Florida meteorologist halts forecast to give dire on-air warning against Trump
Miami meteorologist John Morales issued a dire warning Monday about hurricane season as it begins this month.
He began with a clip of Hurricane Dorian slowly moving due west directly towards Florida in 2019. Morales promised it would turn north and dodge Florida landfall — and that's exactly what it did.
But he said that kind of forecasting would be impossible this year.
"As you've grown accustomed to my presentations over my 34 years in South Florida newscast, confidently, I went on TV and told you, 'It's going to turn. You don't need to worry,'" Morales said on the air.
Then he dropped the bombshell: "I'm here to tell you I'm not sure I can do that this year. Because of the cuts — the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science, in general, and I could talk about that for a long, long time and how that's affecting the leadership and science over the years and how we're losing that leadership, and that is a multi-generation impact on science in this country."
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On the screen behind him appeared bullet points reading: "Central and South Florida National Weather Service is 19-39% understaffed." There has been a "17% reduction in weather balloon launches across the United States." He said it has "degraded forecast accuracy."
"But, specifically, let's talk about the federal government cuts to the National Weather Service and to NOAA," he continued, reading the bullet point. "This type of staffing shortage is having impacts across the country," he said, noting the weather balloon loss.
"What we're starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded," he continued. "There's also a chance because of some of these cuts that NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft will not be able to fly this year and with less reconnaissance missions may be flying blind. And we may not exactly know how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline, like what happened a couple of years ago with Hurricane Otis in Acapulco, Mexico."
He then made a plea to the audience to call their members of Congress to fight for this funding.
NOAA and NWS were cut as part of President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign promise to cut $2 trillion in what he called "waste, fraud and abuse" in government.
See the clip from Morales below or at the link here.
Cuts have consequences, illustrated. As seen on TV 📺
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— John Morales (@johnmoralestv.bsky.social) June 2, 2025 at 8:45 PM