The National Weather Service is slowly rebuilding after a wave of cuts last year eliminated more than 600 employees and sparked widespread safety concerns among meteorologists.
Weather experts say the agency’s latest moves — which include hundreds of new hires, changes to its forecasting operations and a reorganization — are a rapid experiment in reinvention. Whether it will succeed, they say, is unclear.
“I do worry about the speed with which they’re doing it and what this transition period is going to be like,” said meteorologist Alan Gerard, who last year retired from a 35-year career with NOAA, which houses NWS.
Meteorologists say they also have concerns about the weather service’s aging radar infrastructure, its altered weather balloon launches and the loss of institutional knowledge from last year’s exodus of many of the agency’s most experienced employees.
It’s the second year in a row that NWS is in turmoil as hurricane season, which officially began on June 1, gets underway.
Last year, the season began with understaffed weather offices and the looming threat of more cuts to federal weather and climate programs. But the continental U.S. avoided any landfalling hurricanes for the first time in a decade — and experts say the forecasts of other 2025 summer disasters, like the deadly Texas floods, were accurately predicted.
This year, forecasters have predicted a below-average Atlantic season, with eight to 14 named storms and three to six hurricanes. But meteorologists warn that a catastrophic landfall is still possible, and it’s imperative that the weather service is prepared.
NWS secured authorization last year to hire 450 new employees. It has hired about 274 so far and aims to bring aboard around another 150 by the end of September, according to NWS spokesperson Erica Cei. Congress in January also rejected many of the funding cuts the White House requested in its budget proposal for the current fiscal year.
But NWS is more than 300 employees short of its staffing levels at the beginning of 2025. Even if it meets its hiring goals for the year, it won’t fully recover from the Trump administration’s cuts. That means understaffing and employee burnout are still possibilities as extreme weather intensifies over the summer.
“Two hundred employees is really only a drop in the bucket,” Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. “The concern for employee health, employee well-being, employee morale is first and foremost in the minds of weather service leadership.”
‘A real-time experiment’
The new NWS workforce isn’t just smaller. It’s also less experienced. Many of last year’s staff reductions included early retirements offered to employees with decades of tenure under their belts. These included both meteorologists as well as engineers and equipment technicians who maintain the agency’s critical radar network.
“When you cut a big number of experienced people all at once, like what happened last year with the early retirements, that leaves a hole in your experience,” Gerard said. “Losing that, and losing those people to be able to mentor and help bring along that next generation, is a real concern.”
Some NWS offices also cut back on their twice-daily weather balloon launches last year in response to staff shortages, a move that raised widespread concern among meteorologists about the potential for degraded forecasts. While most offices have since resumed the usual two-flight schedule, some are still missing launches, and others are sending up balloons later in the day than they used to.
It’s unclear what effect these changes have had on weather forecasts.
Meteorological agencies around the world coordinate to release their weather balloons at the same time each day, according to Gerard. The data they collect then feeds into global weather models, which meteorologists typically update at multiple set times per day. It’s possible that the changes in U.S. balloon timing could be affecting the accuracy of the models at certain times of the day, Gerard said — but finding out would require a detailed study, and NWS has not conducted one.
A series of deadly tornado outbreaks, which caught forecasters by surprise this spring, brought national attention to the issue. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) called for a federal investigation in March after deadly storms struck the southern part of the state with no tornado watch issued by NWS. A handful of twisters also tore across central Kansas on April 13 after NWS had earlier predicted almost no chance of tornadoes that day.
Gerard’s own analyses have found that NWS’s global weather model experienced a decline in accuracy between 2024 and 2025. But without a detailed investigation from NWS, no one can say for sure whether the balloon launches were part of the problem.
“It’s almost like we’re running a real-time experiment, but we’re not necessarily doing the analysis to know what the potential implications of it are,” Gerard said.
Cei, the NWS spokesperson, said in an email that NOAA’s weather model performance “shows no evidence of overall degradation due to variations in balloon launch schedules.” The agency “will continue to investigate potential changes in forecast skill,” she added.
Organizational changes
NWS is also reorganizing its six regional headquarters into seven new sectors, as well as moving many of the administrative functions previously performed by the regions to its national headquarters.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, some meteorologists say. The regional headquarters have sometimes differed slightly in the ways they produce and communicate forecasts. Moving administrative functions to a national headquarters could ensure that forecasting protocols are standardized across the country.
“The main positive I see is that [the sectors] are going to be strictly focused on operations,” said Brian Lamarre, who was the meteorologist-in-charge at the agency’s Tampa Bay Area office in Florida before retiring from NWS last year. “That’ll be a plus.”
But the reorganization’s rapid rollout has some weather experts on guard.
“What concerns me about what they’re doing right now is that it seems like it’s being very rushed,” Gerard said.
The agency has been years overdue for an organizational restructuring, he added. But he said he’s worried that implementing the changes so quickly, with many offices still understaffed, could backfire.
“This regional structure has essentially been the weather service structure for 50 years, and it is what offices are used to,” he said. “Now it’s happening so fast, it seems like there is a lot of confusion and uncertainty.”
Other organizational changes, previously in the works, were sidelined last year by the Trump administration’s cuts. Those included a plan by NWS Director Ken Graham to embed meteorologists in emergency operation centers across the country to improve communications between forecasters and emergency managers, with the aim of saving lives during disasters.
The agency is working to get those plans back on track, according to Fahy. The highest priority for the ongoing hiring efforts is filling positions at the weather forecasting offices. But NWS is also seeking to hire meteorologists for positions embedded in state emergency management offices, he said.
Cei, the NWS spokesperson, confirmed that the agency is pursuing a broad organizational restructuring aimed at ensuring round-the-clock continuous service at every agency field office and embedding meteorologists in emergency operations centers across the country.
The changes “reflect years of input from the workforce and our core partners, especially the emergency management community,” she said.
Fahy added that the hiring wave won’t necessarily stop at 450 employees. NWS leadership will reevaluate the agency’s staffing requirements at the end of the fiscal year, he said, and they could choose to request authorization from the White House for additional hires.
But as hurricane season looms, experts say they’re still waiting to see how all the agency’s changes and hiring efforts shake out.
“Some of [the restructurings] are things that I think should have been happening for probably the last 10 years,” Gerard said. “The problem is they’re all happening now at once when the agency is already dealing with staffing issues and budget issues and stuff like that. … We don’t know exactly how all this is gonna play out.”
