Former federal officials and outside experts have warned for months that President Donald Trump’s deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service could endanger lives.
After torrential rains and flash flooding struck Friday in the Texas Hill Country, the weather service came under fire from local officials who criticized what they described as inadequate forecasts, though most in the Republican-controlled state stopped short of blaming Trump’s cuts. Democrats, meanwhile, wasted little time in linking the staff reductions to the disaster, which is being blamed for the deaths of at least 80 people, including more than two dozen girls and counselors attending a summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River.
“This was an exceptional service to come out first with the catastrophic flash flood warning and this shows the awareness of the meteorologists on shift at the NWS office,” said Brian LaMarre, who retired at the end of April as the meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS forecast office in Tampa, Florida. ″There is always the challenge of pinpointing extreme values, however, the fact the catastrophic warning was issued first showed the level of urgency.”
Questions remain, however, about the level of coordination and communication between NWS and local officials on the night of the disaster. The Trump administration has cut hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day. Hundreds more experienced forecasters and senior managers were encouraged to retire early.
Former federal officials and experts have said Trump’s indiscriminate job reductions at NWS and other weather-related agencies will result in brain drain that imperils the federal government’s ability to issue timely and accurate forecasts. Such predictions can save lives, particularly for those in the path of quick-moving storms.
“This situation is getting to the point where something could break,” said Louis Uccellini, a meteorologist who served as NWS director under three presidents, including during Trump’s first term. “The people are being tired out, working through the night and then being there during the day because the next shift is short staffed. Anything like that could create a situation in which important elements of forecasts and warnings are missed.”
The cuts follow a decade-long Republican effort to dismantle and privatize many of the duties of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency within the Commerce Department that includes the NWS. The reductions have come as Trump has handed top public posts to officials with ties to private companies that stand to profit from hobbling the taxpayer-funded system for predicting the weather.
At a pair of Congressional hearings last month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called it “fake news” that the Trump administration had axed any meteorologists, despite detailed reporting from The Associated Press and other media organizations that chronicled the layoffs.