Scientists are sounding the alarm over mass layoffs at the National Weather Service under the Trump administration.
The National Weather Service is a government agency whose data collection is used by weather forecasting operations around the country, including private companies. Its information warns of dangerous conditions and helps track the path of hurricanes and other potential disasters.
"NWS has fired meteorologists as a direct result of upper-level heads telling them to do so," said Ethan Clark, a meteorologist for the city of Raleigh and an intern for WRAL, in a post to X. "Let me be clear, people will die because of this. Absolutely insane... I have no words for it. I’ve spent all day I mean all day in meetings with both republicans and democrats fighting."
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain had a similarly grim assessment, in a post to Bluesky.
"Despite widespread discussion to the contrary, the fact of the matter is that the private sector, as it presently exists, simply cannot quickly spin up to fill any void left by substantial dismantling of NOAA and/or the NWS," wrote Swain. "I work extensively with weather and climate scientists who work in the private sector — all of whom do good and important work that I greatly respect — yet even in the private sector there is near unanimous agreement that NOAA and NWS are indispensable."
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In fact, he noted, virtually all private-sector weather reporting right down to your local news meteorologist rely on data from these agencies and "could simply not exist" without them.
The terminated employees were so-called "probationary" workers — federal employees who were put in their position recently and do not have the same level of civil service protections as most others. While some probationary workers are new hires, many others have worked for the federal government for years or decades, and are transfers from other departments or were sometimes even promoted.
The layoffs are being spurred in large part by tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency task force, which is charged with hunting for waste and fraud in the federal government that can be eliminated to save taxpayer money
So far, DOGE has faced a mountain of litigation over its cuts, layoffs, and access to sensitive government databases, and most of its claimed savings for the government do not stand up to scrutiny.