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DOGE has directly affected Hurricane Prep

  • calhouncotexasdems
  • 4 days ago
  • 7 min read

As an engineer who flies into hurricanes for the US government, Josh Ripp is accustomed to turbulence. But the last two weeks have been far bumpier than he's used to.
In late February, the Trump administration fired Mr Ripp and over 800 recently hired or promoted staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration using a form email, part of ongoing cuts to the federal workforce.
Suddenly, he and several other members of the elite Hurricane Hunters flight team were out of a job - until around 21:00 Friday when he received a second email. He was to report back to work in Lakeland, Florida, 12 March, it said.

For decades, the National Weather Service has released weather balloons at a clockworklike cadence at more than 100 sites across the country, as well as over the Pacific and the Caribbean. 
Twice a day — at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. ET — meteorologists simultaneously launch the balloons, which are equipped with instruments called radiosondes that measure temperature, humidity and wind speed. They rise about 15 feet per second for two hours, traveling through layers of the atmosphere and sending pings of data back using radio waves. 
When the air gets too thin, the balloons pop and fall back to Earth with little parachutes — mission complete. 
Data from the balloons feeds into weather models that are the backbone of forecasts across the United States, whether they’re delivered by a local television broadcaster or on your iPhone. 
But many of the release sites — at least 10 in the continental United States — have suspended or limited launches because of the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Weather Service staff. 
Meteorologists and weather balloon experts say the change will reduce forecast quality and increase risk during severe weather. 
“There’s no question it will lead to errors. It’s just a matter of how bad will it be,” said Matt Lanza, a meteorologist in Houston who writes for “The Eyewall” blog. “We know these things help with forecasts, so why are we cutting them?”

The Trump administration continues its cuts to research funding, with a proposal to cut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s budgets by billions of dollars in the 2026 fiscal year. 
In particular, NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research is projected to face $485 million in cuts. According to Ars Technica, NASA’s science programs will be slashed by almost 50%, from $7.5 billion in the 2025 fiscal year down to $3.9 billion.

Trump administration officials are recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times and several people with knowledge of the situation.
The proposal from the Office of Management and Budget would abolish the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office at NOAA, one of the world’s premiere Earth sciences research centers.
A budget allocation of just over $170 million, down from about $485 million in 2024, would hobble science as varied as early warning systems for natural disasters, science education for students in kindergarten through high school, and the study of the Arctic, where temperatures have increased nearly four times as fast as the rest of the planet over the past four decades.
“At this funding level, O.A.R. is eliminated as a line office,” the proposal states.
Programs that retained funding, including research into tornado warnings and ocean acidification, would be relocated to the National Weather Service and National Ocean Service offices.


Current and former employees say fewer people working at NOAA with fewer resources could whittle away the agency’s ability to carry out its mission. Its wide-ranging portfolio includes providing reliable and life-saving information on the climate, weather and oceans, as well as supporting coastal communities and ecosystems.
For Cooley, who has spent 15-plus years studying how carbon pollution is altering the ocean’s chemistry, the professional and personal whiplash has been gutting. She said it’s the “limbo-iest limbo I’ve ever been in.” Now with having to navigate unemployment benefits and health care, and to pay rent while looking for a new job, stresses are piling up.
Several NOAA employees also said there’s mounting uncertainty and fear over which offices are going away, which are being consolidated, and who will be left to run the agency, especially the early warning systems essential for broadcasting life-saving severe weather information.
According to a memo shared with PBS News by a group of both former and current NOAA employees, an early draft of the White House budget plan envisions a far “leaner NOAA,” cutting more than a quarter of the agency’s 2026 budget.


Andrew Hazelton, a former NOAA hurricane modeler who was fired in February alongside other probationary employees, was blunt: If forecasts and hurricane warnings go downhill, he told BI, "we could see loss of life as a result."
The agency's reach extends across the country and the globe. Besides its work on extreme climate conditions, NOAA provides the data that powers the weather app on your phone, alerts pilots to turbulence, and helps farmers know when to plant to keep American agriculture rolling.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) runs the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS), and both agencies have great value to the United States: In 2022, the NWS budget was only $1.3 billion, but it provided more than $102 billion in estimated public value—a return of investment of about 79 to 1. NOAA’s $717 million of direct grant spending on its coastal and fisheries management funding programs from 2022 and 2023 is expected to generate $1.4 billion in economic output and create more than 7,800 jobs. The federal government even placed NOAA and the NWS under the Department of Commerce to provide services that support economic vitality. From broadcasters to weather apps, meteorologists nationwide depend on the NWS’s data collection to provide accurate forecasts that all Americans rely upon. Now, current and future mass layoffs incited by the recently formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) threaten the fundamental work NOAA and NWS provide to U.S. communities and will damage public safety, economic interests, and research efforts to learn more about weather and climate.

With towns and cities in the southeastern United States still reeling from hurricanes that hit last year, scientists are now releasing their forecasts for what could unfold in the hurricane season that starts in less than two months. Colorado State University is predicting nine hurricanes in 2025, four of which could spin up into major strength, while AccuWeather is forecasting up to 10. Both are predicting an above-average season similar to last year’s, which produced monster storms like Helene. That hurricane inundated swaths of the U.S., killing 249 people and causing $79 billion in damage across seven states.
The Trump administration’s slashing of jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, then, is coming at a dangerous time, experts say, as the agency generates a stream of data essential to creating hurricane forecasting models. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has eliminated hundreds of positions at NOAA as part of Musk’s stated aim of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget. Last week, news broke that the administration was proposing to cut NOAA’s overall budget by 25 percent, with plans to eliminate funding for the agency’s research arm. 
NOAA and its various divisions, like the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, are the ones collecting and processing the data that weather apps like AccuWeather use for their daily forecasts. Hurricane forecasters also rely on data coming from a range of government-owned instruments: real-time measurements of ocean temperatures from a network of buoys and satellites and wind speeds from weather balloons. Those readings help scientists predict what the conditions leading up to hurricane season might say about the number of storms that could arrive this summer and their potential intensity.
All those NOAA instruments require people to maintain them and others to process the data. Though Klotzbach says he hasn’t had any issues accessing the data when running his seasonal forecast model, scientists like him are worried that losing those agency staffers to cost-cutting efforts will disrupt the stream of information just as hurricane season is getting going. The National Weather Service is already reducing its number of weather balloon launches. And on Wednesday, the New York Times reported that due to severe shortages of meteorologists and other employees, the National Weather Service is preparing for fewer forecast updates. (The National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center did not return requests to comment for this story.)
The seasonal forecasts coming out now help to raise awareness in hurricane hotspots like the Gulf Coast, said Xubin Zeng, director of the Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center at the University of Arizona. But as the start of hurricane season approaches on June 1 and NOAA loses staff, researchers are worried that their shorter-term forecasts — the ones that alert the public to immediate dangers — could suffer, a result that would endanger American lives. 

One NWS forecast office, in Goodland, Kansas, is no longer operating 24/7, with about a dozen more likely to shift to non-24-hour operations if action isn’t taken this month. These offices include several in the Plains states and stretch into the Pacific Northwest.
Such a change is virtually unheard of in the absence of an extreme weather event, such as a hurricane or tornado, that either threatens the lives of the forecasters themselves or knocks them offline.
There are also more than 90 vacancies among the staff responsible for repairing NWS Doppler radars and automated surface weather observation stations, the NOAA staff member said, greatly raising the likelihood of prolonged equipment outages that could affect air travel. Weather stations provide pilots and controllers with crucial data on wind direction and speed at airports to determine how to take off and land safely, among other parameters.
Radar outages during tornado and hurricane seasons could cause forecasters to miss hazardous conditions till after they strike.
The NWS has lost more than 550 people all told, since the start of Trump’s second term, according to tallies kept by sources inside and outside of the agency. That’s about the same number as the agency lost in the 15 years between 2010 and 2025, according to Tom Fahy of Capitol Meteorologics.









 
 
 

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