National Weather Service already had staff shortages. Then came the latest firings.

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. 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.

At the same time, buyouts from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service that went into effect Friday effectively shrank the Weather Service ranks by about 170 positions, according to multiple officials within and close to the agency. (DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency.) Combined with Thursday’s firings – which the officials said surpassed 100 within the Weather Service and more than 600 overall across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent agency – the government climate and weather enterprise’s workforce contracted by more than 6% in two days.

The National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union representing 4,000 workers, argued the changes, part of the administration’s swift and broad moves to shrink the federal workforce, could leave some offices unable to track weather hazards around the clock.

“We are currently assessing the impacts on each of the 122 forecast offices and 13 river forecast centers and our tsunami warning centers to see which ones will be able to remain operating 24-7,” said JoAnn Becker, the union’s president.

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.”

A federal judge ordered the administration to reverse its directive for mass firings of federal workers Thursday, though it was not clear Friday if the ruling would affect the newest round of terminations at the weather and climate agencies.

But current and former agency officials and lawmakers said the cuts could have major impacts on Americans and the economy, compromising important functions. The Washington Post spoke with more than a dozen current and former employees at NOAA, including some fired this week, including many who spoke under the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who has been vocal in support of NOAA and its headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, called the firings “a critical public safety issue” in a call with reporters Friday. Private-sector forecasters, meteorologists and researchers around the world rely on the agencies’ weather and climate data.

“They’re our eyes and ears,” he said of the terminated employees. “People will die and others will suffer greatly” without their work, he said.

Monitoring weather hazards around-the-clock

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.

So the loss of any staff members in those offices makes it that much harder to ensure the agency can maintain coverage in the event of unexpected severe weather, said Louis Uccellini, who served as Weather Service director from 2013 to 2022. For example, he suggested, what if an office lacked a key equipment technician on the midnight shift and a radar system went down?

“That’s a real risk,” he said. “You’ve got to ensure [staffing] is there all the time.”

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.”

But given the workforce demands facing Weather Service offices, Uccellini 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, said Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden. 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.

And 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.

Ahead of an outbreak of severe storms forecast across the South next week, additional recent changes by the administration could limit the work meteorologists are able to do when surveying damage or investigating the path and intensity of any tornadoes.

Some staff with authority to use payment cards for fuel and other supplies were recently told their spending allowances had been slashed to $1, according to multiple staffers.

Separately, some meteorologists were supposed to head to Boise next week for immersive exercises on responding during weather incidents – training to become special “incident meteorologists.”

Trainees and experienced meteorologists run through simulations of briefings and radio communication, become familiar with new technology used in the field and meet with fire and forest officials from other parts of the government. But the training was canceled. The credit card limit change also would have made travel to the training difficult, said one meteorologist who has been at the agency for 30 years.

Repairing key equipment

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.

When systems require repairs in the coming months and years, “we’re going to be in trouble,” he said.

Modeling weather around the world

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.

Jacobs’s confirmation hearing has yet to be scheduled in the U.S. Senate.

Communicating with the public

Before logging off Thursday, Tom Di Liberto changed his out-of-office reply: He was out of the office permanently, he recalled including. He’d been fired.

He was among many probationary colleagues fired included those in external affairs and contributors to climate.gov. Other communications positions, including crisis communication staff, were also terminated. NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory meanwhile wrote on X that its communication services “will be taking an indefinite hiatus” because of a reduction in staff.

A message on NOAA’s external affairs website read: “Thank you for visiting NOAA External Affairs. Due to the recent layoffs at NOAA, all members of the External Affairs team were relieved of their duties.”

Di Liberto was two weeks away from completing his probation period as a federal employee. Working as a contractor for the agency since 2010, he helped the agency communicate weather and climate science to the public – even receiving a regional Emmy nomination for informational videos he produced for the agency.

“Being a federal employee at NOAA was a dream come true. Literally,” Di Liberto wrote in his farewell letter to his colleagues. “I’ve wanted to work at NOAA since I was in elementary school.”

He had prepared the letter weeks ago, anticipating this day could come.