The New Republic72%
Weather Service Scrambles in Hurricane Season After Trump Purge 61%
By Edith Olmsted82%
7/6/2026, 8:08:28 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Pessimism Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 32.5% saturation with 176 hits. Analysis detected 1,021 faulty-reasoning hits from 541 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 56.8% and a BS Rank of 61% (8,565 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 60.90% of the article peer group.
Nearly a year after President Donald Trump’s mass government layoffs, the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association are still scrambling to replace scientists and collect missing data.
The NWS is hiring for hundreds of mostly entry-level positions, after the agency lost about 15 percent of its employees during Trump’s first year back in office, CBS News reported Monday.
Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said that the agency had shed roughly 600 workers in 2025.
Most of those employees were seasoned workers who accepted early retirement packages, while roughly 100 were probationary employees in their first year of work.
Meanwhile, NOAA employed nearly 300 fewer meteorologists and hydrologists at the end of May than it did in January 2025, according to federal data reviewed by CBS News.
Former government scientists told CBS News that mass layoffs, which forced out experts, have undermined the research and forecasting conducted by these agencies.
Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who worked for three decades at the weather service and NOAA before retiring last year, told CBS News that the Trump administration’s sudden reductions to the workforce disrupted the flow of institutional knowledge.
“Obviously, people retiring and new people coming up is a natural part of any business or agency,” Gerard said.
“But it’s meant to be done in an organized process, where the new people coming in have the benefit of working for a period with people who are experienced and can help train them and build up their expertise.”
Rick Thoman, a climate specialist in Alaska who worked for three decades as a weather service meteorologist, told CBS News that the sudden layoffs had been “a really bad thing.”
“Alaska is not like forecasting for Nebraska, and there are no schools of meteorology in Alaska.
Everyone has to come here and learn it,” Thoman said.
“So, even though there’s some effort to increase staffing now, because there are no old-timers left, and folks come in here without any experience in high-latitude weather forecasting, it just makes it that much harder.”
Already, the cracks have started to show.
Since Trump returned to office, employees, including Gerard and Thoman, have observed a notable decline of “upper air” data collected by weather balloons as several weather stations have stopped launching probes twice daily.
“There’s concern about the quality of the models because of the lack of upper air data,” Gerard told CBS News.
“There’s a lot of expression of just being less confident, and having less confidence in your data tends to undermine a lot of your operational decisions, right?”
Thoman pointed out that in October, weather models had incorrectly predicted a storm that displaced more than 1,000 people, after more than half of the area’s scheduled balloon launches failed to take flight in the days before the storm hit.
Thoman said it was “inconceivable” that the lack of data had made no impact on the weather model forecast.
This shortage of both data and weather experts is especially concerning with the hurricane season about to start.
Climate change has resulted in longer, more intense storms—and now, it looks like some people won’t be as well equipped to face them.
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