President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to the nation’s top weather and climate agency have severely weakened its ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather, just as the country faces a potentially historic El Niño this winter, former officials and scientists warned.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has lost more than 3,000 staffers since January 2025, roughly 20 percent of its workforce, and has hired only 525 replacements, The Guardian reported. About 10 percent of its meteorologists and meteorological technicians are gone, and hundreds of positions sit vacant across the National Weather Service’s 122 forecast offices.
Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA climate scientist, said the system hasn’t really been tested since the cuts.
That test may soon come. This year’s super El Niño is expected to keep strengthening through the winter, according to the report, and could supercharge storms in parts of the West, raise sea levels in California by up to a foot, and trigger debris flows, landslides and flash floods.
“Whether we as a country can handle the kind of coast-to-coast extremes that could potentially happen this winter is a big question,” Di Liberto said.
Monica Medina, NOAA’s principal deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, warned of the stakes.
“I worry about loss of life and about our inability to be protected at a time when we need our government the most,” she said. If this is a real test of a hotter future, she added, “we’re going to flunk.”
The strain is already showing, according to the Guardian. Staffing shortfalls have delayed or curtailed weather balloon launches, leaving parts of the Great Plains unprepared for tornadoes, and rural Alaska communities got limited warning before floods that displaced more than 1,500 people. A Government Accountability Office report found staffing and funding cuts undermined the weather service’s alerts in languages other than English, putting 26 million people at greater risk.
The agency’s El Niño research effort has also been scaled back. In 2015-16, NOAA sent aircraft, drones, weather balloons and a research vessel to gather data. This year, NPR reported, it will deploy only “a handful of unmanned watercraft” into the Pacific. The administration has also cut roughly $6 billion from planned investment in weather satellites, which the GAO warns could leave a gap in coverage.
Trump has proposed slashing NOAA’s budget by $1.6 billion next year, a 26 percent drop, though many of those cuts are unlikely to survive the budget process.
Di Liberto said remaining staffers fear getting in trouble for saying anything that conflicts with the administration’s messaging on climate, likening their position to being told a number doesn’t exist and then being asked to do math.
NOAA and the Commerce Department did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.