Tornadoes don’t take the night off

Trump cut the weather experts who sound the alert when the rest of us are sleeping

An EF3 tornado roared through the city of St Louis on Friday, May 16th. The 152-mile per hour winds flattened buildings, ripped out power lines, uprooted trees, and even damaged the local zoo. It was the city’s first deadly tornado in 66 years – and it was just one of at least 7 tornadoes that hit multiple states that day.

A little further north, a dust storm reminiscent of the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s engulfed Chicago. I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes when the National Weather Service alert popped up on my phone with a “Dust Storm Warning” advising us to “be ready for a sudden drop to zero visibility.” Where I live in Chicago, the visibility didn’t quite go to zero but in parts of downtown, the massive curtain of dust turned day into night.

This multi-day run of severe storms- including over 60-tornadoes- has killed 40+ people and done considerable damage in 13 states and counting. The bad weather is expected to continue through Memorial Day Weekend. Already this year, we’ve had 886 tornadoes, a 35% increase over last year. Plus, hurricane season is right around the corner,too. Seems like a really ridiculous time to be sabotaging the National Weather Service, doesn’t it? But Donald Trump is doing just that.

Seth Borenstein of AP reports that “nearly half of National Weather Service forecast offices have 20% vacancy rates.” He adds:“Detailed vacancy data for all 122 weather field offices show eight offices are missing more than 35% of their staff.” The NWS was already short staffed before Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE took a sledgehammer to it. But now it’s so bad that numerous regional forecasting offices have been forced to abruptly abandon standard round the clock weather monitoring.

While you were sleeping

That isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous because tornadoes and other severe weather events obviously don’t take the night off. Longtime Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling is worried. He told me:

“Severe weather--including hurricane landfalls--happen at all hours of the day and night--and nighttime severe weather situations are especially scary since it's dark and expertise in using tools like Doppler radar are never more important. For a National Weather Service Forecast Office to go offline at night due to staff cuts is frightening and flirting with potentially disastrous consequences.”

In Kentucky, which got hit by a tornado with ferocious 170+ winds on May 16th, all three NWS offices in that state are understaffed. None of those offices has a meteorologist-in-charge in the middle of tornado season. The weather office in Jackson, the area hit hardest by the storm, was down 7 staffers so it had to keep people on overtime and borrow others from other regional offices to fill empty overnight slots created by Trump’s cuts.

Luckily this time, the thread bare staff was able to get people timely and accurate forecasts and warnings. But Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear is concerned about what will happen during the next big storm. He said “I just think this is a basic public safety expenditure, and I hope we can get back to the levels where we will always have 24-7 coverage.”

The only meteorologist currently serving in Congress, Democrat Eric Sorensen of Illinois, agrees. Together with other House Democrats, Sorensen is working on an amendment to the Trump budget plan that calls for no further cuts to NWS/NOAA and “would also block NOAA from being dissolved, from having its work transferred to other federal agencies and from having its website or datasets degraded.” Sorensen told NBC News: “As a meteorologist who has covered severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, I know how important it is that National Weather Service offices are fully staffed around the clock.”

Republicans -including many from the southeast where tornado activity is rapidly increasing- say they aren’t too worried about the weather service cuts. One lawmaker even told reporters for NOTUS that maybe AI could just handle everything. (It can’t)

Wildfires don’t work 9-5 either

It’s not just tornadoes. Wildfires don’t work 9-5 either. But with these massive cuts, the Trump team has set up scenarios where crews could very well lose critical firefighting time at the start of a wildfire, time that might allow the fire to grow and spread from manageable to disastrous.

Anthony Edwards, newsroom meteorologist for the San Francisco Chronicle posted on Bluesky: “Some of the most wildfire-prone parts of California will no longer have 24/7 eyes on them headed into the traditional wildfire season because of NWS staffing shortages.”

That includes the San Joaquin Valley Valley office which has a shocking vacancy rate of over 60%.

Edwards told me:

“In California, the weather service has lost meteorologists at nearly every office. The two offices that are most critically short staffed are in the Central Valley: Sacramento and Hanford. Each of these offices is now closed for several hours each night because they do not have the staff to support around-the-clock operations. This is unprecedented in the weather service. In the Bay Area, a key weather service office that works out of the air traffic control center is down several meteorologists.”

As one of several journalists across the country who is laser-focused on the NWS cuts, Edwards has written countless stories about the local and national and impacts of a gutted weather service. He also did a recent video post to emphasize how much we all rely on the NWS forecasting:

But even with the continuing amount of news coverage, Edwards worries people still don’t completely understand just how much the NWS impacts their daily lives:

“I wish people understood that all weather warnings they receive on their phones are issued by the weather service. AccuWeather, The Weather Channel, Apple Weather, etc. do not issue their own warnings. These third-party applications are all relaying warnings from the weather service. Also, the data collected by NOAA is critical for monitoring hurricanes, snowstorms, heat waves, tornadoes and other forms of extreme weather. Without this data, we would be flying blind into every storm. If NOAA is dissolved, it would endanger the lives of all Americans. Companies do not have the resources to immediately replace the instruments, computer simulations and other aspects of NOAA immediately, or possibly ever.”

The National Weather Service has long been one of the country’s most trusted government agencies with experts there collecting and analyzing “more than 6.3 billion observations per day and releasing about 1.5 million forecasts and 50,000 warnings each year.” All that for the cost of just $4 per year per taxpayer. That seems like a small price to pay to sleep a little easier each night.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social and Substack at “Indistinct Chatter.”