Bulwark Takes - National Weather Service Cuts Hundreds, Disaster Could Loom

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Atmospheric scientist Matthew Cappucci joins Sam Stein to talk the hundreds of firings at NOAA, and how the cuts will affect weather forecasting, air travel, and natural disasters. Follow Matthew Cappucci on social media @MatthewCappucci

Hey guys, me Sam Stein back again. I joined with the great Matthew Pucci, Capital Weather Gang meteorologist extraordinaire. We're talking about DOGE coming for the National Weather Service in NOAA. First of all, Matt, how are you doing? Doing pretty well. It's been a busy stretch lately, but a lot of colleagues I know aren't as fortunate. Yeah. So we have you on this morning because news broke last night. The cuts that have been happening across a number of different federal agencies have now come for our weather services. The numbers are fairly shocking and really have alarmed people in your neck of the woods. NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there's 500 cuts apparently, and that's going to be coupled with 800 more cuts for about 10% of the workforce. And then the National Weather Service on top of that has slash probationary employees and is looking at additional cuts beyond that. They have about 375 probationary workers. Probationary, just as I've always stressed, it has bad connotations,

but it just means you've been working there for about a year or so. And it means that you're easier to fire because you have fewer protections in the workplace. Before we get into the devastation that these cuts will bring, Matt, why don't you talk to us about what these two organizations do on a day-to-day basis so that people who might not be familiar with it can understand what we're talking about? Yeah, so NOAA is basically anything environmental, anything to do with the atmosphere or the oceans. It's both ongoing warnings and also research, too, to sort of embolden our understanding of the world around us. The National Weather Service costs taxpayers about $1.3 billion a year, which amounts to about $4 per person, so roughly a cup of coffee. It's a Starbucks.

Yeah, a single Starbucks. That's where we get all of our watches, warnings, advisories, forecasts. And so anytime your phone buzzes with a tornado warning or a flash flood warning or anything like that, it's coming from the National Weather Service. They have 122 different offices across the country where forecasters are staffed 24-7, watching the radar, making sure things are going the way they're supposed to, issuing warnings. They also issue forecasts for the ocean, for airports, for everything in between. They're responsible for commerce, for facilitating shipping, trade, pretty much everything you can imagine. Climate change monitoring monitoring too. And so anything that has to do with weather or the atmosphere,

it's NOAA or the National Weather Service. In addition, they also have a national center. So like the National Hurricane Center, that's another agency. They have the Storm Prediction Center. And so a lot of different moving parts with this. All right, let's just focus on flights because airline travels in the news a lot recently because of the cuts that have happened to the FAA. But as you rightly point out, a lot of our airline operations depend on having really good insight into what weather and weather forecasts are going to be.

Will these cuts impact air travel in the United States? And if so, how? They very well could, but that sort of remains to be seen to the extent that they do. We know that the Aviation Weather Center obviously falls under NOAA and the National Weather Service. We don't know how many cuts there have been there, if any. We do know, however, that every specific airport falls into the jurisdiction of a local WFO or weather forecast office. That's where there have been 300, 400 plus cuts of probationary employees. And so that could degrade the quality of forecasts at these different local airports and even some national, international airports too. The other thing I'm concerned with as well is that we are seeing a

reduction in the number of weather balloons launched over some remote areas. Like in Alaska, for example, Constabue is no longer launching weather balloons due to staffing issues, which doesn't sound like much. But if you're in the state of Alaska and you're trying to get a forecast, you want a 3D perspective of the atmosphere, the only way to do that is with a weather balloon. And less data in means degraded data out. And that will negatively impact weather models and forecasts too. I guess I'm trying to get a better sense of on a sort of day-to-day granular level. How do these cuts impact a layman's life, right?

For me, obviously, I can make sense of it. I care about this stuff. But let's say you're just sort of out in the middle of the country. You check the weather regularly, but you don't really think you interact with the NWS or NOAA. Like, how would this affect you? I'll be honest, about 99 percent of the time it won't affect you. And one percent will in a very big way. For example, back on the 4th of last year, we had a morning line of thunderstorms move into the greater Oklahoma City area. You know, they're forecasting thunderstorms, but the office wasn't staffed for warning operations because there were so many staffing issues. There were, going into this episode, staffing shortages, and several tornado warnings didn't get issued or didn't get issued in time because of these staffing shortages. You know, back in 2023, the House Appropriations Committee

noted that more than 50% of weather service offices were understaffed, and they used the word concern in their documents to express sort of how worried they were about this. Now we're cutting staff even further. In the past 10, 15 years, we've seen a roughly 15% reduction in overall weather service employees in the non-managerial positions anyway. We're cutting even more. And it's definitely concerning. Now, it is true that there could be some consolidation. It is true that we could be leveraging technology more and perhaps automating some processes.

But here's the thing. The folks who were doing that research were also cut. We've seen cuts at the machine learning. We've seen cuts at the automation offices in the weather service. And so it seems like there isn't really a strategy as to who is being cut. It's more just sort of blind slashing without much forethought as to how to do this in a way that would better set the weather service up

for a more efficient future. Well, is the issue here, I'm going to say this probably inarticulately, but is the issue here about sort of how one philosophically views government services? To me, weather forecasting is a public good, right? I pay for it, not because I want to get money back for it. I pay for it because I want to have information at my disposal, right? Similarly to like the Postal Service, right? I know that the Postal Service

might lose money, but I pay for, in the form of tax dollars, the possibility that one day I want to send a mail, a piece of mail, and be able to do it relatively cheaply. It's a public service, public good that we contribute to. Whereas people who look at this in a different philosophical lens may say, this is wasted taxpayer money. We can privatize this data, or we can even sell this data privately and make money from it. Is that really what this comes down to? Well, I love the way you define it when you talk about losing money. No one ever says that the military loses $820 million a year. And yet when it comes to the Weather Service, suddenly we're trying to cut something that is 0.15%, so barely a tenth of a percent of military funds. Well, it's the same thing with the Postal Service. It loses money, but we need the Postal Service to have something to deliver goods, right? I mean, that's a public utility.

Of course, and the boom for the economy, I mean, anything that moves from place to place in the United States depends on the weather. If you're flying in an airplane, believe me, you want the pilots to know the weather. If you are traveling in a cruise ship, you want the folks in charge to know the weather. If you're driving, you want to know the weather.

And if you have a weather app free or paid for, that data originates from the National Weather Service. Even if a weather app is doing their own manipulation of some of the data, that data in comes from remote sensing that is funded by the Weather Service, whether it be satellites that are launched, weather balloons that are launched, et cetera. And so it just it sort of floors me that this is what's being cut. I understand that, that the government has wasteful spending. The government certainly does. I don't think anyone out there debates that, that we're all as a country spending too much money, but if we're looking for places where there is significant waste, I don't think we're necessarily looking correctly here. What are the last question? What are the next steps here?

I don't have any insight into how the federal workforces at these agencies are responding to this, but we have seen in other instances where we've seen lawsuits, we've seen efforts to get those jobs back. We've seen cases where even probationary employees have said they have been fired illegally and there's been judicial rulings to that effect, although they're not going to get their jobs back necessarily. What's your sense from talking to folks in the field about where this goes? Well, I think it'll be a lengthy sort of a legal battle that will play out. And unfortunately, it will likely be a rollercoaster

ride for the folks who are just let go. You know, Judge Will Alsup in Northern California District Judge recently ruled that, you know, OPM can't be firing folks. And so there are already lawsuits ongoing. I'm sure that folks in the National Weather Service will join those lawsuits. He used a precedent set back in 1883 to make his case.

It's a pretty compelling case. And so that ruling now has to kind of go through the chain and we'll see what happens there. But there are a couple of things I want to point out. You know, number one, all these probationary employees, these these, you know, weather service forecasters were let go. That leaves holes in the schedule. And that means fewer people on forecast shifts. And as we head into tornado season, which really begins to ramp up beginning Tuesday, Wednesday, when a forecast tornado outbreak is coming, that will be a big problem. Hurricane season, same thing too. We have a La Nina ongoing right now, which should be near

or above average hurricane season once again. But also, you know, all weather service offices, their credit cards now are limited to $1. And so let's say, for example, a tornado hits Hattiesburg, Mississippi on Tuesday. The National Weather Service would ordinarily drive out from Jackson down to Hattiesburg to do a damage survey, National Weather Service would ordinarily drive out from Jackson down to Hattiesburg to do a damage survey to rate it, to figure out how strong it was, path length and stuff. They can't do that because they can't put gas in their tanks to go there. And so there will be ripple effects that will take a while to fully understand. And so we understand when it happens.

Will we put the pieces together? Will we be able to connect the dots? I think we'll be able to. And truth be told, that will come to not only the journalists, but also folks in the Weather Service who've been reaching out. I've been fortunate to have, you know, from my end, a half dozen, a dozen sources who have been sort of feeding me information. And so I think the number of people affected is great enough that we can get the information out there that we need to. It's unfortunate it's coming to this.

It is sort of short sighted for how the weather service will be handled in the future, but it's where we're at. All right. Well, keep us posted on what you're hearing. OK, and thank you again for jumping on, Jonas, your friend of the program. Really appreciate it, Matt. Take care. OK, bud. Always a pleasure.