DOGE Targets National Weather Service – What Could Go Wrong?

The Trump administration and its fossil fuel funders do NOT want you to know what is happening in the atmosphere.

According to Mathew Cappucci below, more than 50 percent of National Weather service offices were already understaffed. Now more cuts, big cuts, coming.
For Project 2025, what happens to farmers, coastal cities, or air travelers is just collateral damage, an “externality”.

So who cares?

Associated Press:

 Hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees on probationary status were fired Thursday, lawmakers and weather experts said.

Federal workers who were not let go said the afternoon layoffs included meteorologists who do crucial local forecasts in National Weather Service offices across the country.

Cuts at NOAA appeared to be happening in two rounds, one of 500 and one of 800, said Craig McLean, a former NOAA chief scientist who said he got the information from someone with first-hand knowledge. That’s about 10% of NOAA’s workforce. 

The first round of cuts were probationary employees, McLean said. There are about 375 probationary employees in the National Weather Service — where day-to-day forecasting and hazard warning is done.

The firings come amid efforts by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to shrink a federal workforce that President Donald Trump has called bloated and sloppy. Thousands of probationary employees across the government have already been fired.

Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., released a statement saying: “Today, hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including weather forecasters at the National Weather Service (NWS), were given termination notices for no good reason. This is unconscionable.”

Meng added: “These are dedicated, hardworking Americans whose efforts help save lives and property from the devastating impacts of natural disasters across the country. This action will only endanger American lives going forward.”

Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member in the House Natural Resources Committee, also said “hundreds of scientists and experts at NOAA” were let go.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said on social media that the job cuts “are spectacularly short-sighted, and ultimately will deal a major self-inflicted wound to the public safety of Americans and the resiliency of the American economy to weather and climate-related disasters.”

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Don’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.