CNN One Thing

We in the tornado! Oh *** We need all hands on deck!

Over the last couple of days, as a spate of tornadoes and violent weather tore through multiple states, you've heard one common thing from survivors. Just how quickly it all happened.

Suddenly, all the doors shut, the windows flew out from the bedroom, the entire back of my house, this was my dressing room.

From Kansas to Kentucky to Missouri to Virginia, once the storms arrived, there was very little time to move to safe.

The warning was issued around 2 34 p.m. 7 minutes later that's when st. Louis was hit so hard and now they're reckoning with the cleanup of all of them

Many people did not survive this, though. As I record this, at least 28 people have been killed. Officials say storms like these drive home the message you hear all the time. Pay attention to alerts from the National Weather Service, and when they say take shelter, you better do it. But what happens when your local National Weather service office doesn't have enough staff to keep the lights on 24 hours a day? Today, CNN climate and weather senior reporter Andrew Freedman explains how doge cuts have left the agency scrambling for staffing with hurricane season fast approaching, and a former meteorologist tells us why the agency's mission is more crucial than ever. From CNN, this is One Thing, I'm David Rind. So, Andrew, you've been doing some reporting into staffing shortages at the National Weather Service. What's going on here?

Yeah, so mostly as a result of the Trump administration's push to downsize government, they put in a number of programs that wound up causing 560, a little over 560 weather service employees to leave. Now, this is either through the firing of probationary workers or early retirement incentives or buyout. So, going into this, the Weather Service was already short staffed, and this has now placed the Weather service in one of its lowest staff points in many, many decades.

And so what does that actually look like at these offices around the country?

'It varies from office to office. They have 122 weather forecast offices around the country, but really it means that offices are missing between two forecasters and nine forecaster and technicians. And it means that they're not doing all of the services that they were doing. So for example, they're now launching weather balloons at every location twice a day. They're now not staffing certain weather service forecast offices on a 24-7 basis, which has long been the standard, considering that weather events happen at any time of day or night. Right. The weather doesn't work business hours. Exactly. And it's also causing just a lot of fatigue. That's really a top concern of a lot of weather service people that I talk to is this issue of burnout. They're trying to fill about 155 open positions. These are not people that they are hiring new. These are people who they are trying to get to transfer from one location to fill a critical vacancy somewhere else. So they're just plugging holes basically. They're plugging holes and trying to get a hiring freeze lifted, specifically to try to get the National Weather Service to be considered a public safety agency, just like the National Defense, just like Armed Forces, just like others are.

I gotta say, I'm pretty surprised that it wasn't considered that already, just in light of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, all stuff like that.

Yeah, it just, they haven't had that exemption. They've tried, we'll see if they get one, but it's caused a lot of problems. The hiring freeze is identified as really the biggest block to getting more staffing there.

Why get rid of weather forecasters? It seems like most Americans would be on board with making sure there are enough folks to warn us about incoming weather events. Am I, am I missing something?

You're not missing something necessarily. I mean, in the past, there have been pushes to privatize the National Weather Service. This was a suggestion or recommendation from Project 2025 to fully commercialize the national weather service, but that doesn't seem to be what the Trump administration is trying to do. It almost seems to me like these are unintended consequences at the weather service. Rather than a clear malicious campaign to take it apart or do something else with it, at least for now.

And that would fit in with what we've seen with other Doge cuts across the federal government, that just the haphazard approach that's been taking has led to some key positions being eliminated, and then the administration's like, oh, we gotta fix this.

Yeah, I mean it happened with nuclear security workers, it happens at all sorts of agencies and it seems to be happening that way across NOAA and the National Weather Service.

I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA is not good.

What happens after the storms blow through though? Because Trump has talked about maybe getting rid of FEMA altogether, or at least radically transforming it. How is that agency approaching things?

You know, the situation at FEMA from my reporting colleagues who are covering it closely, they're basically saying that the agency is not ready for hurricane season. They don't have a very clear plan in this new paradigm that they're operating in.

The disaster relief agency, I'm quoting now, is not ready, end quote, for the start of the season, that according to an internal agency review obtained by CNN. This comes after the agency's previous acting administrator was fired last week after telling Congress that he did not believe the agency should be eliminated, which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to do.

And one of the things that you've got to realize is the outlook for the Atlantic hurricane season comes out late this week. Every forecaster, every private sector forecaster that's already weighed in is looking for an above average season. So more storms than average. But we've never come into a hurricane season with both the National Weather Service and FEMA experiencing such inner turmoil.

One FEMA official told me what Americans will see is a federal government that is either absent completely or, if present, sputtering to deliver response and recovery resources.

'So there's a lot of things that are not happening, like the FEMA pre-hurricane season trainings that they have with state and local governments that has not been happening, that hasn't been happening on the weather service level either. So we're going into this in a more depleted capacity rather than coming in, prepositioning all the aid and everything. The question of what happens after the storm in this hurricane season. Is very much an open question.

'More broadly, even beyond day-to-day weather forecasting or storm cleanup, I've been thinking a lot about how much the Biden administration worked to emphasize climate change and climate impacts within various parts of their agenda. Now, I think activists may look at how much oil drilling was actually being done during Biden's term and say, hey, this was not really meeting the mark, no matter what they say, but at least it was being talked about and studied. This second Trump administration, meanwhile, is actively hostile towards the idea of climate change, climate research, let alone anything like climate justice or ambitious green energy solutions. You've been talking to a lot of people who do this work. What is their mood right now?

I think there's been some actual surprise about the level of hostility that this administration has to anything related to climate.

Like they knew it was bad, but they didn't know it was going to be this bad.

'Yeah, they knew he would pull out of the Paris agreement. They knew he'd try to scuttle a lot of the anti-pollution regulations that the Biden administration put through. Those things were sort of a given. It was not a given that they'd actually be contemplating, which they seemed to be. Either not complying with the requirements of, or possibly even exiting the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is this 1992 agreement that the U.S. Signed under George H.W. Bush, which just basically commits us to generally working with other countries to help solve climate change. So there's certain steps, like the administration's not submitting a greenhouse gas registry or no longer keeping up our billion-dollar disaster database. There's certain things on the data front that are happening that are kind of making climate researchers more and more nervous. So things like this, you know, kind of more extreme measures, weren't fully anticipated, I don't think.

We got to take a break, but when we come back, I'm going to talk to someone who used to work for the National Weather Service who says staffing is just one part of the agency's challenges.

'For 17 years, Brian LaMarre was the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service office in Tampa, Florida. And if meteorologist-in-charge sounds like a really important title, that's because it is.

'So, say for example, during high-impact weather events such as hurricanes across Florida, I would often be providing the decision support, the interviewing with local, national media, also with elected officials and with emergency managers across West Coast of Florida.

Brian says when he started his career, between 5 and 6,000 people worked for the National Weather Service. Since then, he's seen that number gradually decline, thanks to burnout and a lack of interest in government work. And now, a combination of early retirements and firings from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have reduced that number even more, to less than 4,000.

And I think that's dangerous because we need a fully staffed, we need robust national weather service in order to make sure that warnings are out there, that make sure people have the data that they need. I will say the National Weather Service, even when a weather forecast office is fully staff, that is baseline staffing. So that is for clear weather staffing. So when typically a weather forecast office has the 20 to 25 people, that is their full staff, when active weather comes their way, the office still has to amplify the staffing, bring people in on overtime. And so now that we're seeing even more significant short staffing, it becomes a problem. And so the National Weather Service has been looking at plans over the past few months in order to help fill that gap.

'Yeah, I was going to say, because over the weekend, these tornadoes, especially in Kentucky, the office in Jackson, Kentucky is one of those places that is short on employees. And it wasn't being staffed 24-7 anymore. But the employees union said once it became clear that there would be a strong threat of storms, it called everyone in on Friday to make sure it was staffed overnight so that proper warnings could go out. But is that tenable to have this patchwork of mutual aid calling people in when it's, you know, really gets bad. It's a short-term fix.

'But when you do that at an office that's already short staffed, that's leaving an impact. It's not sustainable as we go forward. It needs to see increase in staffing to maintain that 24-7 mission.

Last September, Brian left his job in Tampa and took a new position with the National Weather Service on a team that was starting work on an ambitious plan to modernize the agency.

'The plan, as we go into the future, is about shifting the production of the day-to-day forecasting from the field offices to the national centers. And that's like the Weather Prediction Center, Storm Prediction center, Hurricane Center, and actually benefiting from some of the advanced technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning. But when we start shifting production away from the Field Office, that allows the Field office to focus more on interpretation of data. And the goal was to really start embedding some of the meteorologists and hydrologists, you know, positioning them with the actual decision makers inside the emergency operation centers at the local level, state level, federal level.

But then, just as the program was getting off the ground, Trump took office and Doge started cutting government staff and programs left and right. Brian actually took them up on their offer to retire early. He said the timing was just right for him. And he's now watching from the outside as the programs moves to its next phase with its future very much up in the air.

It's a clash where we have a hiring freeze right now. We're seeing reduction in budgets across the National Weather Service and across NOAA right now, the research part of NOAA, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, is the proposal is to significantly underfund that part of NoAA. And that is a lifeblood to the National weather service because that's where the research gets turned into operations. So I'm hopeful that a lot of the severe weather that has impacted people across the country is really going to start opening the eyes and the perspectives of people that are going to start realizing, hey, we need a really robust science part of our federal agency because it serves as the very foundation that enables the private sector, that enables broadcast media to get us the We need

Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask because we've heard arguments, you know, most recently from the heritage foundation and their project 2025 playbook that the national weather service should be privatized, take it out of the hands of the federal government or run it like any other private business. So like, what would be so bad about privatizing the national weather service?

'I think it would have significant negative cascading effects going into the future if the entire National Weather Service was privatized. I don't see that happening. I could see there could be certain components of the National Weather service that the administration would want to privatize. I still think there'd be negative consequences to doing so. The private sector benefits and profits off of the data that the National weather provides, you know, the National Weather Service. Is the foundation of data, is the foundation of life-saving warnings, whether it be for people on land or people navigating the oceans, the National Weather Service has that mandate from Congress to provide life- saving information for people that need it.

I guess I'm wondering about the average person. They're just looking at their weather app that's like preloaded on their iPhone and they say that's where they get their weather from, that's what the warnings come through who maybe don't have any idea about all these distinctions of where this stuff is actually coming from. And they may be like, you know, as long as I get the accurate temperature and the warnings, like I don't really care where it's coming from

Exactly, David, that's an excellent point. I would say I saw that a lot. I would see where the past maybe 15 years, especially the last 10 years were the expansion of social media, the expansion of many people that were diving into the weather enterprise, and they may or may not be a meteorologist. And they're providing information, but they're provided information that is from the National Weather Service. They're showing radar information when they're out there storm chasing. They're show... Observational networks, satellite data. That's from NOAA, that's from the U.S. Air Force, that's form the National Weather Service. The taxpayers have already funded the National Weather Service, it costs about, what is it, between four and five dollars per U. S. Citizen per year. And also as we saw over the weekend, we see every single year when it comes to tornadoes and hurricanes and blizzards and wildfires, that data is coming from the National Weather Service and the private sector takes it, uses it, adds value to it. And amplifies it so the public can better understand it. So it's a team effort. So that's why I think it's really dangerous if we start looking at underfunding the National Weather Service, if we started looking at underfunding science in the federal government, because that is where the rubber meets the road and that's where lives are saved.

Well, Brian, thanks so much for the perspective. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, David. Really great talking to you today.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Matt Martinez, Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Mark Duffy, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pessaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage. Just a reminder, we love hearing from you. You can leave a review and a rating on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. We're also on Spotify, literally wherever you get your podcasts, spread the word. I'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.