NOAA/NWS in focus on Capitol Hill
Secretary Lutnick testifying about FY2026 budget
Wednesday was another busy day with regard to weather on the policy and budget front. Department of Commerce - the department that NOAA resides in - Secretary Howard Lutnick testified in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies (CJS) about the President’s proposed FY2026 budget. Secretary Lutnick was questioned by a number of senators about the proposed massive cuts for NOAA, as well as about the current state of NWS staffing after the significant loss of staff from the recent early retirement/buyout and termination of a number of probationary employees. This Reuters article provides a good overview of the NWS related discussions in the hearing, and this summarizes his comments:
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a Senate hearing that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is "fully staffed" with weather forecasters and scientists after concerns were raised about some offices losing 24-hour staffing ahead of hurricane season.
"We are fully staffed with forecasters and scientists. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched," Lutnick told a Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NOAA, saying he got the National Weather Service (NWS) exempted from a federal hiring freeze.
As has been documented in numerous media articles over the last few weeks, it is simply not true that the NWS is fully staffed. I had the opportunity yesterday afternoon after the hearing to participate in a press event with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), the ranking member on the CJS subcommittee, to talk about my concerns as a longtime NOAA employee about the potential impacts of the proposed FY26 budget to NOAA; as part of their press release summarizing that event, Sen. Cantwell’s office summarized some of the key shortages affecting NWS currently:
National Hurricane Center in Miami has at least five vacancies.
At least eight NWS weather forecasting offices no longer have enough meteorologists to cover overnight shifts.
30 of the 122 weather forecast offices don’t currently have a meteorologist-in-charge, their most experienced weather expert. Some of these vacancies are in major metropolitan areas such as New York City, Cleveland, Houston, and hurricane-prone Tampa (ed. note: Houston is obviously hurricane prone as well).
Since mid-March, at least 10 weather forecast offices have suspended or limited their weather balloon launches needed for daily forecasts.
NOAA is short more than 90 staffers whose job is maintaining Doppler radar and automated airport weather sensors operational across the nation.
I have to admit, it angers me that the Secretary is making this statement to the CJS subcommittee while for the first time in my 35 year career in NOAA the NWS is dealing with a staffing crisis that is resulting in a number of offices having to reduce their hours of operation. To me, it is once again a slap in the face by the current administration to the NWS employees that I know are doing everything in their power to avoid any mission reduction, including working extensive overtime and traveling to other offices to provide mutual aid.
What is particularly frustrating to me is that this is a crisis of the administration’s making as I talked about in Monday’s newsletter. In his remarks, the Secretary touted the fact that he was able to get the authority for the NWS to hire 125 staff to help deal with the current staffing issues. I won’t rehash my Monday commentary, but it goes without saying that if his statement to the committee about NWS being fully staffed was accurate, you would not need the exemption to hire 125 people. Furthermore, the whole reason the staffing crisis exists is because the NWS lost 600 people from an already thinly staffed organization due to the administration’s across-the-board staffing reductions to NOAA through the buyout and probationary employee termination, actions undertaken with little regard for the specific implications of what positions were being lost and where they were coming from.
That process is what has led to a number of offices being critically understaffed while others are able to manage in a reasonably normal manner. The NWS is trying to address that with their reassignment effort that I discussed here. Again, though, this is a process that will take time and the success of which is uncertain - people have to volunteer to move, the process of selecting and reassigning people has to happen, and then people actually have to move to their new office and be trained in the new position. Neither this process nor the hiring of 125 new staffers is likely to make any significant impact on helping the NWS deal with near-term staffing issues it faces for hurricane season given the time it will take; the NWS will have to manage staffing issues for hurricane season as it already has been managing the shortages, through mutual aid and using short term deployments of staff from unaffected offices to offices under risk.
As I have alluded to before, the NWS has been doing that kind of mutual aid for many years to help “staff up” offices before anticipated major events like hurricanes. All NWS offices are baseline staffed for “fair weather staffing,” meaning they use overtime to “surge staff” the positions that are needed during impact weather events. During potential major, prolonged weather events that can be anticipated like hurricanes, the NWS already has to move people to help with staffing even when staffing is “normal.” What concerns me about the current situation is that there has never been a situation in my career when so many offices were so critically understaffed; I do not know at what point the situation reaches a breaking point, because we are truly in uncharted territory.
Furthermore, a lot of the focus has been on hurricane season, but there are a lot of other potential crises to worry about. As my colleague retired NWS meteorologist-in-charge Brian Lamarre talked about in our event with Sen. Cantwell yesterday, the NWS Incident Meteorologists (IMETs) that go out on scene to support firefighters on wildfire fights are regular NWS forecasters who have years of special training to be able to work these events. (You can read more about what IMETs do here.) I do not know how many IMETs may have been lost due to the recent buyout/early retirement, and do not know how many of these IMETs will be able to leave their current offices for long deployments given their own office may be critically understaffed and/or facing their own impact weather events. Managing IMET deployments to meet the needs of firefighting crews was already a difficult balancing act for NWS fire weather leadership and local meteorologists-in-charge to manage during “normal” times; it will be magnified given the current staffing situation. If we have a particularly active hurricane and/or wildfire season - both of which are quite possible - we could reach a true crisis situation.
The last bullet in the list of impacts from Sen. Cantwell talks about another potential crisis: the lack of technicians to maintain critical observing equipment. While the radars that make up the current NEXRAD Doppler radar system have been periodically updated over the decades, it is still a 30+ year old system that needs a lot of maintenance and parts that are becoming increasingly scarce. The stability and reliability of the NEXRAD system was already a serious concern for myself and many colleagues. When dealing with a sensitive electronic and mechanical system like the 30 year old NEXRAD, experience is invaluable, and a lot of it has unfortunately been lost in the last couple of months as many experienced technicians have left the agency. This will make the task of keeping this critical national infrastructure operational all the more challenging for the NWS.
Finally, I want to address something that Secretary Lutnick alluded to yesterday, but seems to have made more clear in testimony that is ongoing this morning, namely his apparent assertion that reorganization of the NWS is what is going to ensure there is no degradation of services.
I strongly urge you to watch this, it’s only a couple of minutes long. I am not going to rehash what he says about current staffing levels, I have made my thoughts on that clear above. I want to talk about the centralization and regionalization comments he makes.
I want to stress yet again: I fully believe the NWS needs a major reorganization and modernization, and has for a number of years. The current organization of the agency was developed as a concept in the 1980s; obviously, incredible changes in technology and communication have happened in the intervening 40 years, and there are rapid changes coming down the pike with artificial intelligence, new modeling and improved data fusion techniques that the NWS needs to be better positioned to utilize. The reality is that there are a number of ways in which I think the NWS organization could be optimized to provide better services, and that includes some regionalization and centralization: we likely do not need 2-3 people in 122 forecast offices around the clock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week like we did in the 1990s.
Having said that, the NWS mission is truly a life or death public safety mission, and change needs to be made through a careful, deliberate, well thought out process. Achieving the optimal balance between national, regional and local NWS services is something that should be developed through a strong collaborative effort between the NWS, the broader weather and water communities, and core partners like emergency management and broadcast meteorologists. It cannot and should not be achieved by the process that the administration appears to be pursuing now: gutting the agency and trying to continue to provide services within the same organizational structure without enough people, and then going back and trying to fit a new organizational structure around whatever staff you have left.
I will finish this post by circling back to the event I participated in with Sen. Cantwell and a couple of meteorological colleagues. You can read her office’s press release summary of the event here, and watch the full event at this link. I had the opportunity to use my experience as a longtime employee of both the NWS and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) to talk about the importance of both agencies in the protection of our country from the dangers of hazardous weather, water and climate events. While the NWS staffing issues that I have talked about above are obviously a critical short term concern, I want to stress that the elimination of OAR as proposed by the President’s FY2026 budget is just as huge of a concern from a longer term perspective.
I know from being an operational meteorologist that research is a crucial avenue through which we identify evolving societal needs for science based information and determine the optimal ways to meet those needs. With OAR, NOAA has built a tremendous research infrastructure that has a strong partnership with NOAA’s operational entities, including the NWS. While as with NWS there are certainly ways in which OAR could be optimized, elimination of an organization that includes not only federal labs but also a vibrant partnership with multiple universities around the country through the Cooperative Institutes seems completely counterproductive. If you would like to hear some more of my thoughts about this, you can see my comments about 17 minutes into the video with Sen. Cantwell.
If you have made it to here, thank you for reading this. My experience has made me very passionate about these topics - I truly believe that the work that NOAA and other related federal agencies do is a matter of life or death when it comes to how our country handles disasters. I plan to continue to write about these topics in Balanced Weather, and in particular intend to hopefully share perspectives to help start the community conversations I mention above that need to happen about the optimal organization and mission for NOAA and especially the NWS.