Trump cuts 600 weather service staff as hurricane season begins

Trump's Department of Government Efficiency terminated 880 NOAA employees on February 27, 2025, including nearly 600 National Weather Service staff through a combination of fired probationary employees and voluntary buyouts. The cuts eliminated hurricane hunters, meteorologists, storm modelers, and radar technicians months before hurricane season. NWS Director Ken Graham had warned that maintaining 24/7 operations at the agency's 122 forecast offices depended on adequate staffing.

The staffing reductions forced at least eight National Weather Service offices to suspend 24/7 operations — the first time in agency history. The Goodland, Kansas office became the first to halt round-the-clock coverage in May 2025, followed by offices in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Pendleton, Oregon; Sacramento, California; Jackson, Kentucky; and others. By mid-2025, 52 of 122 forecast offices reported vacancy rates above 20%, and 23 offices lacked a meteorologist-in-charge.

This crisis unfolded as FEMA — a separate but equally critical disaster-response agency — began hurricane season with only 12% of its incident management workforce available, a five-year low. FEMA lost roughly 20% of its permanent full-time staff to layoffs and DOGE buyouts between January and June 2025. President Trump announced in June 2025 that he planned to phase out FEMA entirely after the November 2025 hurricane season, shifting disaster response responsibility to individual states.

On July 4, 2025, catastrophic flash flooding struck Texas Hill Country, killing at least 137 people, including 27 at Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp in Kerr County. The National Weather Service issued its first flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m. — more than two hours before the peak flood surge — but Camp Mystic did not begin evacuating until nearly two hours after that warning. The deaths exposed a critical gap between federal warning systems and local emergency management infrastructure, compounded by years of deferred investment in local flood alert systems and the NWS staffing shortfalls that had reduced backup monitoring capacity across the region.