After losing nearly 600 employees to layoffs and retirements as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, the National Weather Service is planning to hire additional staff members to “stabilize” the department, a spokesperson said.
Erica Grow Cei, a spokesperson for the National Weather Service, said “a targeted number” of permanent positions would soon be advertised.
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents weather service employees, said the department had been granted an exemption to President Donald Trump’s governmentwide hiring freeze to hire 126 people, including meteorologists, hydrologists, physical scientists and electronics technicians.
In recent months, the weather service said it was preparing for “degraded operations” with fewer meteorologists available to fine-tune forecasts. Some forecasting offices no longer had enough staff members to operate overnight, and others had to curtail the twice-daily launches of weather balloons that collect data on atmospheric conditions that feed into forecast models.
The meteorologists still on staff were being asked to shuffle around the country in short-term assignments to fill gaps where the cuts had made the deepest impact.
At the same time, the country has seen a nonstop pace of deadly and expensive weather disasters this year, including the California wildfires, several tornado outbreaks and severe hailstorms. On the cusp of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began Sunday, some observers had expressed concerns about understaffed offices and fatigue.
At a news conference in New Orleans last month to announce that it was forecasting an above-average hurricane season, officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the weather service’s parent agency, acknowledged those concerns indirectly.
“We are fully staffed” at the National Hurricane Center, said Laura Grimm, NOAA’s acting administrator, calling hurricane response a top priority for the Trump administration. “We are very supportive of our national weather staff,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
