At least 800 employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were fired on Thursday, with more likely on the way. Just as with similar moves at the National Institutes of Health, or the IRS, or the Forest Service, this lays bare the lie at the heart of Trump’s, Musk’s, Russell Vought’s, and DOGE’s supposed cost-cutting scheme: these agencies and offices themselves save the country money — enormous sums of money — through disasters avoided, impacts reduced, losses averted. The country is less safe today than it was yesterday.
The bloodbath at NOAA apparently included meteorologists with the National Weather Service; scientists inside what’s simply known as NOAA Research, or the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) more formally; technicians that keep up the country’s weather instrumentation; staff at the office that maintains and runs a fleet of satellites giving us scads of information about the planet; and even staff from the two tsunami warning centers the US has, both run by NOAA. Employees that help maintain the country’s fisheries are gone. Researchers that build climate and weather models that tell us what to expect were fired. It was an arbitrary, capricious, needlessly cruel move that took a sizable chunk out of the country’s ability to prepare and protect itself from acute disasters, not to mention to better understand and adapt to the changing climate.
You may not open an app labeled “NOAA” or “NWS” on your phone, but whatever weather app you do use is almost certainly built on the instrumentation and data NOAA and NWS provide. When warnings come in days or even a week ahead of a storm’s arrival, with at this point eerie accuracy, thank the National Hurricane Center. The day before the Los Angeles Fires hit, it was the NWS literally shouting its “life-threatening” messages from the rooftop.
Per several sources, the firings appeared to flout the theoretical targeting of “probationary” employees, or those who had been with NOAA for less than a year or two, or at least take such liberties with that category as to render it meaningless. Probationary status can be in place even if someone has been at an agency for years or decades but recently got a promotion — one fired employee posted on Bluesky that they had 15 days remaining in a two-year probationary period, but had worked at NOAA since 2010. Another source told Splinter that some fired scientists had been with OAR for many years and were well established experts, but because of NOAA partnerships with outside institutions like Princeton their official status as NOAA employees may have been probationary or otherwise non-permanent.
“People who have been here for over a decade and are at the top of their fields, [and] early career scientists thrilled to do this work for the public good. All gone,” the source said. “Absolutely devastating.”
If there’s much of a country around to ponder it, years from now people will wonder why this tiny cadre of malevolent and ignorant trolls, racists, and ultra-wealthy monsters was allowed to do this, to so quickly tear down that which took decades — centuries — to build.
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