Trump Administration Fires Hundreds of Weather Forecasters and Other NOAA Employees

Hundreds of federal workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were fired on Thursday, in the latest of a series of moves by the Trump administration to cull the numbers of federal workers in the sciences.

The purge of the federal payroll is being led by the Department of Government Efficiency, which despite its name is not a department of the federal government. The NOAA layoffs close out a particularly bloody February that saw workers in the Food and Drug Administration and the National Park Service laid off, among other agencies. NASA struck a last-minute deal to avoid expected staff reductions, though it may only be a temporary reprieve.

Craig McLean, a former NOAA chief scientist, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that the layoffs happened in two rounds, of 500 and 800, respectively. Together, the layoffs constitute about 10% of the agency’s workforce.

The first round of cuts targeted probationary employees—people whose positions were currently under review. According to CBC, about 375 probationary employees are with the National Weather Service, which constantly monitors weather patterns and events across the United States, from your quotidian sunny days and rain showers to flash floods, hurricanes, and mudslides.

Critically, probationary employees are not on probation in the high school sense of the word. They often are employees with stellar records but who recently joined the agency.

“Some of the people I know who were fired had decades of experience and were considered ‘probationary’ just because they were [approximately] one year into new roles,” said Julie Lundquist, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Wind Energy at Johns Hopkins University, in an email to Gizmodo.

It is hard to quantify the potential effects of the layoffs. DOGE and the Trump Administration claim the layoffs are being done in order to make the government more efficient. The hundreds of layoffs occur against the backdrop of a key tenet of Project 2025, the Trump Administration’s presidential transition project to overhaul the U.S. government. Project 2025 calls for the abolishment of NOAA.

“NOAA brings a value of $11 or more for every $1 spent, so these firings are sacrificing long-term capabilities for temporary gain (like eating one’s seed corn, to use a farming analogy),” Lundquist explained.

You can read more about the value of NOAA work in an op-ed by a previous agency chief of staff and in an Internet of Water report. NOAA weather monitoring data is provided free to private sector companies who run their own forecasts; with less NOAA data, meteorologists everywhere will be hampered.

NOAA staff are essential for monitoring, but also disseminating information about weather events across the country. According to the agency, the U.S. has sustained over 400 weather and climate disasters since 1980 in which damages exceeded $1 billion. The total cost of those weather events is nearly $3 trillion.

If the layoffs affect NOAA’s ability to monitor and deliver information about meteorological events, it could increase the damages from weather-related phenomena.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California – Los Angeles, said on X that “NOAA and the NWS collectively offer tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year in net economic benefit through a combination of averted losses and efficiencies gained.”

“Even a temporary or partial interruption in NOAA/NWS 24/7/365 lifesaving services—which are often used in an hour-by-hour (even minute-by-minute) context during extreme weather events and other emergencies—would be devastating,” Swain added.

The fallout from these layoffs is hard to predict, as it is not immediately clear where all the layoffs hit across NOAA and in NWS’ many stations nationwide. But there are now fewer scientists, meteorologists, and other qualified people helping operate the country’s round-the-clock sentry for extreme weather.