Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has left National Weather Service teams desperately scrambling to staff depleted operations ahead of the hurricane season.
According to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, there are at least 155 vacancies that need to be filled, including forecasters essential for the around-the-clock coverage needed during hurricane season.
“For most of the last half century, NWS has been a 24/7 operation. Not anymore, thanks to Elon Musk,” Tom Fahy, legislative director of the union, wrote in an email to the Washington Post.
Now, the Trump administration is looking into reassigning some of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s remaining staff to the “critically understaffed” weather service offices.
At the start of 2025, NOAA had more than 600 vacancies, but instead of trying to fill these important roles, President Donald Trump—with the help of Musk’s DOGE goons—illegally fired and pushed out about ten percent of the remaining workforce.
And the effects of these cuts were felt immediately. In March, the NWS announced that it would suspend weather balloon observations in several locations and greatly reduce data collection efforts in others due to staffing issues.
The economic value of NOAA’s weather and climate data has been estimated at more than $100 billion, but that was before Trump and Musk got their hands on it.
The Trump administration’s efforts to destroy NOAA are part of its broader strategy of undermining climate science. By gutting weather and climate research, it obscures the real costs of climate change and extreme weather events, leaving Americans in the dark.
After illegally axing USAID and drafting plans to do the same with the Department of Education, President Donald Trump and his unelected co-president, Elon Musk, have now set their sights on decimating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal scientific agency that helps forecast the weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditions, and manages the protection of marine life.
"Hearing reports that Musk’s cronies are targeting NOAA—infiltrating key systems & locking out career employees," Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland wrote on X. "NOAA is vital for weather forecasting, scientific research & more. Their critical work saves lives. My team and I are looking into this & we will not stand for it."
As of Wednesday morning, parts of the NOAA website appear to be down, including the Global Monitoring Lab, which conducts research on greenhouse gasses. Greenhouse gasses lead to global warming and climate change, which Trump and the GOP deny are real, despite the scientific consensus otherwise.
What's more, Trump on Wednesday nominated Neil Jacobs to lead the NOAA, the same guy who was reprimanded in June 2020 for "Sharpiegate"—when Trump used a sharpie to alter the path of Hurricane Dorian on an official map to say it would impact Alabama and Florida when it was not projected to.
In fact, the report finding that Jacobs violated scientific ethics with his involvement with Sharpiegate is now offline, replaced with text saying, “These are not the sites you are looking for” (a reference to the film “Star Wars”). However, the report can still be accessed through the Wayback Machine, an internet archive that helps preserve websites even if they are removed.
The report found that Jacobs—who at the time served as acting director of the NOAA—issued statements about the hurricane that were "driven by external political pressure" and "inappropriately criticized ... underlying scientific activity," which "compromised NOAA's integrity and reputation as an independent scientific agency."
Jacobs would have to be confirmed by the Senate to get the job. But Senate Republicans have confirmed all of Trump’s unqualified and dangerous Cabinet nominees so far, so hoping that Republicans would do the right thing and vote down Jacobs is a fool’s errand.
Ultimately, getting rid of NOAA is a goal of Project 2025, the far-right Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a second Trump term. On last year’s campaign trail, Trump claimed he had nothing to do with that agenda, but it is now clearly driving the actions of him and his administration.
Project 2025 also calls for privatizing the National Weather Service, which helps forecast major events like hurricanes, wildfires, blizzards, and flooding. That would make it harder for Americans to get accurate (and free) information about impending storms.
Experts say that privatizing the NWS would make hurricane preparation and clean up even harder.
“Attacking this agency, attacking the science that it's doing is really damaging to the public,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, told PBS News in September. “They would like the private sector to run rampant and not be fettered by any kind of guardrails. And we all know that the climate crisis is accelerating, getting worse, having an impact on our economy as well as the environment.”
The Weather Channel criticized Breitbart.com for falsely claiming that global warming temperatures have “plunged,” describing a Breitbart article as “a prime example of cherrying picking” data and pointing out that Breitbart denied the findings of “thousands of researchers and scientific societies.”
In a video accompanying a December 6 article, Weather Channel meteorologist Kait Parker explained to Breitbart, “Science doesn’t care about your opinion. Cherry-picking and twisting the facts will not change the future, nor the fact — not opinion — that the earth is warming. ”
The Weather Channel video and article roundly debunked the false and misleading claims in the November 30 Breitbart article by James Delingpole. In response to Delingpole’s claim that “[g]lobal land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year,” Parker pointed out that Delingpole had cherry-picked one set of data, adding in the video that “land temperatures aren’t an appropriate measure” and that the temperature decline disappears when you also account for sea surface temperatures. Delingpole also cited the science editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, David Whitehouse, to claim that “without the El Niño (and the so-called ‘Pacific Blob’) 2014-2016 would not have been record warm years,” yet Parker noted in the video that even if you “take out the El Nino spike in temperatures, 2015 and 2016 still come in as the warmest years on record,” as Carbon Brief has shown. Finally, Parker debunked Delingpole’s claim that a likely drop in global temperatures in 2017 is evidence against global warming, writing: “There is nothing unusual about a drop in global surface temperatures when going from El Niño to La Nina. These ups and downs occur on top of the long-term warming trend that remains when the El Niño and La Niña signals are removed.”
Parker also lamented the U.S. House Science Committee’s endorsement of the Breitbart article on Twitter and concluded her video with a helpful suggestion for Breitbart and a rallying cry for fellow scientists: “So next time you’re thinking about publishing a cherry-picked article, try consulting a scientist first, and to all my fellow scientists out there: Let’s make the facts louder than the opinions.”
Here is the video and full transcript of Parker’s comments (which are well worth watching):
KAIT PARKER: So last week, Breitbart.com published an article claiming that global warming was nothing but a scare and global temperatures were actually falling. Problem is, they used a completely unrelated video about La Nina, with my face in it, to attempt to back their point. What’s worse is that the U.S.Committee on Space, Science, & Technology actually tweeted it out. Here’s the thing: Science doesn’t care about your opinion. Cherry-picking and twisting the facts will not change the future, nor the fact — not opinion — that the earth is warming. So let’s break it down.
Their first claim is that “Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year — the biggest and steepest fall on record.” Now, that was based on one satellite estimate of global land temperatures, not a consensus. And second of all, land temperatures aren’t an appropriate measure. The earth is 70 percent water, and water is where we store most of our heat energy, so when you look at sea surface temperatures, and you combine that with land temperatures, you actually get a record high for November of 2016.
Their second claim: “It can be argued that without the El Nino … 2014-2016 would not have been record warm years.” Now, if you’re taking a look at the Arctic sea ice melting here in this video from NASA — when you actually normalize the data, aka take out the El Nino spike in temperatures, 2015 and 2016 still come in as the warmest years on record.
So that brings me to claim number three: “Many think that 2017 will be cooler than previous years.” Now, it is typical, yes, for temperatures to drop in a post-El Nino environment, but certainly not to record lows. If that claim was correct, we would have had global record lows all over the last century, and we haven’t seen that since 1911. The last time we fell below the 20th century average was in 1976, and guess what? That was directly following the 1974-1975 strong El Nino. So next time you’re thinking about publishing a cherry-picked article, try consulting a scientist first, and to all my fellow scientists out there: Let’s make the facts louder than the opinions.
FORT WORTH, Texas — A storm is raging on Twitter after outgoing Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns asked The Weather Channel to show pictures of Fort Worth, not Dallas, when displaying the local weather on its app.
Their reply: “Sorry to see you go. Good luck on ending bullying.”
A flood of tweets soon followed, with some people announcing they’d be deleting their Weather Channel apps and others calling on the cable network to apologize.
Burns, the first openly gay council member who gained international acclaim in 2010 after delivering a moving anti-bullying speech — called “It Gets Better” — during a council meeting, offered the station a chance to come out of the downpour.
“Let’s help kids instead of snark?” he tweeted to the network, asking it to donate $100,000 to the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network and The Trevor Project. He added that he would donate $1,000.
By 10 a.m., the cable network had tweeted an apology to Burns and later reiterated its regrets in a statement.
“This morning one of our team members used sarcasm in an unfortunate and unacceptable way on our Twitter account. It was not our intention to offend and we are sorry that we did,” it states. “We have since apologized to Councilman Burns and want to restate that sincere apology and assure him that this tweet does not represent our views. In fact, this is the opposite of how we want to interact with our fans, as we value their input on any occasion. We are taking the necessary steps to be sure something like this does not occur again.”
Burns said photographs of Dallas have been routinely been posted with Fort Worth weather since The Weather Channel app was updated a few weeks ago. He said he and others have previously asked the network to change the pictures but to no avail.
“I finally got frustrated this morning and sent out the text that you saw and kind of blew up from there,” Burns said.
He called the network’s response “disappointing.”
“I thought about it for just a second: Were they actually being honest in this?” Burns said. “Nope. That was not an earnest tweet. That was a jab.”
“It’s unfortunate that they had such a bone-headed response,” he said. “It goes to show that you have to be careful with social media and not be snarky.”
David Blumenthal, a spokesman for The Weather Channel, said Monday that the network is working to provide more city-specific photos on its app.
“We recognize the need to make the photos more local and the team is working on that now with the goal of delivering every user a locally relevant, weather specific photo on their home screen,” he said in an email.
