Federal cuts to weather staff put Illinois emergency alerts at risk

As Illinois recovers from a record-breaking year of tornadoes that prompted emergency declarations across several counties, local officials and lawmakers are sounding the alarm about deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service — and the risks they pose to public safety.

More than 1,000 employees of the National Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have been laid off by the federal government this year, representing about 10% of NOAA’s workforce.

The cuts included hundreds of weather forecasters as well as researchers and other employees who monitor ocean and climate conditions, record weather data, and oversee management of ocean-based resources, as reported by The Associated Press.

So far, the local effect is not immediate, said Will County Emergency Management Agency Director Allison Anderson, who added, “We’re not feeling any impact now” and that “nothing official” has been relayed from federal agencies regarding operations.

But some experts worry there could be highly damaging long-term impacts.

“The issue is that the NWS people who do communications and put out things like weather warnings are incredibly productive, efficient, and resilient,” Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford said. “Right now, from my perspective, there hasn’t been too much impact, but only because the workload of those forecasters monitoring the weather has been absorbed by other wonderful people who are still there. That’s not a stable model, though.”

Ford noted that “forecasting dangerous weather is NWS’ top priority,” however, that may result in other duties of the agency going by the wayside.

Critical staffing roles

Various NWS stations historically have collected critical data that is used to track weather patterns and measure impacts and climate change trends, Ford said. Maintaining those databases at lower staffing levels may prove challenging.

“The only reason we know about the effects of El Niño, for example, is because we studied that data for decades and noticed the trend,” he said. “If we reduce the day-to-day data we collect, then we’re just going to be working in the dark.”

Ford also noted that many NWS employees spend “a lot of time and resources” getting to know the communities they are stationed in. This allows them to learn where problems might arise and coordinate with local emergency management agencies so they can tailor the information necessary for those areas.

Major staff reductions or centralized nationwide forecasting facilities could eliminate that localized work.

When asked about potential risks posed by understaffing, National Weather Service public affairs specialist Erica Grow Cei issued a statement saying “the National Weather Service continues to meet its core mission amid recent reorganization efforts and is taking steps to prioritize critical research and services that keep the American public safe and informed.”

The statement continued to say that the agency is working to reassign employees or temporarily fill positions left by the employee layoffs and buyouts to “fill roles at NWS field locations with the greatest operational need.”

NOAA has recently been exempted from the federal hiring freeze with “a targeted number of permanent, mission-critical field positions” planned to be advertised soon “to stabilize frontline operations,” Grow Cei said.

When asked when those positions would be filled or how many “a targeted number” would represent, Grow Cei said she did not know. As of July 30, only six positions were listed on the USA Jobs website for NOAA civilian positions, all of them “electronics technicians.”

Trouble predicting disasters

While additional hires may be made in the coming months, some experts are concerned that damage may have already been done.

This summer, the U.S. has seen multiple states impacted by severe storms and deadly flash flooding, including in Kerr County, Texas where the Guadalupe River flood on the night of July 4 killed at least 134 people, including young children at a summer camp.

Democratic Rep. Eric Sorensen, who represents Illinois’ 17th District near Rockford, is the only member of Congress with a background in meteorology and suspects the NOAA budget cuts could have contributed to the tragedy.

“When the Texas flood happened, I got a lot of calls and I called friends at the NWS,” Sorensen told Shaw Media. “I found out they had staffed up the office that covers that area, but they were missing a hydrologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.”

A warning coordination meteorologist is the person at a weather station who makes sure everything at the warning desk is running smoothly and goes out on time, he said.

Sorensen said that even if the Texas flood was not a failure of meteorology, the current staffing levels at NOAA are unsustainable and could lead to mistakes in the future.

“I’ve talked to friends in the Quad Cities office, and they’re already stressed,” he said. “A lot of their people are working six days per week. My worry is if these teams get overstressed and fatigued that we might miss something. Someone might miss a rotation starting to form a tornado and warnings might not go out.”

Illinois was hit by a record number of tornadoes in 2024, with 142 cyclones touching down in the state, according to the National Weather Service.

While the state saw zero tornado-related fatalities — due in part to early warning systems — extreme damage to property led to an emergency declaration for Cook, Fulton, Henry, St. Clair, Washington, Will and Winnebago counties, and more than $50 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance was distributed to residents and business owners.

Increased relief costs for storm damages are another risk Ford cited related to NOAA staffing cuts.

“NOAA is the primary climate and ocean monitoring entity in the country,” Ford said. “They also compile Probable Maximum Precipitation data, which is very important for city planning and designing retention systems for rain water. That’s just one example of the important services that we get through climate research.”

NOAA’s rain mapping data has been used by FEMA to create emergency response plans as well as to provide grants to communities to build disaster-resistant infrastructure through the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program.

That grant program, known as BRIC, was also eliminated in a round of budget cuts in April, including the cancellation of already approved but unpaid grants dating back to 2020, according to The Associated Press.

“We’ve already seen situations where the issue isn’t forecasting, it’s a lack of local planning and warning systems,” Ford said. “These cuts will lead to even less resources for that. Even when we know about a hazard, there can still be big problems if there’s not enough planning ahead of time.”

Part of the reason FEMA plans have worked is because we have accurate mapping from NOAA, he said.

The Washington Post reported on July 16 the U.S. Department of Commerce had “indefinitely suspended” work on Atlas 15, a NOAA project that shows how often storms of different intensities could be expected across the U.S. over time based on climate change trends. That was expected to be released in 2026.

In light of the reporting and the outcry over the Texas flooding, CNN reported the Trump Administration then paused the suspension and said the project would only be slightly delayed. Still, the pause raised concerns about the administration’s approach to climate science and severe weather.

“It’s concerning because this administration is using hateful politics to cut climate resources,” Sorensen said. “They feel if we take talk of climate change away, then it won’t occur, but it’s going to continue and we’re going to be left behind. It gets hard when politics are brought into science. We need to use data to make good decisions.”

The work of NWS and FEMA often goes on in the background “trying not to inconvenience people,” Ford said. “That’s a balance they’ve worked on for decades: finding how to save lives without crying wolf.”

Proposed solutions

Sorensen currently is using his position in Congress to push a series of bills aimed at reversing the impact of recent workforce cuts — and preventing similar layoffs in the future.

In June Sorensen introduced the “Weather Workforce Improvement Act” with bipartisan support from a handful of other congressmen. The bill would provide resources for the NWS to “quickly and fully” staff offices with meteorologists, physical scientists, hydrologists, computer specialists, and technicians and designate their staffs as necessary “public safety employees.”

This designation would give the employees the same status as Transportation Security Administration agents, making their jobs harder to cut and allowing them to continue working in the event of a government shutdown.

“We need them,” Sorensen said. “And we need them fully funded so they can keep innovating and improving lead times ahead of disasters.”

Sorensen has also proposed the creation of a National Weather Safety Board, similar to the National Transportation Safety Board, which would analyze weather disasters to fully understand their causes and impact.

“We have to look back at tragedies like Texas the way we look at plane crashes,” Sorensen said. “So we can understand the factors that lead to the disasters and understand where we went wrong to prevent them in the future and improve our warning technology.”

Sorensen said his proposals have drawn bipartisan praise, but he remains uncertain whether the bills will gain enough traction to pass in the current congressional session.

“Everybody I’ve talked to has said ‘that’s a great idea,’” he said. “I think I have bipartisan support, but it may take until we have a majority to get funding, because Trump is set on cutting funding to everything right now.”

Sorensen said he doesn’t want to make this issue political, but he noted that time is of the essence.

“It’s summer. Hurricane season is coming. The atmosphere is boiling with instability, and we can’t afford to have people killed because the administration wanted to save money,” he said.