the public is apprised of tsunami threats, the person said.
Technicians who repair radar systems across the country lost their jobs, as did several from a team who handled larger repair projects at the Weather Service’s National Reconditioning Center in Missouri, said Jeran Krska, who was fired Thursday after leaving the private sector to join the center as director in September. “We’re falling even more into, we just can’t support the mission anymore,” Krska said. “Now they just terminated all the probationary people? We’re screwed.”
Krska’s office is responsible for major repairs to systems that gather weather observations to help issue forecasts. Budgets were already tight for many repair parts, and now repair technicians across the country are also among those fired, Krska said. “We were barely Band-Aided together as it was,” he said.
As much as 25 percent of the staff at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center was cut Thursday, Spinrad said — a blow to an office that faces a complex task of building, improving and maintaining the computer models that serve as a foundation for weather prediction.
The center handles more than 20 numerical weather prediction systems — programs that combine mathematical models of earth systems with observations of current conditions to produce weather predictions. Already, low staffing has affected the operations of at least one weather balloon station in Alaska that collects data on current conditions. Without information from sources like these, experts said the accuracy of models key to forecasts across the country and globe could be affected.
The modeling center is central to work championed by Neil Jacobs, Trump’s nominee to lead NOAA. The work is meant to improve U.S. weather models, generally outperformed by rival systems developed in Europe and the United Kingdom. The center is collaborating on efforts to build what is known as the Unified Forecast System, of which Jacobs serves as chief science adviser and that he has spearheaded as a means of improving forecasting accuracy.

@yogibb said,
Noted in Barron's - Economy:
Atlanta Fed GDPNow is projecting economic contraction for 2025/Q1 of -1.5% (real) vs +2.3% previously, while Piper Sandler switched to -2% from +2% previously.

An Elon Musk ally installed in the US government said in a late night email going into Saturday that the office behind a popular free online tax filing option would be shuttered – and its employees would be let go.
The 18F office within the General Services Administration (GSA) created the IRS Direct File program that allows for free online tax filings. It has been a frequent target of Musk, and one of the billionaire businessman’s close associates who holds a key position in the GSA informed staffers that the agency would close 18F in an email to staffers that arrived around 1am on Saturday morning.
According to the message, the firings were in support of the executive order Donald Trump issued after beginning his second US presidency, which has empowered Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) taskforce to cut federal workers.
“The 18F Office has been identified as part of this phase of the GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical,” the email states. “This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the Administration and GSA. There are no other TTS programs impacted at this time, however we anticipate more change in the future.”
The email came from Thomas Shedd, a 28-year-old former Tesla software engineer who took over in late January as head of the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services. It’s not immediately clear what may happen to 18F programs such as the direct filing system or the total number of workers that the GSA is firing from the office, which has about 90 employees.
Musk claimed in early February that he had “deleted” 18F while responding on X to a rightwing influencer who accused the agency of being “far left”. Musk didn’t elaborate on his statement, which caused confusion as the 18F website and services like its direct file program remained online.
In addition to working on the free tax return program, the 18F office worked across government agencies to update technology and launch new software products. It worked on more than 31 projects across different government agencies in 2024, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa). It has been part of the GSA since 2014.
Shortly after taking over TTS, Shedd told staffers that he planned to run the agency like a tech startup and that he wanted to implement artificial intelligence programs throughout the government. The GSA is one of the major agencies that Musk and his allies have taken over as part of their wider and potentially illegal dismantling of the federal government, which has cut services such as humanitarian aid and disease prevention while attempting to reshape agencies along ideological grounds.