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Trump cuts weather service as hurricane season approaches [1]

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Date: 2025-05-18

Donald J Trump, President of the United States, wallows in his disdain for science and sets the stage for the citizens of the country to suffer the consequences. Having executed massive cuts to the primary science division of NOAA, Trump may get a first hand view of the consequences from his Mar-a-Lago palace in hurricane prone Florida. Worse off than Florida though, critical staffing shortages in Texas and Louisiana prevent forecasting offices from being open at night.

That should be reassuring to Republican voters in those red states who were concerned about fiscal responsibility and supported massive staffing cuts to agencies already underfunded for decades. They apparently value tax cuts for billionaires over their own safety. How altruistic of them.

Trump’s budget busting tax cuts are intended to line the pockets of the ultra wealthy few who have lined up to pay homage to our C minus President. As an added benefit, he gets to sock it to the nerds who have plagued his warped vision of reality with unpleasant facts based in expert knowledge. While the overall budget of NOAA has been trimmed by 27%, its primary science division has seen 74% cuts, according to Inside Climate News.

There were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020, tallying a price tag of at least $92.9 billion, according to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. NOAA’s total annual budget by comparison is about $6 billion. This is deemed by most to have already been insufficient.

Tornadoes and flooding — The effects of these unconstrained budget and staffing cuts will be wide spread. Who is not affected by the weather? Central and Eastern states are especially at risk. Recent tornadoes in Kentucky where 18 died were faced by understaffed weather offices. In 2022, the same weather offices in Eastern Kentucky saw floods that killed 45 people.

Hurricanes — Gulf of Mexico and East Coast states face seasonal dangers of considerable magnitude. In Houston, the weather station manager and the backup manager have both been terminated just ahead of hurricane season. DOGE, at Trump’s direction, cut research programs that resulted in accurate short term hurricane forecasts predicting changing storm directions and increasing intensity of hurricanes. The net effect of research and staffing cuts is that forecasts will get to be less timely and less precise.

Fisheries — The National Marine Fisheries Service is being cut by 30%. This impacts their ability to correctly set fishing quotas and prevent over fishing and subsequent collapse of fish stocks in coastal areas from New Jersey to Washington and Alaska. Trump has basically called for a return to unmanaged fishing that decimated the US fishing industry until some 30 years ago. Also hit in Trump’s cuts are programs to maintain and restore coastal fish habitat.

Agriculture — Farmers will face difficult decisions about what crops to grow as long range forecasts are impacted by staffing cuts. They will have problems managing for droughts and nitrogen fertilizer application. Planning forage for livestock over winter depends on accurate long term forecasts.

The cuts affect even basic weather information gathering like weather satellite maintenance and weather balloon launches which have been cut in half. Farmers rely on accurate short term forecasts to make daily decisions such as when to cut hay. There is a straight line effect of reducing data collecting balloons and forecast accuracy. This is simple and obvious, but none of this was taken into consideration by DOGE when making wholesale cuts to staffing and budget.

The annual saving from these cuts could easily be offset by increased losses from just a few severe weather events. This is the epitome of being penny wise and pound foolish. And for Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their DOGE stooges, this is their stock in trade. There’s no amount of other people’s money they are unwilling to spend to make themselves a buck.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/18/2322977/-Trump-cuts-weather-service-as-hurricane-season-approaches?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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