Inside the ‘slow-rolling catastrophe’ of Trump’s NOAA cuts

[ResidentialBusiness]

Mass layoffs struck the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization (NOAA) late last week, throwing into jeopardy the core mission of the agency tasked with observing the skies and seas nationwide—and a key piece of the federal disaster preparedness apparatus. 

In addition to hampering the day-to-day weather forecasting ability of its National Weather Service, cuts to NOAA will curtail efforts to protect endangered species, manage coastal regions, and prepare for climate change. When combined with the federal hiring freeze, recently terminated staff told Fast Company that the cuts put their organizations on a trajectory to “break.”

The moves have drawn outrage from Democratic members of Congress and the general public. Thousands of people showed up to protest on Monday near the Colorado and Maryland NOAA campuses in support of the National Weather Service, which has a higher favorability rating than Taylor Swift.

A rally in support of NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, on March 3, 2025. [Photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Getty Images]

Maryland congressman Chris Van Hollen called the cuts “an assault on our public safety.”

“They are our eyes and ears, and so when you close your eyes and plug your ears, people will get hurt,” he said at a virtual press conference shortly after the cuts were announced.

Because the cuts were tied to federal employees with “probationary” status, the impact was haphazard and largely without regard to their specific job functions.

In Miami, multiple hurricane researchers were let go. In Alaska, a member of the 24/7 National Tsunami Warning Center lost her job. Michigan’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory can no longer staff a communications team. More than 10% of the staff of the Maryland-based Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) were fired, dealing a significant blow to the ability of the U.S. to maintain and improve its weather forecasting capabilities.

Accurate and timely weather forecast models maintained by the EMC and provided by the NWS not only power virtually all weather apps and television weather forecasts, they also underlie much of the U.S. economy and help it to function efficiently.

“The loss of EMC workers will be a slow-rolling catastrophe,” said Larissa Reames, a meteorologist and computer scientist who was one of the EMC staff until last week. “It’s going to be a massive communication breakdown.”

Computer weather models are a vastly complex assemblage of physics equations and data processing algorithms that constantly input weather observations from NOAA’s fleet of satellites, radar, and weather stations around the world. Maintaining, improving, and tracking the performance of those models is the main goal of the EMC. By losing key staff members like Reames, who had decades of experience working with NOAA’s weather models, America’s weather predicting abilities will likely suffer.

Reames led a team of scientists working to unify and upgrade the core capabilities of a group of NOAA’s primary weather forecasting models. On a day-to-day basis, that meant having lots of conversations with experts who have specific knowledge of the models’ subsystems and working to unify and streamline their input.

As she describes it, “getting the people who are actually doing the nitty-gritty part of the model development the right tools to understand what they can do better.” For Reames, losing her job may mean an end to a 20-year career in computer weather modeling. She’s now considering a job doing software development in the private sector, but admits she has no idea what that might entail.

“It’s overwhelming to think about what I’m going to have to do,” said Reames. “I don’t know any of the languages they use, but I have the skills to learn them.”

The cuts to NOAA appeared to be made without regard to continuity of the services it provides. Hundreds of scientists, technicians, and support staff were given just two hours to vacate their workplaces and didn’t have time to properly transition their roles to other colleagues. By diverting people like Reames to the private sector, institutional knowledge of how NOAA’s weather models function will be lost.

Other essential parts of federal disaster management, like FEMA and the agencies that manage public lands have also been hamstrung by staff cuts to probationary employees and strict spending limits.

For many fired NOAA employees, the cuts brought a harsh conclusion to a lifelong dream of public service in the earth sciences.

Francis Tarasiewicz grew up in southern New England, not far from Boston. He became a storm spotter, then an observer on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and worked in grad school with emergency managers to understand how they use weather information.

Tarasiewicz had started work at the Boston NWS office only in January as a shift forecaster, responsible for liaising with emergency management officials during periods of severe weather.

“I grew up in foster care and have overcome a lot of obstacles just to live a normal life, let alone deeply serve the people of my community,” Tarasiewicz said. “It was like a one in a million chance there.”

The NWS as a whole lost about 10% of its staff last week, but those cuts weren’t made with regard to geography or the population each office serves. Boston was especially hard-hit. (In an email, an NWS spokesperson said they don’t comment on personnel or management issues.)

After the departure of Tarasiewicz and three other colleagues, the NWS office in Boston is now down to just seven meteorologists, four fewer than are needed to run it around the clock with even minimal staffing. That means meteorologists in Boston will need to perform the duties of multiple staff members at once. Since the NWS works around the clock, it will also mean performing those duties with fewer hours of rest in between shifts.

“The meteorologist in charge of my office had no idea this was coming, said Tarasiewicz. “I’ve never seen a boss of mine break down in tears.”

If he can’t get his job back at NWS, Tarasiewicz wants to work in climate—but is reluctant to consider a job in the private sector. He has honed his skill set specifically to assist government and public safety officials during inclement weather and feels discouraged at the thought that he might end up in a role with a narrower focus, as might be the case if he worked as a forecaster for a private company. “The whole reason I decided to work for the weather service was to maximize my impact on the world,” said Tarasiewicz.

As severe as the cuts are, they could be just the beginning. Reports say Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” plans to cut NOAA’s staffing by up to 50%, and has already moved to cancel key building leases in Oklahoma and at Maryland’s Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, where Reames worked.

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