With a prediction of 17 named storms, nine of those hurricanes and four anticipated to be major, the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season looks about as expected. While we can be grateful that due to typical atmospheric patterns, that the season is only estimated to be a bit more active than average, there is still a lot to worry about with this forecasting. We learned last year that the season predictions were highly accurate and even history-making.

While we wait and see if the predictions will indeed come true once again, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS), as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have put the United States populace at risk – over time, staff purges, program shutterings, and funding cuts will degrade the quality of weather prediction and the ability to send severe weather alerts in a timely and accurate manner. Weather forecasting and the science behind it, as it turns out, has been taken for granted and has become an easy target for tearing down climate change research and projects spearheaded by the NOAA.

The current cuts to NOAA are both poorly timed and entirely predictable. Project 2025 – the conservative policy blueprint now shaping Trump administration actions – explicitly targets the agency, with a section on page 674 titled “Break Up NOAA.” The following page goes further, labeling NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

This will kill people.

Forecasting on Fumes

The Trump administration says these cuts are about administrative downsizing. It is abundantly clear that this is not the case. What we’re seeing is the first stage of the broad dismantling of public safety infrastructure in favor of delegating this responsibility to strapped state and local governments and to the profit-driven whims of private forecasting and relief programs.

One of the most critical losses has been the DOGE’s cutting of weather balloon launches, which provide essential upper-atmosphere data used to model storm strength and trajectory. Without this data, forecasts become less precise, and life-saving lead times shrink.

At the same time, staffing shortages across the National Weather Service have reached crisis levels. Nearly half of all field offices are reporting vacancy rates above 20%, with some exceeding 35%. These are not desk jobs—they’re forecasters, meteorologists, and emergency response liaisons. When offices are this understaffed, the ability to issue real-time warnings and track rapidly changing storm behavior is severely compromised.

And while the storms themselves don’t discriminate, our ability to communicate about them now does. The National Weather Service has discontinued multilingual emergency alerts following the termination of a translation service contract. Tens of millions of Americans who rely on alerts in languages other than English are now left out of the loop in life-or-death situations. Former agency leaders and independent experts alike have raised the alarm: these combined gaps—in data, in staffing, and in outreach—are already degrading forecast quality, delaying alerts, and increasing the likelihood of disaster.

What we’re seeing isn’t neglect – it’s sabotage. A deliberate campaign to gut our national climate and disaster response infrastructure and offload the consequences onto already-overburdened state and local systems. And in the vacuum, private sector players are stepping in to monetize what was once a public service.

In other words, we’ve entered a reckless era of fewer trained experts, fewer tools, and fewer warnings.

THIS WILL KILL PEOPLE.

Tornadoes, Floods, and No One Coming

As tornado season rages on, we are already seeing the impacts of these cuts. The impacts of these cuts are not hypothetical, or something that we can wait and see what actually happens. We know because we’re seeing it happening now already. Field offices of the National Weather Service (NWS) in the Appalachian and Mississippi Valley regions have also reported significant staffing shortages. These vacancies have coincided with delayed tornado and flash flood warnings during peak events this spring. These services are what have kept disaster recovery and relief organized across the country and its diverse environmental concerns and severe weather patterns, and recklessly pulling the rug out from under these programs risks leading to a breakdown of overwhelmed state and local support networks overwhelmed without federal resources or connections.

In Buncombe County, North Carolina, officials had planned a door-to-door survey to assess lingering health and economic needs six months after Hurricane Helene tore through the region. But just one day before the project launched, the federal government abruptly terminated 16 CDC employees assigned to assist. The county was left scrambling to find alternative methods to carry out essential post-disaster assessments. Elsewhere in parts of Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, tornadoes and floods left residents reeling. Coordination failures, fueled by a lack of federal presence and support, slowed relief efforts, leaving vulnerable residents with their recovery needs unmet. These delays weren’t due to surprise or incompetence; they stemmed from hollowed-out systems. At a time when every hour counts, overburdened local responders were left to navigate complex recovery logistics with minimal backup to tackle many community-wide tragedies.

The thing about disaster recovery is that it depends on well-connected, well-resourced networks—scientists, emergency managers, public health experts, local officials—all working together. But federal cuts are severing those connections, leaving local agencies to shoulder the weight with fewer people, less money, and no time to spare.

THIS WILL KILL PEOPLE.

What Happens When the Sirens Don’t Sound?

Well, we know what can happen. Let’s set the scene. People in your community are out and about, or relaxing at home. Buried in work, or playing outside with friends. Maybe you’re aware of severe weather, but not that it’s coming straight for you. Maybe you have no idea a tornado has formed in the vicinity and is headed their way, or that a hurricane has dramatically changed trajectory and is making a beeline to your domicile.

You find out pretty quickly when severe weather has arrived and your home is flooded, your roof is long gone, or maybe your home is not even there anymore. Maybe you got a weather alert, but by the time you received it, it was too late to do anything but try to shelter in place, or run into the nearest building that you hope is up to code. When you finally emerge and take in the wreckage, your car is out of commission, perhaps along with most of your belongings, if you’re one of the particularly unlucky ones. Sorry about all that. Is your family okay? Where’s the dog? You’ve got your work cut out for you, rebuilding your life and community post-severe weather event.

But you’re still luckier than the folks who didn’t make it out to see the other side at all. I hope you don’t know anyone who…you know.

The U.S. has indeed learned hard lessons from forecasting failures and relief hiccups. But weather science and disaster management strategy is always improving, having advanced significantly in the past decade. The Trump administration’s radical funding cuts and mass firings is how this technology goes to waste, unused to its fullest potential to forecast severe weather events and support impacted communities. Unfortunately we know how this goes. The fewer highly-trained staff members we have at NOAA and FEMA, the worse off every American will be, with consequences ranging from low-stakes prediction failures to multi-state-wide catastrophes.

During Hurricane Helene, the National Weather Service issued advance forecasts warning of life-threatening floods across parts of the Appalachian region. But when the storm hit, many residents were caught off guard – not because the science failed, but because the alerts never reached them. A CBS News analysis found that of the 43 counties where fatalities occurred, 29 did not send out warnings through FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). Whether due to overwhelmed local emergency offices or broken communication infrastructure, the result was the same: entire communities were left in the dark until the floodwaters were already rising.

We’ve spent decades improving our forecasting models and emergency response strategies. That progress came through public investment, interagency collaboration, and federal support. It can’t survive on platitudes and state-level goodwill alone.

When you cut funding, fire staff, and discredit the science, those sirens don’t just go quiet. They disappear.

And we know how this ends.

THIS WILL KILL PEOPLE.

Posted 10 April 2025.