Wisconsin expert warns of impacts amid cuts to NOAA, NWS as severe weather season looms

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WLUK) -- As severe weather season approaches for much of the United States, weather experts are growing increasingly worried as President Donald Trump delivers on its promise to slash the federal workforce.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lost hundreds of employees tasked with forecasting the weather for millions of Americans.

"They’re taking a meat axe to something that’s already short-staffed," says Jon Martin, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "People are going to feel that effect immediately."

In the 2024 fiscal year, NOAA accounted for around just 0.1% of the U.S. federal budget. Despite its low budget, in an effort to curb federal spending, the Trump administration cut jobs for 600 forecasters with NOAA's National Weather Service.

In a statement to FOX 11, U.S. Rep. Tony Wied, R-8th District, said this about the cuts:

I recognize that these staffing changes are an ongoing and evolving situation. I will continue to actively monitor the impact this will have on the National Weather Service Office in Green Bay and work with the Trump Administration to ensure that their critical services continue while also working to make our government more efficient.

FOX 11 reached out to both Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-6th District, and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, on Friday and again on Wednesday for comment on the cuts. We did not hear back.

"What we’re doing when we make these sloppy, not well thought out decisions about cutting government services, is we’re putting people's lives in danger -- and that’s a serious, true statement. Lives are in danger now that were not in danger to the same degree just two months ago," says Martin.

Martin adds that the NWS offices, which need to be staffed 24/7, were already short-staffed before the cuts. If divided evenly, those 600 cuts equal 12 employees in Wisconsin.

"So that’s four people in each of the NWS forecast offices in our state no longer have a job," Martin says. "How can you possibly imagine that that office can work as efficiently in doing the job it's supposed to do -- warning citizens about weather threats, monitoring those threats and giving up-to-the-minute information -- and sometimes shorter and medium-range forecasts? It can't do the job by being short-staffed another four people."

There are five NWS offices that cover the Badger State; three in Wisconsin itself and two in Minnesota.

As Martin explains, fewer employees at each of those offices means each remaining forecaster has less time to break down complicated atmospheric data.

"My biggest fear is that it simply takes time away from the necessary deliberation that a trained scientist needs to employ when he or she is looking at the forecast model guidance to make a forecast," Martin explains.

We don’t just take the output from these computer models and parrot it out to the public and say, 'This is what the model says and therefore that’s what the forecast is.' There’s expert judgment involved there, and I say expert because there’s training involved in understanding how the atmosphere works and then whether or not you trust how today's model forecast is trying to represent that behavior. So that expert judgment phase is simply going to be shortcutted and the consequence on days when there’s really serious weather bearing down on a locale could be very serious.

President Trump and DOGE leadership cut mostly probationary jobs, but Martin says those employees are just as valuable as anyone else.

"This group of students who are coming out now, and in the current year and last 5-10 years and next 5-10 years, have a set of skills that people like myself did not have when we graduated. So cutting off these probationary employees who are the very front line of the new wave with brand new computer skills [and] brand new insights about the way the atmosphere works, is really bad. It’s like eating your seed corn. You don’t want to do that. That’s what’s happening," Martin says.

As part of the NOAA and NWS cuts, employees from the National Hurricane Center also lost vital roles -- after Martin says the center had its most successful forecast year ever in terms of storm tracks and intensity.

"What that does to me, is that it makes me angry. As a citizen of the U.S., it makes me deeply angry that this was not well thought out," Martin says.

I am not against looking at our portfolio of services and what they cost and taking a really sober look at. ‘Hey, can we make some changes in a modern era? Are there things that might be able to be done differently at lower costs?' There’s nothing wrong with doing that inventory. However, this is not the way it was done.

Martin also warns that this can have impacts on international forecasting, as the NWS and NOAA don't just have an obligation to the United States and its people.

"The NWS is part of a giant international group. It's not affiliated in any formal way, but all of the international weather services -- the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in London serves a lot of western Europe. The French have their own meteorological organization, the Germans do, the Chinese do, the Japanese do, the Russians do. All of these different organizations cooperate in the coordination of data, collecting the data, assimilating it, putting it into numerical forecasts models, which gives guidance for the coming weather from zero to six days with great accuracy to people all around the globe," Martin says.

As one of the most diverse weather nations in the world, it's critical for other countries to understand the U.S. and all of North America's accurate global weather patterns.

"The overlapping international agreements make it possible, feasible, to collect global weather information and turn it into data that can be used for our numerical forecast models, is done by the NWS and NOAA," says Martin.

Across the weather industry, there are fears about privatizing the National Weather Service.

"There are private firms who run their own forecast models, but they almost all, more than 90% -- all of them, in fact -- rely on a national and international effort at coordinating and observing the weather to create the data that goes into those models. So there’s no way on earth that the current infrastructure in the weather enterprise in the U.S. could be suddenly turned over to private companies alone. And still function at anywhere near the way it functions today. That’s not possible," Martin adds.

That forecast you draw up on your app has its basis in an NWS product. There may be places that can try to replicate that. I don’t think the accuracy will be quite the same, because the coordinated effort the weather service can do because of its size, is, of course, better than what a private company can do.

Martin warns that private companies have an obligation to shareholders and their bottom line, whereas government agencies like NWS have mandates to serve and protect the American people. As the landscape changes, Martin says that teaching does too.

"What we're doing, I think more than we anticipated in this job, is coaching people. Trying to remind them this won't last forever. The country needs a National Weather Service. We will come to our senses and things will recover. We're in a period now of disillusionment and ignorance, so don’t give up. So that’s what I find myself doing more than anything," Martin says.