Are You Affected by the NOAA Layoffs?
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From GateQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, scientists at the National Weather Service and its parent agency, NOAA, are reeling from the Trump administration's mass terminations of hundreds of jobs, including roles issuing extreme weather warnings, advising emergency managers, and studying climate change.

We talk with recently fired workers and with climate scientist Daniel Swain about the significance and broad reach of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's work as more agency cuts loom. Have you been affected? Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Some 880 people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, have been laid off in the last few weeks, including the scientists who predict the weather and extreme weather events, study wildfires on our coasts, and monitor climate change. The roughly 10% cut to the workforce, when combined with recent resignations, has already affected weather balloon launches and other data-measuring tools used by forecasting stations around the U.S.,

Now the agency is preparing for another round of 1,000 job cuts that could double workforce losses to 20%. We take a closer look at the impact of the Trump administration's cuts and meet workers whose jobs were just terminated. Joining me first is Kayla B. Song, who, until about a week and a half ago, was a scientist for NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu. Kayla, thank you so much for coming on to talk with us.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for having me. So Kayla, what did you do for the Tsunami Warning Center? Can you tell us about your job and what it entailed? Yeah, absolutely. So I was a duty scientist and also a physical scientist that was part of a 24-7 public safety operation where we are constantly monitoring for the potential for tsunamis.

And how we do that is we basically have pagers, sort of like we're ER doctors, right? We get paged if there's been a large displacement in Earth's water or Earth's crust that could lead to a tsunami, right? So tsunamis are generated by landslides, by meteors or other means, but most commonly via earthquakes. And so most of the pages that we get are...

are for an earthquake that has occurred, and we have to go into our operations floor and determine or solve the earthquake by finding its exact latitude, longitude, depth, and magnitude. And from there, if it's a big enough earthquake in a given location, we start moving forward, alerting the appropriate channels, issuing messages, kicking off secondary analyses, kicking off potential tsunami forecasts, etc., etc.,

Wow. So then how did you find out your position was terminated, Kayla? Via email. Email. Just an email straight up to you? You didn't hear it from a supervisor or something? No, they had no idea. So they hadn't even been informed? No, I had to inform them. And I've heard that some people's supervisors haven't even been informed to this day. So if we hadn't told them, they would not know.

Wow, Kayla, what was your reaction? And what does this mean for your team? Because we've been hearing about how offices throughout the system are either short-staffed or just barely staffed enough. Yeah, my team is now short-staffed. We only require 12 people to be fully staffed, which is not a lot for a 24-7 operation that needs two people on at a time.

Um, so we were already overworked and now we're down to 11 people making that even tougher, right? So if you even think about the math, it's no one's allowed to take a vacation. No one's allowed to get sick. No one's allowed to go to a conference. And if we are, then, you know, most people are going to be putting in way more than 80 hours a week. So then based on your own experience, what you've seen and heard about how these cuts are being carried out,

How concerned are you about the risk to the public? I'm very concerned because burnout is a fast track to mistakes. When your team is tired, when the morale is low, that interferes with our mission. And our mission is to protect public safety. So I am concerned.

So Kayla, tell me, what drew you to this work and sort of what were the requirements for you to be able to have this kind of a job? The requirements are very high. To be in the duty rotation, you need to have a PhD or a combination of experience and other degrees. So they just don't let anyone walk in and determine, you know, lives of thousands of people or the alert messages for those, right?

What drove me to it is the public service aspect to begin with. So I did my PhD, I was in academia, then I was in industry for a little while.

And they weren't the right fits, and I really was not sure why until I landed into the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and realized that it was this public service component that really gives you this sense of purpose. Like, you're using your skills to help people directly and not in these tangential ways in my other roles that I've had. Yeah. So how are you doing, Kayla? Yeah.

The best I can, you know, just like everyone else. It honestly feels like I've been grieving, going through various cycles of grief, of sadness, of anger. Yeah. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on to share what you're going through. And I'm just so sorry to hear how this process went.

has played out for you. And just to be reminded again of just the significance of the work that you do and the type of work that NOAA does. So really means a lot, Kayla. Yeah, thank you for having me and giving me a chance to help humanize the story. Kayla B. Song is a terminated duty scientist for NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Joining me now is Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Daniel, really glad to have you with us, too. Thanks for having me back. So you've called these mass job terminations at NOAA profoundly alarming. Talk about why. What do we need to understand about the work this federal agency does?

Well, first of all, you know, the work that NOAA does is wide ranging. And there's been a lot of focus on, including for myself, on its function in the capacity of the National Weather Service. So to produce these, you know, 24, 7, 365 day a year projects.

weather predictions that virtually everybody in some form or another directly or indirectly interfaces with or relies upon on a day-to-day basis. But there are, of course, also other life safety critical functions, as they might be called, through entities like, as we've just heard, the Tsunami Warning Center, also fisheries,

for economies and for food, and any number of research arms of NOAA as well. So it's actually quite a wide-ranging federal government organization in terms of what it does. And I think what has been a little bit missed in all of this is just how instrumental a lot of these functions are in

whether or not people realize it in their day-to-day lives, whether they realize that they are consumers or beneficiaries of those weather predictions or those people who are on duty, again, all the time to alert them to any tsunamis that might be lurking out there in the ocean, even if the earthquake that might be triggering them is on the other side of the world in the middle of the night.

I think a lot of these functions are incredibly valuable and important, and we often don't recognize them unless we're in the midst of a crisis. And so it's easy to take them for granted. And so what we've seen already with these

Mass firings, which, as you already heard, were very disorganized and chaotic and remain so even among the people who were supervising the terminated employees and certainly among the people who were terminated with.

As was noted in the introduction, highly credible indication of large further cuts to come, either in the form of an imminent additional 10% reduction, which would essentially be doubling the losses we've already seen,

Or as is credibly rumored and has been discussed for some months since October or November last year, as much as a 30 to 50 percent cut overall to NOAA and some of its subsidiary agencies at some point this year, which really would be an even more devastating cut. So it's sort of we're interpolating between

The effects that we've seen so far, the lagged effect of what we've seen so far that's likely to emerge in the coming weeks and months, and then this deep concern that there are right now appear likely to be more to come. Yeah, because there are so many people and industries who rely on NOAA data. It's really hard to wrap your mind around it, you know, from the individual who looks at their weather app to weather.

airlines or the mail service, right? Can you just describe a couple of these for us, Daniel? Yeah, even if we sort of restrict the conversation for a moment just to the National Weather Service side of this, which again is only one part of NOAA. Right.

It is in some ways probably the one that people interact with most often, whether they realize it or not, because as you mentioned, the data that NOAA and the Weather Service provide in terms of weather and climate and disaster risk prediction, essentially, is

is, is critical, providing this critical backbone for virtually all of the weather relevant stuff that we do day to day. So whether that is, as you mentioned, checking your smartphone weather app, that data, either the observations that you're seeing or the observations that go into the weather models that are used to make those forecasts, or in many cases, the weather models themselves that produce those forecasts are

guess who is responsible for maintaining and upgrading and advancing those? It's primarily NOAA. Or if you have a trip scheduled and you're taking a flight, where are the airlines and the individual pilots and the FAA, where are they getting their weather information again?

primarily from NOAA. If you've ordered a package from your favorite large corporation website or from any, even an independent local retailer, where is that package coming from the logistics for shipping it and getting it from wherever it's starting to your front door? Those logistics and shipping companies are of course also relying on that information from NOAA and the weather service. Likewise, you take a road trip,

highway department, Caltrans in the case of California, also using NOAA and weather service data to keep you safe and keep those roads open. So it really is universally out there, even if the weather isn't particularly threatening or extreme in the moment. It's sort of a question of

In the extremes, you know, protection of life and property from damage or risk, but also in the day-to-day, it really is this backbone of why we have weather predictions and why we know what the weather is going to do next in the first place is largely thanks to NOAA data.

and the weather service. And of course, we do have private companies that offer some of these predictions. That's usually what you see through your smartphone weather app or on the weather channel or on the evening news. I don't know if anybody still looks at the weather section and printed papers anymore, but that's ultimately where that information comes from. And that's sort of what's at risk right now. Yeah, all that comes from NOAA. We are talking about the effect of mass firings at NOAA more after the break. Stay with us.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about the Trump administration's recent terminations of more than 800 jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service and their implications for public safety and scientific research that affect our daily lives. We're with Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. And with you, our listeners, we're

Have you been affected by NOAA layoffs, either directly or indirectly? Have you collaborated with NOAA on scientific research? Share your experience. What questions do you have about how you'll be affected by the job losses at NOAA or...

reductions in the kind of work that NOAA does potentially. You can email forum at kqed.org, find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram threads at KQED Forum. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Kevin writes, I eat food, ride in airplanes occasionally, and breathe air during the fire season. So yes, I am affected by the NOAA layoffs. NOAA provides raw data, which is then crunched by many organizations, some public, some private, to improve our lives. Diane on Blue Sky writes, the answer to the question, are you affected by the NOAA layoffs, unilaterally is yes. Another listener writes, I thought the only federal employees who could be terminated were workers who were only in their jobs for a short time.

Did NOAA have that many newbies? How long is the probationary period? Does it also affect people who were recently promoted? The answer to that is yes, right? So Daniel, these cuts have targeted quote-unquote probationary employees or relatively new hires. But what do we need to understand about what that means? Yeah, and I think this was...

Almost a casualty of the rush to characterize what was going on is that there were a lot of folks I don't think who really understand what the term probationary means in this context, which really just means people who were relatively recently hired. In many cases, these folks were hired to fill either critical staffing gaps that had been long pre-existing or

or to essentially find new expertise in areas that were emerging as very important in these organizations. That's one class of people who were terminated without any real warning or justification.

And by the way, depending on where you were in the agency, recent in this context means anywhere from one to three years. There were some people who had been working for almost three years and were considered probationary new hires in this context. And then also, as you mentioned, some of the most experienced people who were very, very high performing employees who had recently received benefits.

promotions. There are certain types of promotions in the federal government that essentially when you receive them due to excellent performance over years or even decades, you're then considered a newly probationary employee in your new, more senior role. And so some of those folks too were terminated in this first round of firings at NOAA and in other federal agencies as well. So

In many ways, what happened was some of the most critically needed people were terminated, the people who were coming in to fill existing gaps and the people who were arguably the most experienced in some of their senior roles as well. So it's almost the opposite of who you would choose to select for targeted reductions in force if you were trying to maintain operational efficiency.

And so these early losses, and I guess I have to say early because as you were saying, and I mentioned also in our introduction, you know, NOAA is being asked to look for further cuts and to submit a plan that includes an additional thousand workers by tomorrow. I mean, what are you hearing have been the effects of these early losses?

losses, job losses and resignations. I had read a piece about weather balloons. Why is that such a critical and important thing for us to be able to launch on a regular basis? Yeah, and I would preface this with two caveats. One is that I'm not a primary source here. I'm not a federal employee or in the Weather Service. So it's all sort of secondhand and thirdhand, although I've been hearing a lot of things secondhand and thirdhand. And also, you

I think the full toll is largely untold still for two reasons. One is that there is a really striking reluctance, almost absolute reluctance among federal employees that I've talked to who remain employed by the federal government to speak about any of this, even informally as a colleague, let alone on the record to journalists.

And also there is just generally mass confusion. Nobody really seems to know what is going on all the way from the day-to-day folks who are working the 24 hour shifts to protect life and property to people who are managers or supervisors at the national and regional level. Nobody really seems to have any good idea about what's going on. There've been numerous absolutely conflicting internal memos sent out as frequently as every six to 12 hours.

that are mutually contradictory, ordering people to do things that would be in direct conflict with the previous memos. I just want to contextualize this with, sort of give us a sense of what it's like internally, and also that I don't think that all of the potential consequences have been clearly articulated. But what we have heard, one of the things, as you mentioned, is these

reductions in staffing for people to perform or repair critical meteorological instrumentation. I suspect this also extends to hydrologic instrumentation and probably seismological instrumentation to the extent that it also applies to entities like the Department of Interior, USGS, you know, I mean, I don't know all of the details there. But

But these require people essentially to release, in the case of weather balloons, they're known as radio songs, essentially these large helium-filled balloons that carry weather instruments all the way up into the stratosphere that are released at regular times consistently from specific places all around the world. NOAA is the agency that does that in the US and its territories.

And there have indeed been locations, especially across the northern tier of the U.S., so Alaska and Maine and other places, where these launches are actually really important because we don't have as much other types of weather instrumentation in these regions anymore.

Those let us know what's going on with the weather in the moment, but more importantly, allow us to give correct information to weather models to predict future weather. And these weather balloons are not just important locally. The weather balloons launched in Alaska very much matter for predicting weather, say, in California or the Rocky Mountains or the central U.S., because most of that weather is going from west to east. So what's happening out west over the Pacific and Alaska very much is important for what happens elsewhere.

We've also seen or heard of reductions in staff to repair, for example, local weather radar sites. So these are, you know, these Doppler radar sites, you see the imagery on the news, you know, these bright colors representing precipitation, rain or snow, depending on where you are.

These are ground-based observation platforms. There's about 160 of them in the U.S. And as you might expect, they tend to break down a lot. They have a lot of moving parts, a lot of complex electronics. And so they do require highly specialized parts and personnel technicians to repair them on a semi-regular basis.

Some of these people in certain parts of the country are who were fired recently, and there is a shortage of personnel to fix these, from what I'm hearing, when they do break, and they do periodically break under normal circumstances. And finally, we have the fact that there were indeed, despite numerous assurances that this would not happen to life safety relevant personnel, people who are actively on 12-hour shifts every

monitoring the weather to issue severe weather warnings when relevant, there were actually meteorologists who were fired. And it sounds like that might happen again in the second round. People who, you know, are on duty, literally, the people who would issue, you know, if there's a tornado outbreak, the tornado warnings or in a flash flood, the flash flood warnings, right?

Or in the case, perhaps closer to recent experience in California, these extreme fire weather warnings like the ones we saw in the lead up to the devastating events in Los Angeles earlier this year. So, you know, there's all of this happening.

And of course, the agency is still functioning at large with these order 10% cuts, but there are real concerns that in these local field offices all around the country, the next time there's really a major extreme weather event, that there simply won't be enough people.

personnel available to fill all the needed roles. And in those moments is where there could be gaps that become dangerous, a tornado that goes without a warning, but not enough personnel, meteorologists locally to send, for example, what's known as an incident meteorologist to a major wildfire. So the weather service will send specific highly qualified meteorologists to sort of be the onsite meteorologist during major fire or disaster events and

there's real concern that there just isn't the staffing level this year to do that anymore, as has been standard practice for many years. So just some specific examples of where we are with these 10% cuts.

I think the consequences would be far greater than, you know, the consequences of an additional 10% cut are going to be larger than a 10% increase in the impacts, I think, at this point. Yeah. We're talking with climate scientist Daniel Swain and listeners. What questions do you have about the cuts at NOAA? How have you been affected? Have you been directly affected by the NOAA cuts?

terminations. And what do you wish more people knew or understood about the work that Noah does? You can call us at 866-733-6786, post on our social channels, Blue Sky, Instagram, Threads. You can email forum at kqed.org.

Richard writes, are Trump's NOAA cuts part of a larger effort to privatize government services, save money, or downplay the threat of climate change? Similarly, Emily writes, what are Dr. Swain's personal and professional thoughts on why this is happening? Certainly, Daniel, there's no secret that Project 2025 called NOAA essentially a

the main driver of the climate change alarm industry and called for dismantling it and privatizing its functions.

What do you think is the reason? And if it is privatization, is that the answer? Could private companies replace NOAA? Yeah, I mean, I think that there was, prior to the November election last year, a fair bit of skepticism from some folks that Project 2025 and the architects of it would be particularly relevant in a second Trump administration. It's very clear at this point that that was not the case, that this is very relevant to

almost serving, I think, based on just what we've seen since January 20th, is a prescriptive policy document pretty explicitly describing a lot of

priorities that have been put into motion, I think, since already in the early weeks of the new presidential administration. So I think it's fair to talk about that document specifically as essentially a blueprint. And there is, as you mentioned, a section specifically devoted to NOAA and the National Weather Service

I talked about this a little bit back in October and November last year because I found what was described in the section about Noah to be alarming even at that time, partly because it doesn't come out of the blue. These are arguments that I have heard in other circles before, but this is a more coherent and formalized version of these arguments.

mainly that because, as you pointed out, the document describes NOAA as being part of the "climate change alarm industry," which is not an objective statement of fact, of course, but is an assertion made in the document, it is argued that NOAA should thus be essentially dismantled and that the National Weather Service specifically should be privatized.

So those are really dramatic words to describe huge changes to these agencies that offer critical public safety functions and have done so for decades. World-class organizations that actually don't really have a clear peer equivalent in other countries and have long been, in fact, the envy of other countries that wish they had an American-like National Weather Service, for example,

So, that is explicitly called out in this document as a desirable aim. But there's actually one further comment in the Project 2025 section on NOAA that I personally thought was maybe even more telling about the bigger picture. And I haven't heard as many folks pick up on this, but I actually have it in front of me right now, so I'll just read it verbatim.

And the quote in the Project 2025 section about NOAA is this, this industry's mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. To me, this really speaks to a fundamental rift in what the whole purpose of this type of scientific enterprise is, which is

to serve the public by preventing bad outcomes, either preventing disasters or making inevitable ones less bad by trying to foresee the future in a certain sense. It's actually kind of a remarkable goal to predict the future as it relates to weather or tsunamis or wildfires, whatever the hazards might be, and presumably then to make the outcome of those events less bad than they would have been. And NOAA and the Weather Service do fantastically well

good job at that. Historically, in fact, a better and better job of that over time. And the idea that this shouldn't even be something we try to do, so not even an argument that for Noah doesn't do it well in this context, but in this document, the whole notion of even trying to predict the future to help people and to prevent personal or

economic harm even, is not a desirable function of government, of the public sector at all. And so...

I have to take this document at its word, given that one of its chief architects, Russell Vogt, for example, is at such a senior level in this new presidential administration. It really does seem like this is a checklist. And if we view it as such, I think it's a little bit easier to understand the why of this, at least as it's articulated internally.

Obviously, I don't agree with any of this professionally or personally, but I think it is helpful to sort of understand maybe what the broader motivation is here. And even if they did recognize the value of weather prediction, for example, right? Is there a private infrastructure that is just waiting in the wings ready to be deployed with NOAA's downfall and the work that it does?

No, and I'm glad you brought that up. The answer is very definitively and flatly no. And I think this is a widespread misperception that there is sort of this totally parallel and independent private sector. So weather companies or wildfire companies, windmills.

that sort of are out there and exist independent of NOAA and the public sector and can sort of just step in to provide the services that NOAA provides like for like, apples for apples without a whole lot of additional effort. And what is so remarkable about this is that every single person I've interacted with and that I've seen quoted in the news in the last few weeks about this in the private sector

completely disagree with that statement, as do I, which is that the folks in the private sector, just to be clear, agree that the private sector cannot on its own replace NOAA in any substantive form in the near or even medium-term future because NOAA provides the backbone for the private weather sector. The private weather sector is using NOAA data from NOAA satellites and

And NOAA weather radars and NOAA weather stations and NOAA weather balloons and from NOAA weather models. You know, I know I'm deliberately being a little bit repetitive here, but I think you get the idea. Like these fundamentally, the private weather sector couldn't operate without NOAA because it wouldn't have any basic data to work with. And so that's not to say that the private sector isn't doing something worthwhile or important or that the private sector, uh,

collaborations with NOAA and the Weather Service and other federal entities couldn't be expanded and improved. In fact, I think there's a strong argument that both would mutually benefit. So the irony here is that the kernel of truth is that I think we have perhaps under leveraged those public private partnerships over time in a way that Europe, the European equivalent of NOAA, that ECMWF has actually done

a bit of a better job of in recent years. So I actually do think we should see more involvement of the private sector. And yet the notion that the private sector can just be a like for like replacement for NOAA and its critical public functions is just a complete misunderstanding of the role of NOAA and its importance, partly because NOAA is a

public entity funded by taxpayer dollars, it is explicitly acting in the interest of the American people in terms of protecting American lives and the American economy, which is not necessarily going to be the mandate of any private company. It's unclear how you could make a profit off of doing that. No, nor would a private company be shielded from legal liability if they make an incorrect prediction, for example, not the way that the government entity would.

We'll have more with Daniel Swain after the break. Stay with us. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about

The recent mass terminations at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and their implications for public safety and research, the effects on our daily lives. We're joined by Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. You, our listeners, are sharing your thoughts, concerns, and questions as well at 866-733-6786.

at the email address forum at kqed.org and on our social channels on Blue Sky and Instagram and so on. I'd like to bring in Heather Welch, who is now a former research biologist at NOAA Fisheries, who worked on the NOAA Climate, Ecosystems, and Fisheries Initiative in Monterey, California. Heather, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. So your role was technically probationary, but you worked with NOAA for years right before your title changed?

That's right. I started with NOAA as an affiliate in 2015 in New Jersey. And then in 2016, I moved to Monterey, California, also as an affiliate. So an affiliate is not technically a federal employee. We're contractors. And then last year in April, I changed from an affiliate to a federal employee. And ironically, it was that small change that put me on the new hire probationary list.

The new hire probationary list. And then like a previous guest, Kayla, did you find out about your job loss in an email? That's right. I got an email on February 27th around 1230 p.m. Pacific. And I was told my termination was effective 90 minutes later. So 5 p.m. Eastern. 90 minutes later. So then how were you able to wrap up your projects and do all the things you needed to do in 90 minutes?

I mean, I wasn't. I had to walk away from years worth of work without clear people in place to continue it, without plans for how that work would be managed. It was truly, you know, just grab the most important things, which is your employee personnel records, your pay slips. And the work really just had to be set aside. And it's very unclear how or if it will continue. Yeah.

Talk about your work, Heather, what you did for NOAA Fisheries. I was an ecologist. So that means I study how marine animals relate to the environment. So I built what's called species distribution models. They are models that explain how animals like leatherback turtles, blue whales or elephant seals relate to environmental conditions like temperature, currents, upwelling, etc.,

And we can use these models sort of like a weather forecast to predict where animals are going to be today, so where they are right now. And then we can run them into the future to predict where they're going to be next month, next year, even out to the end of the century to 2100. So using these models, we can start to understand the climate impacts on animals. And we use these models to help industries avoid human-wildlife conflict.

So, for example, we might give a weather forecast of blue whales to the shipping industry to help them avoid ship striking blue whales. I imagine that information is very useful. So, Heather, are you challenging your termination? And if so, in what ways? Yeah, I've submitted an appeal to the Office of Special Counsel. That's a

federal branch where we've been encouraged to sort of document our terminations and make appeals. It's unclear if we are covered under the OSC, given that we're probationary employees.

Also, the appeal required understanding all the rules and regulations that guide NOAA employment. And we're not lawyers. It's unclear if I filled it out correctly. I've also tried to join the class action suits. But again, it's unclear if I will be eligible. I understand you recently bought a home after you

Got your full employment with NOAA after being a contractor for a while, but now you're looking for a new job. How are you feeling about that? What are you seeing and thinking about your prospects? It's certainly financially stressful. I think if I had had a crystal ball, I would not have bought a house. I'm a lot less mobile in terms of being able to relocate for work.

I've applied for unemployment. So certainly it's it's I was not expecting to not have a steady paycheck. And then I think it's it's just dark in terms of science and scientific opportunities in the US right now. There's an influx of highly qualified workers who are recently terminated. We're all going to be searching for similar jobs. And at the same time, there's the threat of federal funds drying up.

So even private industries like universities were reliant on federal funding. They would write grants to NOAA and NASA to fund their academic research. And so I'm not sure how much money private institutions will have to bring on new employees. I know some universities are canceling their postdocs and PhD positions due to concerns over funding.

Heather, thank you so much for talking with us about your experience and for also just giving an insight into the incredible ripple effects that these cuts are having. And I also just wish you luck and the best, as I know what you're facing must be incredibly heartbreaking. Heather Welch, a terminated research biologist at NOAA Fisheries.

Many of you listeners are sharing your thoughts and questions as well. And let me go to caller Carly in Sacramento. Hi, Carly, you're on. Hello. Can you hear me okay? I can. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me and providing the space to share our stories. Well, thank you for calling in. How are you doing, Carly?

I am doing okay overall. It is obviously very disheartening and a bit frustrating. I was a brand new employee in our Sacramento office. I started January 13th and received my termination letter as well on February 27th.

So just over a month with the agency. But I definitely grew a love for the people and the mission. And again, just very disheartened by all that's going on. What did you do for the hatchery?

Yeah, I, so I actually, as Daniel had mentioned, I was hired on to fill an existing gap. So right now there's a huge backlog of hatchery genetic management plans, which are basically like recipe books for, um,

hatcheries to properly manage the output of their fish totals for California and ultimately, you know, sustain both our inland and ocean fisheries economy in the U.S. So I was brought on to help address that backlog, to work directly with hatchery managers,

and to meet goals for basically getting numbers of fish out for the commercial fishers along our coast. And meanwhile, I was, you know, my termination letter says that, you know, the agency no longer needs your skills and abilities. So in direct contrast with why I was hired, which, yeah.

Oh, Carly. Well, thank you so much for calling in to share what you are going through. Um,

And this listener, Nancy, writes, I did some work related to California's Department of Water Resources years ago. Agriculture is an enormous part of the California economy, and its decision-making depends heavily on water forecasts, which in turn depend on weather data and forecasts. Cuts to NOAA could have serious implications for California in our economy in many, many ways. Daniel, I know that you have been hearing from a lot of people, concerned people like Nancy, people who were formerly California,

workers at NOAA as well. And you also said people from the private sector and so on. So what are the prospects for these folks? Joan is writing, it sounds like some of what NOAA does has international consequences. Is it possible for Canada to recruit NOAA staff to continue their jobs? I'm just wondering what you are seeing on the horizon or how you answer questions or concerns about where to take your skills if you worked for NOAA?

Well, there certainly are cascading international implications. Just as a bit of an aside, I've already heard from folks in Europe and India who work in meteorological agencies there saying that existing and further research

or planned cuts to NOAA would directly affect their operations because, again, NOAA provides this backbone for so much of the raw data that goes into all of this. But I think that on the career and employment side of things,

This is a tough moment. As we heard earlier in this conversation, there are only so many jobs in the private sector that are equivalent or similar to what exists in the public sector. And that's partly because much of what the public sector is trying to do in this space is

different than what the private sector is trying to achieve, but it's also just a scale mismatch. You know, there are perhaps dozens, maybe low hundreds of relevant jobs potentially available in the private sector right now. And I've been trying to connect as many folks as I can who are interested in hiring and who've lost their jobs. You know, most of my relevant connections are in the weather, climate and wildfire world, as you might expect, given what I study. But

You know, the challenge is, I think, if there are, especially if there are further reductions, and it's not just NOAA, of course, there are people at NASA, there are people at other federal agencies, NSF, who have also, USGS, other Department of Interior branches, all of whom have been terminated and are or are expecting to be further terminated in the near future. And many of these folks are going to be competing for

for the same job. So here is where is the question well beyond NOAA and what is the ability of the private sector to absorb a lot of this? The answer is there are some companies that are scaling up hiring to sort of take advantage of this in the US. But by scaling up in most cases, I literally mean adding two, three, four new roles. So not a tremendous number of them.

There are other countries that are definitely stepping up. We've heard that China and other countries in Western and Central Europe, governments and universities there are sort of realizing that there is likely to be a bit of a brain drain, as it were, from the U.S. And so they are slightly scaling up to accommodate. But I think the reality is there is going to be a mismatch, ultimately, between the number of people who have

highly specialized skills that took either many years of experience and or many years of formal education and training to get there that have a lot of

and public benefit that can come from them that may not immediately be able to find work in the private sector that allows them to continue to use those skills. And so for practical reasons, I think we're going to see some attenuation. I certainly wouldn't blame any individuals for changing their career trajectory and taking those skills and doing something different with them. But I think what will be a shame is

is that if we lose hundreds or even thousands of people who had very specialized expertise that was very aligned with

preventing harm and providing public benefits who through no fault of their own were terminated and need to find employment doing something else that may not be directly utilizing those skills. And therefore they may not be directly benefiting the public in the same way that they would be as public servants in that dedicated role. So this isn't really anyone's fault individually. I think it's just going to be an inevitable reality that the public

The private sector does not exist to provide the level, the number of jobs, essentially, that we know would be needed to match everybody who's losing theirs right now in the federal government. And

This is true beyond science, beyond NOAA, of course. There are lots of other federal employees also losing their jobs. But I'm focusing on this angle of it specifically because there truly isn't a private sector that is as vast as the public sector in the space. And so here, I think, is where there just is an enormous mismatch.

Noelle on Discord writes, Musk and Trump masquerade as being concerned about government waste and fraud. The Doge boys have no idea what NOAA does. They go to the various agencies just to break things. And in fact, they're breaking morale even more. We can't allow this unelected mob to do whatever they want.

Another listener writes, better weather forecasting is often named as one of the keys to the green revolution and thus to our economy. California, USA, and the world. A little bit of money saved on NOAA salaries means higher food prices, fewer food choices, more failed crops, more crops not planted. It's a bad deal for all of us. Let me remind listeners you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

We've been hearing a lot about, and you have touched on just the economic benefits of NOAA. I think you've even described it in the past as like, you know, 10 times the economic benefit is what it provides versus what it costs to operate, right? It's a $6.8 billion industry with some 12,000 workers, which on the scale of some other government agencies is relatively small. No, Daniel? Yeah, I mean, the, you know, the, the

The way to quantify the public benefit of NOAA or the National Weather Service, there are a lot of ways to do it. And there have been formal attempts to do so. And the general idea is that the weather service itself costs individual Americans probably about $4 per person per year. And NOAA, the broader umbrella agency, may be more like $10.

$10 to $15 a year, which when you realize the vast scope of the public benefits that accrue from the Weather Service and from NOAA more broadly, in terms of either losses averted, so essentially bad things that don't happen to individual properties or individual cities or economies, and

by having those good predictions of when storms or wildfires or other kinds of disasters might unfold, whether it's a tsunami or something else. And also through the more mundane, but still critically important day-to-day routine efficiencies gained. And one simple example is, you

you know, the airlines when they're routing aircraft, you know, the primary, uh, constraint is safety of course, but then there is a secondary constraint of fuel efficiency. And sometimes aircraft will take a longer path if it allows them to burn less fuel between point A and point B, uh, you get a stronger tailwind or something that pushes you along, or you at least avoid a headwind, for example, those are the, you know, every single airplane trip, uh,

has a higher financial and pollution cost, frankly, if it doesn't take that optimal path. And that optimal path is largely dictated by the information. So there's all these little pieces of economic benefit, efficiencies gained, losses averted, that accrue day after day, week after week, and year after year. And the general notion is that the return on investment is, as you mentioned, at least, at bare minimum,

10 to 1, so $10 gain for every dollar spent on these sorts of activities at the federal level. But more holistic estimates are that it's probably closer to 100 to 1, so more like essentially almost $100 in benefit for every dollar spent, which is, you know, if you were to have a business with a 10 to 100 benefit,

you know, times return on investment, that would be a very successful business. And so I think the irony is that all of this is ostensibly in the name of improving efficiency and cutting waste, whereas really it just seems to be having the net effect of doing precisely the opposite of that in practice. And I think it does largely come from the fact that I don't think there's a lot of understanding by the people imposing these cuts that

or perhaps by the public in general, just how enormously cost-effective and beneficial these critical public functions provided by NOAA and the Weather Service actually are.

Well, the Zistner writes, good data reduces deaths, fewer air crashes, hurricane deaths. It reduces costs and helps the economy so businesses know how much to spend on storm preparation or know when it's safe to stay open. Another listener on Blue Sky writes, I'm a former meteorology major and storm chaser. It's impossible to estimate how many lives...

NOAA has saved. In 2011, 223 tornadoes touched down in a single day. Forecasters were monitoring the region that was hit a week in advance of the first tornado touchdown. 48 hours ahead of time, they were already sounding alarm bells and recommending public venues and events be closed down. If that information was privatized, we would have no guarantee it would have been decimated to the general public or even forecasted properly.

Daniel Swain, thank you so much for talking with us and just giving us the context and impact of all of this. Really appreciate it. Yes, thanks again for having me. Daniel Swain is a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Thank you, listeners, for sharing how you've been directly and indirectly affected and your appreciation for NOAA. And thank you, Caroline Smith, for producing this segment. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.