Trump’s Mass Layoffs at NOAA Cut Into the Bay Area Weather Service

Updated 12:20 p.m. Tuesday

Hundreds of employees were believed to have been fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s preeminent climate research institutions, as part of the Trump administration’s latest mass culling of the federal workforce.

They include at least three people at the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office — a meteorologist, an administrative support assistant and a facilities technician. The three employees were relatively new to their jobs and received emails notifying them of their termination before their supervisors were aware.

They were given until 5 p.m. Thursday before being locked out of their emails and accounts, according to Dalton Behringer, the Bay Area office’s union steward for the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

Across the country, around 800 probationary employees at NOAA were reportedly fired. The agency, which employs around 12,000 people, includes federal meteorologists who provide daily forecasts, issue red flag warnings for high fire danger, alert residents to critical storm and weather threats, and collect data on water, climate and river levels.

“This is very clearly not what you want to do if you want to remove the fat,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA. “This is what you would do if you want to purposefully kneecap a well-functioning public agency. It’s really impossible at this point to see it as anything other than that.”

Swain said the cuts would exacerbate staffing shortages and strain the weather service’s ability to provide critical information to the public.

“It may mean that meteorologists are put in a really difficult position, where they’re trying their best, and they’re still not able to keep up,” he said. “They may still miss things. And that, first of all, will be a personally terrible feeling for those meteorologists who might miss a severe weather event, a tornado on the radar screen, or a flash flood warning.”

The Bay Area NWS office, which serves more than 8 million residents across 11 counties in the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions, was already down one meteorologist, Behringer said. It will now operate with a staff of 22, with 20% of the remaining employees eligible for retirement.

Behringer, a meteorologist for the Bay Area office, spoke to KQED after hours in his union capacity.

The work of the fired employees “is going to get spread to those of us who are already overworked, and we’re understaffed,” he said.

Weather service offices from Eureka to Los Angeles may also have lost staff, Behringer said, but he could not confirm it.

The full impact of the layoffs will not be known for weeks. Behringer said weather service products such as those offered to schools and in multiple languages could disappear, and community engagement might be scaled back.

Some offices could be asked to expand their forecast areas to fill in gaps. The additional workload and loss of expertise could slow the dissemination of critical weather data.

“A big part of our work is aligned with emergency management so that we can work eye to eye with them,” Behringer said. “With reduced staffing levels, that hinders our ability to not only do outreach but also limits our ability to get in the field.

“If suddenly our office has to start covering areas we’re not as familiar with weather-wise, we could definitely see a degradation in our service,” he said.

The layoff emails stated that the employees were “not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the agency’s current needs,” Behringer said.

The cuts come after Howard Lutnick was sworn in as secretary of the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA, last week.

Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat who represents communities from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, called the firings a “betrayal of the American people, and it will not stand.”

“If we were looking for a point at which this crazy DOGE exercise really backfired into people’s lives, I think you’ve found it with NOAA and with many of these cuts,” said Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee.

He took aim at the Department of Government Efficiency, the newly formed entity behind the Trump administration’s slashing of the federal workforce, which is overseen by billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

“The tech bros at DOGE just have no concept of any of this,” said Huffman. “These layoffs will absolutely translate into direct impacts to people’s lives, to our economy, and to our way of life.”

He is particularly worried about how the loss of a meteorologist could affect local forecasting, especially during fire season.

“We’re going to head into fire season, for example, without the data and the science that we need to be safe,” he said.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who represents communities in Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, told KQED she learned of the firings when her staff received a call from a NOAA employee who monitors tsunami threats.

“This is really heedless firing, and unfortunately, we don’t even know how many people have been fired,” said Lofgren, the ranking member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. “We need to know what’s coming at us so that we can prepare and have people safe to evacuate if they need to.”

Lofgren said she and other lawmakers plan to fight the firings and pursue litigation.

“This is not the way to run a government,” she said. “If they want to change the government, they should do it properly by going in, repealing the law if they don’t like it, and passing a new one.”

Behringer, the NWS Bay Area union steward, said he is reminded that he took the same oath as the president to defend the Constitution, which he takes seriously.

“We are sticking by that for now as long as we can, but as far as the union is concerned and what will happen with these appeals in the coming days or with pushing back against these illegal terminations, we will just have to wait and see,” he said.

March 4: This story was updated after the National Weather Service added that a third Bay Area employee was fired last week, after it had initially said two.