National Weather Service Cuts: Texas Flood, Rehiring, and Lawsuit

The Trump administration’s cuts to the National Weather Service began in February 2025 with the termination of roughly 880 probationary employees at the agency’s parent, NOAA, and by early summer the NWS had shed about 600 positions through firings and early-retirement incentives combined.¹² The losses forced dozens of local forecast offices to operate with heavy vacancies, drew scrutiny after a July flash flood in Texas killed more than 100 people, and led to a staged rehiring effort that as of mid-2026 has still not restored the agency to its pre-cut headcount.³

What Was Cut and When

The February 27, 2025 terminations were carried out by the Department of Government Efficiency as part of a broader push to shrink the federal workforce. They targeted probationary employees — workers still in their initial evaluation period — and the notices told recipients their “ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.” An administration official said meteorologists were largely spared, but NWS sources disputed that: meteorologists, radar specialists, and members of the Hurricane Hunters flight crew were among those fired.¹

Roughly 400 NWS employees held probationary status at the time. A parallel wave of early-retirement incentives drew out experienced forecasters, engineers, and equipment technicians. Together, the two channels stripped about 600 positions from the NWS in the first 60 days of 2025.²⁴ Across all of NOAA, about 1,875 positions were lost under the administration, with roughly 3,000 additional vacancies going unfilled.⁵

How Forecast Offices Were Affected

By May 2025, 52 of the NWS’s 122 Weather Forecast Offices had vacancy rates above 20 percent, and 35 lacked a meteorologist-in-charge, the senior forecaster who runs each office. At least eight offices halted or planned to halt overnight operations because they no longer had enough staff to keep forecasters on duty around the clock.⁶ Some of the hardest-hit offices:

The shortages also cut into the raw data the agency relies on. Weather balloon launches, which happen twice a day at upper-air stations and feed atmospheric readings directly into forecast models, were curtailed at multiple sites. By late May 2025, about 17 percent of scheduled U.S. balloon launches had not taken place, and roughly 18 percent of upper-air stations had lost their regular launch schedules.⁹ Tom Fahy, legislative director for the NWS employees’ union, called the risk to public safety from lost 24/7 coverage “extremely high.”⁶

Staff described the day-to-day effect as a “cascading of risk.” At the Louisville, Kentucky, office, meteorologists could not conduct mandatory on-site tornado damage surveys after a recent outbreak because doing so would have pulled them away from managing incoming warnings. Offices reported an inability to answer critical weather reports or issue individual storm warnings during multi-storm outbreaks because too few people were watching radar.⁸

The Texas Flood and What Investigators Found

On July 4, 2025, remnants of Tropical Storm Barry stalled over the Texas Hill Country, and the Guadalupe River in Kerr County rose more than 20 feet in hours.¹⁰¹¹¹²

The NWS Austin/San Antonio office had issued a flood watch the afternoon before and an urgent flash flood warning for Kerr County at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, tagged at “considerable” to “catastrophic” severity, which triggers wireless emergency alerts on mobile phones. Independent meteorologists and former NWS officials said the warnings were as timely and accurate as modeling allowed, but the overnight timing was a “nightmare scenario” for reaching people who were asleep.¹¹

Staffing at the responsible offices was thin. The Austin/San Antonio office was operating with 11 of a typical 26 meteorologists, and the nearby San Angelo office was short four of its usual 23. San Angelo also had no permanent hydrologist, and both offices lacked permanent top leadership. The NWS employees’ union said the offices had “adequate staffing and resources” to respond to that specific event, while flagging the leadership vacancies as a broader concern.¹¹

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer requested an inspector general investigation.¹³ President Trump rejected calls for a probe and called the suggestion that cuts contributed to deaths “disgusting.”¹¹ The Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General opened one anyway and completed it in April 2026. The OIG reported that while vacancies existed at the Austin/San Antonio office, staff asserted the gaps “did not affect their ability to forecast, issue flood alerts, and provide support to Kerr County officials.” The review also noted that the warning lead time for the Kerrville area was 26 minutes, short of the 65-minute federal performance goal, and made zero formal recommendations.¹⁴ A broader OIG audit of NWS staffing levels, hiring limitations, and operational practices nationwide is underway.¹⁵

Later Warning Failures

Two 2026 tornado events renewed questions about forecast reliability. In March, four people were killed by tornadoes in southern Michigan for which no tornado watch had been issued. Senators Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin formally asked NWS Director Ken Graham to investigate whether staff shortages were a factor. On April 13, 2026, tornadoes struck the Kansas City area without an advance watch; the NWS issued one about 30 minutes before the first tornado formed. Meteorologists pointed to delayed weather balloon launches as a possible contributor, though the NWS said its model performance showed “no evidence of overall degradation” from changes to balloon schedules.¹⁶

The Rehiring

The administration reversed course in stages. On June 2, 2025, the NWS received an exemption from the government-wide hiring freeze to fill 126 permanent positions covering meteorologists, hydrologists, physical scientists, and electronic technicians.² Senator Maria Cantwell, ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, criticized the figure as less than a quarter of the workforce lost.¹⁷

Pressure kept building through the summer, driven by the Texas flood, bipartisan criticism, and the start of Atlantic hurricane season. On August 4, 2025, the NWS announced it had received permission to hire 450 total personnel, inclusive of the original 126, under direct hiring authority from the Office of Personnel Management. At that point the NWS workforce had fallen below 4,000, down from roughly 4,550.¹⁸

By June 2026, the NWS had hired 274 of the authorized 450 and planned to fill about 150 more by September 2026. The agency remains more than 300 employees short of where it stood at the beginning of 2025. Many new hires are replacing experienced forecasters who took retirement incentives, and former employees have raised concerns about lost institutional knowledge and mentorship that take years to rebuild.³

What Congress Did With the Budget

The administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request would have cut NOAA funding by roughly 25 percent, to about $4.5 billion. It called for eliminating the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, shutting down all NOAA climate, weather, and ocean research laboratories, and defunding programs including the National Sea Grant College Program and the National Oceanographic Partnership Program. Research facilities targeted for closure included the Global Systems Laboratory in Boulder, which develops the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) severe-weather model; the Global Monitoring Laboratory, which oversees the Mauna Loa Observatory; and the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, a key hurricane-modeling center.¹⁹

Congress rejected most of it. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved its bill in July 2025 on a 19-10 vote, allocating about $6.14 billion to NOAA, adding $68.7 million for the operations and research account, and providing $10 million specifically for NWS staffing.¹⁹ Senate Appropriations subcommittee chair Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said the bill “fully funds the National Weather Service” and “eliminates any reduction in the workforce.”²⁰ The House appropriations subcommittee’s version provided about $5.8 billion, a 6 percent cut from the prior year but far above the White House request, with language directing NOAA not to close labs or cooperative research institutes.²¹ A Democratic amendment from Senator Brian Schatz that would have required the administration to maintain NWS staffing at September 30, 2024, levels was rejected along party lines.

President Trump signed the final FY2026 appropriations bill on January 23, 2026, providing NOAA with $6.171 billion, close to the prior year’s level and $1.6 billion more than the administration had requested.²²

Why the Lost Observational Data Matters for AI Forecasting

The cuts collided with a shift toward artificial intelligence in weather prediction. AI models depend on large volumes of observational data from satellites, weather balloons, and ocean buoys to identify patterns and generate forecasts. Cutting the observation systems that produce that data while leaning harder on AI created what former NOAA acting chief scientist Craig McLean called a “snowball effect” undermining forecast accuracy.²³

A study published in Science Advances in April 2026 found that AI-based models tend to “underperform” during extreme weather because they are trained on historical data, causing them to predict conditions resembling the past rather than record-breaking events increasingly driven by climate change.²⁴²⁵²⁶ NOAA has said its AI-powered models are meant to add to physics-based forecasting rather than replace it.²³

The Union Lawsuit

On September 2, 2025, the National Weather Service Employees Organization and the Patent Office Professional Association sued in federal court to challenge two executive orders that terminated collective bargaining rights for their roughly 13,000 combined members on national security grounds. The unions alleged the national security rationale was a “pretense” for political retribution against unions that had criticized the administration, and brought claims under the Federal Service Labor Management Relations Statute, the First Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.²⁷

National Weather Service Employees Organization v. Trump was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After oral arguments on December 10, 2025, Judge Paul L. Friedman stayed all proceedings pending decisions from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a cluster of related union challenges. As of March 2026, the D.C. Circuit had heard oral argument in those consolidated cases but had not issued a ruling, and the stay in the NWS case remained in effect.²⁸

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Scripps News. Commerce Dept. to Audit NWS Staffing After Texas Flooding
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Department of Commerce OIG. Review of the National Weather Service’s Actions to Support Kerr County During the Catastrophic Flash Flood in Texas
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Department of Commerce OIG. OIG-26-017-I Report
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NBC News. Tornadoes Kansas Concerns Changes National Weather Service
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Senate Commerce Committee. National Weather Service Partial Rehire Plan Isn’t Good Enough, Says Cantwell
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Roll Call. Trump’s Proposed NOAA Cuts Meet Senate Appropriators’ Opposition
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Inside Climate News. Congress Advances Bills to Save NOAA
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The Guardian. Trump Cuts AI Weather Prediction Forecasts
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Mother Jones. Trump Cuts NOAA Weather Data Incomplete Forecasts Reliability Extreme Weather Climate Change
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Claims Journal. February 2026 Blizzard
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Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. National Weather Service Employees Organization v. Trump
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