Nelson Tucker
Staff Writer
Four months after beginning a job he’d spent years proving his competence for, Andy Hazelton was bewildered to receive an email stating that he had been fired.
Hazelton was inspired to study weather after experiencing a series of destructive hurricanes in his childhood. He focused his life on understanding the nature of hurricanes. After graduating from Florida State University with a PhD in Meteorology, he became a rising star in hurricane research. He started working for NOAA offices in 2018 through the University of Miami’s Hurricane Research Division. His success advancing hurricane modeling led to him becoming an official federal employee last October at the National Weather Service’s Environmental Modeling Center.
It’s unclear how many employees the weather service has lost. Vacancy statistics compiled internally by members of the weather service and shared anonymously with the press indicate hundreds have either been fired or accepted resignation packages.
On Feb. 27, 880 probationary employees across NOAA were fired, including Hazelton. The weather service is one of the primary components of NOAA. The New York Times reported on March 8 that 1,300 in NOAA had either been fired or resigned and had been told by the Trump Administration to prepare for losing another 1,000 employees.
A probationary employee in NOAA is in their first one to two years either since being hired, or since certain promotions or transfers into the agency. The difference from other employees is that those on probation have minimal protections and procedural rights against removal. Hazleton, who was removed in February, was temporarily reinstated and then refired after a few weeks due to an ongoing legal battle over broader government actions toward probationary employees.
Other meteorologists either chose or felt compelled to leave seeing what was happening to the agency.
“I saw the writing on the wall,” said one former officer, who had been with the weather service for 35 years. “That was the hardest decision I ever made… I left because I was told, ‘Can you imagine firing a good employee?’ No, I can’t… I wasn’t going to do it.”
The firings, along with budget cuts to services from its parent agency, NOAA, are part of the Trump Administration’s broader effort to cut wasteful spending and improve efficiency. In the case of the weather service, data in recent years does not suggest a bloated or overstaffed organization.
According to Annual Reports from the Congressional Research Service, the weather service’s enacted budget in the data analyzed from Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 to FY2024 has been stagnant to slightly below the rate of inflation. Using annual inflation rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the budget of $1.12 billion in FY2017, at the beginning of the first Trump administration, equates to $1.43 billion in FY2024. The enacted budget in FY2024 was lower at $1.35 billion.
Understaffing has also been a concern for many years within the weather service. Internal documentation acquired by Dr. Victor Gensini, an associate professor at Northern Illinois University, showed that the weather service has averaged a roughly 10% vacancy rate for the last decade. This March, that number jumped to nearly 20%.
Since the firings were primarily based on probationary status, the impacts have been uneven between the 122 Warning Forecast Offices stationed across the nation. Several of these offices were down over 40%. Others were minimally affected. At a few stations, the former weather service officer noted, there are no electronic technicians left to maintain equipment.
Alongside the data, the four established meteorologists interviewed for this article each emphasized that the cuts to both the weather service and NOAA as a whole will cause the opposite effect intended.
“I think the biggest concern of all is missing a warning,” stated the former weather service officer. “I wish I could get through to the powers that be that they should be using a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.”
Hazelton, who worked on hurricane models before being fired, believes that more money may be lost from degraded forecasts than could be gained by the cuts. A 2024 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that since 2007, forecast improvements saved an average of $5 billion per hurricane – four times the entire weather service budget.
“They’re having to prioritize what model upgrades get done and which ones don’t because a lot of us that were working on those have gotten fired,” he said. If these models are compromised, Hazelton noted, “that puts people at risk, both lives and property.”
Matt Lanza is a meteorologist in the energy industry and the co-author of two popular weather blogs. There was uncertainty, he said, about the impact of recent reductions in weather balloon observations due to the staffing cuts.
“How is that going to influence weather modeling, particularly as we’re going into the heart of severe weather season and with hurricane season just around the corner? Are we going to go back in time to when our forecast errors were worse than what they are today? We don’t know.”
When asked what demographic would suffer the most under these changes, Lanza pointed to rural Americans and their local emergency management, which are reliant on the weather service. Another concern, he said, was a loss of trust that could result from deteriorated forecasting.
“That’s when you have people getting trapped behind during storms or don’t evacuate because the last time they said it, it didn’t happen.”
Chris Vagasky is the manager of a statewide mesonet in Wisconsin. He worked for eight and a half years at Vaisala, a company that manufactured weather instruments. With experience in both the public and private sectors of meteorology, Vagasky stressed the risk of damage to companies in the weather enterprise.
“No one group can do everything on their own,” Vagasky said. The free data stream from the weather service allows private companies to profit while ensuring that weather information is a public good. “It would be almost impossible for a private company to be able to spin up all of the capabilities that the weather service has… It’s really critical to the weather enterprise that they continue to do what they do.”
A study by the American Meteorological Society’s Policy Program published in 2024 found that the weather service generated an estimated $102.8 billion in public value from its $1.35 billion budget, a 73 to one return on investment.
“It comes down to a cup of coffee per person per year,” Vagasky emphasized, “so that private companies or anybody that needs to know what the weather is can go to the weather service or they can go to their favorite private company to get that information.”
Andy Hazelton believes that some reorganization is possible without causing harm. The main issue, he noted, was how inefficient these efforts were. “I’d like to see that done in a less haphazard and more efficient manner,” he said. “The Weather Service actually is very cheap in terms of how much taxpayer dollars it takes. It’s a pretty lean organization already.”
The improvements in forecasting over the past few decades that give such a high return on investment, he warned, can be easily lost.
“It’s more than you might think in terms of economic impact. And if forecasts are degraded again, we risk losing some of that monetary value.”
