June marks the start of hurricane season. On June 1, Miami-based meteorologist John Morales kicked off the season with an alarming message: The weather service might not be prepared for the extreme weather that could hit us this year. 

He begins with a clip of an old broadcast from 2019. In the clip, he reassures Floridians that Hurricane Dorian, a fierce category 5 hurricane, will turn, missing Florida entirely. But today, Morales says, “I am here to tell you that I am not sure I can do that this year.” 

Why? “Because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general,” he says. More specifically, Morales says this is due to the recent federal government cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Weather Service (NWS). 

Earlier this year, the NWS lost almost 600 positions due to cuts ordered by the Trump administration. Cuts to NOAA and NWS mean some weather stations are understaffed. There has also been a decrease in weather balloon launches, which can impact weather forecasting. Now, NOAA is scrambling to hire back some positions they had to cut. The Trump administration has proposed 30% budget cuts to NOAA for the 2026 fiscal year. 

In May, five former NWS directors wrote an open letter condemning the cuts. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.” 

“We know through history that without a forecast and warning system, disasters occur,” says Louis Uccellini, one of the former NWS directors who signed the open letter. Uccellini called the cuts arbitrary, cruel, and uninformed. “There's a collaborative relationship between the Weather Service and decision makers. And if you just arbitrarily start firing people, you start pulling that apart so you increase the risk. And that's a concern that we all should share,” he says. 

For now, Uccellini says weather service staff are going above and beyond to try and fill in the gaps. “We saw the example several weeks ago in Eastern Kentucky,” Uccellini says, referring to storms that killed at least 18 people in Kentucky. “The office was down to seven people. They planned their schedule so everybody was in [the office] the day of, the night of, the next day, and the next day. They were sleeping in that office so they wouldn't miss a beat. But that's not the situation you want people in when they got to make very difficult decisions.”