The 2025 Hurricane Season officially starts three months from Saturday, and with massive and arbitrary cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by President Donald Trump, it’s possible Texas will be in significant danger if a major storm targets the state.
The NOAA is the source of virtually all American data that is used to predict the weather. Local meteorologists rely on the measurements taken by the NOAA to track the conditions that become major storms in time for Texans to prepare. One of the reasons that the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, sometimes known as Isaac’s Storm, was so devasting is because it predated modern predicting technology.
On Thursday, the Trump Administration fired roughly 500 NOAA employees, including weather forecasters who work in the region around the Gulf of Mexico. It was the second round of layoffs after Trump cut 800 NOAA jobs, reducing the entire NOAA workforce by 10 percent. The cuts came through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a quasi-government agency of dubious legality run by Trump’s top campaign donor, Elon Musk.
It is unclear how much damage these job losses will do. The first round of layoffs was for probationary employees in their first or second year of employment, without regards to their actual work, skill level, or competence. The Trump Administration has already had to walk back several of these high-profile firings when they realized the importance of workers in healthcare, nuclear safety, and other fields.
Eric Berger, who runs the Houston-based meteorological site Space City Weather, told Houston Public Radio that it would be catastrophic if the NOAA closed under the Trump Administration.
“The radar that we all look at when there’s severe storms is operated by NOAA, their office in League City,” Berger said. “So if you lose that radar, you lose an incredibly powerful tool in understanding weather. That would be really a catastrophic loss.”
Managing the weather response of the fourth-largest country in the world by area is no simple task. American climates range from tundra to tropical and everything in between. Devastating storms hit Texas regularly, particularly Atlantic hurricanes that often leave billions of dollars in damage in their wake. Cutting jobs at any agency will reduce the number of people tracking and managing those storms.
Trump’s targeting of the NOAA comes from the president’s long history of denying manmade climate change. The NOAA’s measurements consistently show that the temperature of the Earth is rising, likely due to human factors, and that it is making weather more severe and unpredictable. Orders from Trump to the agency prohibit the NOAA from using the words “climate change” in official communications.
The NOAA is one of the most cost-effective and reliable parts of the federal government. Their predictive models in the 2024 hurricane season were the most accurate ever. Cuts to the agency endanger both the accuracy of future models and Texas’s ability to prepare for the next inevitable hurricane.
