(Washington Post) Some National Weather Service forecasting teams are so critically understaffed that the agency is offering to pay moving expenses for any staff willing to transfer to those offices, according to notices recently sent to employees and obtained by The Washington Post. The worker shortages have forced several offices to stop operating 24 hours a day — a drastic step for an agency whose ethos is to prepare and warn a “weather-ready” nation.
The 155 vacancies the agency is seeking to fill by May 27 include key weather forecasting positions at offices in coastal Texas and Louisiana, states that could face threats when the Atlantic hurricane season begins in a few weeks. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the weather service’s parent agency, is also asking large numbers of meteorologists to move to offices in Alaska and across the northern Plains in Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota.
In four forecasting offices — two in California’s Central Valley, one in western Kansas and another in eastern Kentucky — the staffing is so thin that there aren’t enough meteorologists to cover an overnight shift, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing NOAA rank and file. Offices in Wyoming, Michigan, Oregon and Alaska are expected to soon follow suit, the union said.
That development is elevating fears that without the transfers or new hires, more offices will struggle to monitor coming weather threats, issue aviation forecasts and launch weather balloons around-the-clock, according to current and former weather service officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the agency.
The circumstances lay bare how significantly the Trump administration has whittled away the corps of public servants responsible for the forecasting, warnings and information that can protect lives and property when extreme weather strikes. An estimated 500 National Weather Service employees have been fired or taken early retirements this year, out of a staff that numbered more than 4,200 before President Donald Trump began his second term, the officials said. “For most of the last half century NWS has been a 24/7 operation — not anymore thanks to Elon Musk,” Tom Fahy, legislative director for the union, said in an email.
But the action is spurring some hope that, after five months of efforts to cut staff, administration officials are heeding concerns that the nation could now be less prepared for major storms or other events, said Brian LaMarre, who retired from the weather service last month after a career that included 17 years as meteorologist-in-charge at the forecasting office in Tampa.
The number of vacancies underscores how in the administration’s efforts to streamline government and boost efficiency it may be threatening core agency functions, he said. “We’ve got to be careful on how much efficiency we’re looking for,” said LaMarre, who had been working on a National Weather Service initiative to reinvent the agency’s staffing model. “The more efficient we make something, sometimes it becomes less effective.”
Politico reported about the NOAA effort to fill Weather Service vacancies in a newsletter earlier Wednesday.
