The five former directors of the National Weather Service (NWS) over the past 37 years released an open letter Friday expressing their alarm at the Trump administration’s deep staff cuts to the service and the agency that houses it, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“We know firsthand what it takes to make accurate forecasts happen and we stand united against the loss of staff and resources at NWS and are deeply concerned about NOAA as a whole,” the former NWS directors wrote. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
The former NWS directors include three doctorate-level scientists, two retired Air Force brigadier generals and a retired Air Force colonel. They served as NWS directors under six presidents, three Democratic and three Republican. Their joint letter marks the first time all of them have come together to issue a public appeal.
President Donald Trump‘s administration and the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk have eliminated hundreds of positions from NWS and NOAA by firing recently hired staff and offering buyouts to workers with longer tenure. The proposed budget released by the White House on Friday would reduce NOAA staff by nearly 30 percent, according to the former NWS directors.
“All of a sudden we find ourselves with an organization that looks like Swiss cheese, there’s holes throughout it,” former NWS director and letter co-author E.W. “Joe” Friday told Newsweek.
Friday said the loss of electronic technicians and personnel to launch weather balloons has already started to degrade forecast capability and the ability to function in emergencies.
Friday also emphasized the highly integrated nature of work that happens across NOAA and said that the NWS forecasting depends on work performed by other NOAA programs that also face cuts.
Advances made by NOAA researchers allowed for dramatic improvements in tornado warning time, he said, greatly expanding the number of tornadoes detected and adding valuable time for people in their path to prepare.
NOAA offices operate the system of satellites and ocean buoys that provide critical data, he said, and the National Climatic Data Center houses long-term climate information that supports weather models.
“That database is obviously a crown jewel,” Friday said. “Unfortunately, the administration is considering eliminating it because it has the word ‘climate’ in it.”
Friday served as NWS director from 1988 to 1997 under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he described himself as a lifelong conservative. He said previous reductions in NOAA staff, like reforms to the agency that took place in the 1990s, were done in a way meant to minimize disruption to the public service. Now, however, he said he thinks the opposite is happening.
“If I were a cynic, I would suspect that the administration is deliberately doing this to make the organization work poorly, so that people would no longer support it and no longer be interested in whether or not the taxpayer funded it,” he said.
The other former NWS directors who cowrote the letter are Louis Uccellini, retired Air Force Colonel Jack Hayes, and retired Air Force Brigadier Generals D.L. Johnson and John J. Kelly Jr.
They concluded their letter with recognition of the public servants employed at NOAA, and they recounted times staff had stayed at their stations during hurricanes and tornadoes even when the extreme weather affected their own homes and families.
“They aren’t nameless, faceless bureaucrats,” the former directors wrote. “They are the everyday heroes that often go unsung.”
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