NWS employees designated as "public safety" and exempt from hiring freeze
Positive step towards fixing an administration self-inflicted wound
Starting off this morning with job news from the National Weather Service (NWS). Multiple sources have told me that on an agency all-hands call yesterday, leadership told employees that the Trump administration has designated NWS employees in the meteorologist, hydrologist, and electronics technicians job categories as critical to public safety and exempt from the administration’s government wide hiring freeze. Leadership anticipates that this will enable them to fill up to 450 currently vacant positions.
This is obviously positive news. These are the three job categories that are most crucial to NWS operations, and being able to fill 450 positions would go a long way towards completely fixing the current labor shortage the agency is facing. While I obviously do not have access to exact NWS labor figures, Northern Illinois University professor Victor Gensini reported back in the spring that at that time the NWS field offices had about a 20% vacancy rate. This would likely equate to about 500 vacant positions across the NWS field offices, so it sounds as if leadership is talking about trying to fill most of their field staffing holes.
However, this process will take a significant amount of time. NWS leadership also told staff yesterday that they would be able to utilize direct hire authority (DHA) as part of its recruitment process for these jobs. Again, this is a positive step, but as someone who has actually utilized DHA to fill vacant positions, I can say that it does not provide a huge time savings. As the OPM fact sheet for DHA states, DHA “expedites hiring by eliminating competitive rating and ranking, veterans' preference, and "rule of three" procedures.” Essentially, this means that human resources does not have to go through the process of generating ranked candidate panels for each job, and that hiring officials will have more flexibility in making their hires. This is really only a small time savings though given that most of the time to fill a vacant position is in the bureaucratic process on the front end of generating and creating a vacancy announcement, and then on the back end of certifying a selection and bringing that person through the hiring and security process.
For the 125 positions that the NWS was given emergency hiring freeze exemption for at the start of June, only the nationwide electronics technicians and physical science positions at the Space Weather Prediction Center have even been advertised more than two months later. The bottom line is that we are at the start of a multi-month, multi-layered recruitment process, and even the positions which have already been advertised are at least a couple of months away from having new hires in them. Then once the hires are in place, they have to be trained in their new job, and for highly technical positions like these, that is a multi-month to year-long process, depending on the exact position and role.
While the NWS was already dealing with staffing issues prior to January, this staffing crisis that the agency finds itself in today is clearly an “own goal” of the Trump administration’s making. The NWS did not suddenly become a “critical public safety” agency yesterday, it has been one for decades. The fact is that because of the administration’s DOGE and OPM mandated “fork in the road” and buyout programs, the NWS lost hundreds of meteorologists, hydrologists and electronics technicians with decades of experience in one fell swoop.
While luckily the impacts of those losses on NWS services seem to have been around the edges so far, we still have the peak of hurricane and wildfire season to get through, and then have to navigate through the long process of filling these jobs and training the new hires. Of course, the lost experience from the employees that left in the spring can never be replaced, and the more subtle damage to the agency from not having those employees around to help mentor younger employees or possibly provide a crucial forecast or technical insight at a critical moment will never be known.
There is no question in my mind that public safety has been jeopardized by a rushed job cutting process led by people who assumed that government roles like these in the NWS were expendable, and have now learned through real-world examples like the Texas Hill Country catastrophe that these federal employees actually perform a mission that the nation relies on. While I certainly am happy that the administration has belatedly come to see what those of us “in the arena” already knew, I only hope it is not too late and that at this point the damage from their mistakes can be minimized as much as possible.
Programming note: I will have a full weather focused Substack post out later this morning or early this afternoon (depending on your time zone).
While the exemption of critical NWS positions from the hiring freeze is welcome news, it risks becoming a headline win without addressing the root problem: NOAA and the NWS are being asked to deliver 21st-century public safety on 20th-century technology.
The agency’s ability to protect lives and property now hinges as much on its tools as its people. The WSR-88D radar network is well past mid-life with no funded replacement program. AWIPS, the operational display backbone for forecasters, is decades old and increasingly 'brittle'. MRMS, a cornerstone for weather situational awareness, rainfall estimation and flash flood monitoring, is running on constrained hardware and outdated architectures. Surface observation (ASOS) systems are drifting out of calibration. U.S. NWP, despite incremental gains, continues to lag behind European centers and now even emerging AI-driven models (both commercial and gov).
This is not just a “modernization” problem, it is a capability gap. Without investment in next-generation radars, fully funded model development (atmo and hydro), calibrated observation networks, and AI-integrated decision support, the NWS will remain reactive rather than anticipatory. That directly impacts lead time, accuracy, and ultimately, public safety.
Hiring 450 people is an important step, but if those employees are given the same degraded tools, redundant workflows, and a management structure resistant to operational innovation, we have only slowed the decline rather than reversed it. The last decade has shown that the skill of NWS personnel can partially mask the agency’s technology deficit, but only partially, and only for so long.
Congress and NOAA leadership must treat NWS technology on par with staffing in budget priorities...timely budget priorities..stop kicking the can down the road because you don't like the obvious solution. Without a coordinated investment strategy to replace aging radars, upgrading AWIPS, recalibrate remote sensing systems, and close the modeling gap, we will continue to ask our NWS forecasters to fight modern hazards with outdated weapons. That is not a recipe for resilience — it’s a slow-motion erosion of national capability...degradation of public safety
Alan, I do not have numbers, but I am fairly certain that the probationary employee suspensions also hit NWS hard in terms of ## lost as well as impact to the future NWS workforce, which - as you know- is built on a strong mentoring model at the WFO's . I'd love to know if any NWS probationary are still in suspension and could be brought in off Admin leave, other suspended state, or simply rehired - they have already been through the selection process and might be a way to jumpstart filling the vacancies created by hasty actions.