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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Trump administration on Thursday fired hundreds of probationary employees responsible for producing critical weather forecasts, maintaining radar systems, gathering data from satellites and monitoring key commercial fisheries.
Termination letters were sent to staff in offices across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and of the National Weather Service, multiple employees told The Washington Post. It was a step current and former agency staff had been fearing for days, warning they would cause massive disruptions in the nation’s ability to guard against storms, solar flares and other natural threats.
The termination notices reviewed by The Post told staffers that agencies had concluded they were “not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”
In many cases, fired employees had years of tenure working with the agencies, but they were on probationary status because they had been working as contractors and had only recently become federal employees.
That included people like Andrew Hazleton, a physical scientist for the Weather Service and a veteran of NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters missions, which fly through the heart of storms to collect data and improve forecasts.
“Unfortunately I can confirm the rumors going around today since I received ‘the email,’” he wrote on X. “I don’t want to make any comments other than I am exploring legal options in a couple of avenues.”
Thursday’s mass firings come days before a potential severe weather outbreak early next week in the southeastern United States, and just months ahead of the next Atlantic hurricane season.
In a statement, NOAA spokeswoman Susan Buchanan said the agency does not discuss internal personnel matters, adding that NOAA “remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public” and that weather forecasts and warnings from the agency continue.
The latest mass terminations follow the removal of thousands of probationary employees across the government as the new administration moves swiftly to shrink the federal workforce. Layoffs of thousands of probationary employees have struck numerous agencies, including health agencies and federal emergency workers in the days since the Trump administration directed agency heads to fire trial and probationary staff, potentially hundreds of thousands of employees.
At the Weather Service, staff were already stretched thin by a graying workforce and shrinking hiring pool for offices across the country that produce local weather forecasts.
That was compounded when Trump enacted a government-wide hiring freeze, and though the agency has requested an exemption, one has not been granted, multiple people close to the agency told The Post.
Democrats quickly criticized the firings and pledged to fight them in court. A day before the firings occurred, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) had warned they “would be brazenly unlawful and carry significant consequences.”
“Park rangers, firefighters, scientists, all of these people, whose purpose is to serve everyday Americans, have had the rug pulled out from under them,” Rep. Jared Huffman of California, ranking Democrat of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. “And we will all be worse off for it.”
Impacts of understaffing within the Weather Service were underlined even before the firings came down.
The agency said Thursday that staffing shortages would prevent it from releasing weather balloons from a station in northern Alaska. Though the area is sparsely populated, the data gathered from the balloon releases helps inform the weather models that produce forecasts for communities across the country and around the world.
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Personally I don’t know how much more hurricanes can be studied? They’ve been studied to death. And weather is going to happen whether we have a thousand people employed predicting it or 100 people employed predicting it and I guess we’ll have to depend on our local meteorologist also.
Rhea P, there are billions of dollars and hundreds or thousands of lives at stake when the path of a hurricane shifts just a few miles. You’d be stupid to think that better forecasting and modeling isn’t worth a lot.
This isn’t just about hurricanes (although there’s still plenty to learn from them). NOAA and NWS are essential components of commerce and everyday life, which is why they are component agencies of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The next time you board an aircraft, thank the NOAA employees who chart weather systems for pilots to navigate you safely from point A to point B.
I have worked for small, medium, and large businesses and owned and operated my two of my own successful businesses. No well-run business just randomly fires people and then gleefully celebrates kicking these former employees while they are down.
Not only is what happening disgusting and a brazen attempt to hijack our government to serve the interest of billionaire tech oligarchs (as we become more and more like Russia or North Korea), but it is also just *bad business*.
You have a bunch of smart-aleck, immature kids who could not find their rear-ends with a map being let loose to randomly dig through confidential information, including *my* information and *your* information, and giving termination orders to people with *zero* basis under the direction of a megalomaniac multi-billionaire who (A) wants to distract the public while he finagles *another* huge tax break for himself and his billionaire buddies and enriches himself with multi-billion dollar government contracts and (B) enjoys being a sadist and watching ordinary working-class, taxpaying Americans suffer and laughing about it.
It is insanity what is happening, and it needs to be stopped.
Average Conservative Thought Leader Mentality
The key word in your comment is “personally”.
As in, you personally dont know anything about the jobs or how important the job function is, so let’s just start cutting. Your local meteorologist… gets all of the data from the NWS and NOAA!!! They are TV personalities, but I guess that tracks with populating the government with a bunch of TV personalities that aren’t qualified for the jobs they have been given.
NOAA is targeted because it is associated with the word “woke” because of climate change, ignoring all of the other vital functions it has in the name of… I don’t know, winning?
Only if you inhabit an alternative reality, you can’t see or even want to understand the economic benefits that come from these core government services.
This feels a lot like 2017 when Trump fired the pandemic preparedness team and threw away years of planning and preparation because it was “a waste of money”.
Or more likely, I can see a time when your weather app will come with a $4.99 a month subscription that some rich Republican billionaire will profit from.
Let a businessman do his thing. Eliminate the baseball team that is doing three people’s job
In the real world, business people execute on initiatives like this strategically and with defined purpose. The best CEOs operate in this way.
That is not what is happening here.
Businessman ? TRUMP is a Bankruptcy in motion . He couldn’t even keep casinos solvent
How many of you are Federal Employees or have a clue what the government looks like from the inside? The Federal Government is bloated. It is due for a thinning out. Contrary to the thought that one person is doing 3 jobs, I see 3 people doing one jobs. I see Federal Employees and contractors who are in positions created to keep them employed. Just thinning out the Federal grants and studies that are absurd will save billions.
$12 million for a pickleball court in Vegas? $4 million to pay Ukrainian influencers? $15 billion to push Americans to drive electric vehicles? Over $1Trillion in identified waste and there are thousands of Federal Employees and contractors being paid to dream up and implement these programs.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/fox28savannah.com/amp/news/nation-world/pickleball-private-island-among-1t-in-wasteful-govt-spending-senators-report-finds-sen-rand-paul-r-ky-on-monday-released-his-annual-festivus-report-doge
If there was strategy involved we’d all agree.
But starting with the smallest stuff to say you did something and randomly firing the entire nuclear division, etc… embarrassing
Cancel 500 Halliburton contracts – boom I just shaved 10% off the budget. Trump said countries fear him so we don’t even need a military anymore anyways
All of this “waste, fraud, and abuse” cutting is a side show. It is far more about loyalty and politics and installing loyal servants, than cutting enough to make a difference in the deficit.
Until you reconfigure Medicare, Medicaid, and SS,, this is all just moving chairs around the Titanic so we can all feel good about ourselves. This government impact is a literal drop in the bucket compared to those items.
Are there things that should be strategically addressed, yes. Is the way it is being handled incompetent, also yes.