Five former National Weather Service directors have taken the unusual step of signing onto an open letter warning that cuts to the organization by the Trump administration may soon endanger lives.
“N.W.S. staff will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services,” they write in the letter, dated Friday. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
Hundreds of Weather Service employees, or about 10 percent of the agency’s total staff, have been terminated or accepted buyout offers since President Trump began his second term, according to the letter.
The letter notes that the coming weeks are “the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes,” and it points to a wide range of activities that rely on accurate forecasting: “Airplanes can’t fly without weather observations and forecasts; ships crossing the oceans rely on storm forecasts to avoid the high seas; farmers rely on seasonal forecasts to plant and harvest their crops which feed us.”
“Perhaps most importantly,” they write, “N.W.S. issues all of the tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, flood warnings, extreme wildfire conditions and other information during extreme weather events.”
The loss of staff is already affecting local forecast offices, said Joe Friday, who led the Weather Service from 1988 to 1997 and who signed the letter. “You have offices that cannot maintain their balloon launch schedules,” he said. “You have offices that cannot maintain 24-hour-a-day operations fully staffed.” The more than 100 Weather Service offices around the country have traditionally launched at least two balloons a day to collect data that helps them produce forecast models.
In an interview, Dr. Friday said he was concerned that meteorologists who are stretched increasingly thin will be left to issue severe weather warnings with less lead time. “There’s going to be fewer people keeping their eyes on what’s going on,” he said.
In addition to Dr. Friday, the letter was signed by Louis Uccellini, who led the Weather Service from 2013 to 2022; Jack Hayes, who led it from 2007 to 2012; D.L. Johnson, who led it from 2004 to 2007; and John J. Kelly Jr., who led it from 1998 to 2004.
The Weather Service declined to comment on the letter on Friday.
The agency may soon face another challenge. On Friday, the White House published a budget proposal including a $1.5 billion cut in funding to the Weather Service’s parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has already faced the loss of hundreds of employees.
The budget proposal does not describe specific reductions in funding to the Weather Service, but the cuts planned for NOAA’s research arm could have a profound effect on meteorologists’ capacity to improve forecasting techniques. “Given the interconnectedness of all of the parts of NOAA, there will be impacts to weather forecasting as well,” the letter says.
The proposed cuts at NOAA echo a plan laid out in Project 2025, a policy playbook published by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2023 that described the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It called for NOAA to be “broken up” and for the Weather Service to be privatized.
Dr. Friday said he worried that a forced decline in the accuracy of Weather Service products could eventually offer a pretext for the agency’s privatization.
“If you want to basically wipe out an organization, the personnel policies that are going on right now under DOGE are probably about the best way to do it,” Dr. Friday said. “You destroy the organization from the inside.”
