The National Weather Service on Thursday announced that it is suspending weather balloon releases in eight locations around the country, after co-President Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency slashed jobs at the agency indiscriminately leading to critical staff shortages.
“Effective immediately, and until further notice, the National Weather Service (NWS) is temporarily suspending weather balloon observations … due to a lack of Weather Forecast Office (WFO) staffing. Offices will perform special observations as needed,” the NWS said in a statement.
Two locations—one in Omaha, Nebraska, and another in Rapid City, South Dakota—will no longer release weather balloons. Six others—in South Dakota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, and Wyoming—will reduce weather balloon releases to once per day.
Weather forecasters say fewer balloons means weather reports will be less accurate because there won't be as much data for forecasters to model.
Related | Stormy forecast as DOGE axes weather agency workers
"I can't imagine April 26th of last year without having known what the atmosphere was," Omaha's Chief Meteorologist Bill Randby told a local Nebraska television station, referring to a tornado outbreak in 2024 that destroyed hundreds of homes and killed one person. "Having that detailed information was critical in trying to figure out when tornadoes were going to form, how quickly they might form. If you had staff to do it this morning, but now you don't have staff to do it this, this evening says that this decision was made by somebody that doesn't understand weather."
Less accurate weather forecasts endanger lives, as accurate predictions of severe weather lead to evacuations and storm preparation that keep populations safe.
According to a 2023 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, “Making forecasts 50% more accurate would save 2,200 lives per year.”
NWS is cutting critical weather reporting functions as severe weather season is about to start, such as tornado season in the Midwest.
Trump holds up a map he marked up with a Sharpie to try to edit the path of Hurricane Dorian in September 2019.
“These cuts at 8 NWS stations aren't just a Midwest problem,” storm chaser Ryan Hall, who runs a popular YouTube channel dedicated to weather reporting, wrote in a post on X. “Fewer weather balloon launches means less atmospheric data feeding into national forecast models. Weather doesn't respect state lines, and neither does bad data.”
Of course, President Donald Trump—who deputized DOGE to make these cuts and is responsible for whatever negative impacts those cuts have—doesn’t care about accurate weather forecasting.
Who could forget when he used a Sharpie to amend a hurricane path forecast. Trump had inaccurately said that a storm was going to hit Alabama, and when the actual expert reports showed that was wrong, he took the sharpie and drew an additional circle to claim the storm was going to hit Alabama.
Ultimately, Musk’s DOGE effort was supposed to make things more efficient.
Instead, the indiscriminate cuts he’s helped Trump make to the federal government’s staff and funding have only made things worse.
DOGE cuts are threatening Social Security payments, veteran health care, medical research, tax filing, national parks access, and more.
And now the cuts are harming weather forecasting, with Randby telling the local Nebraska television station that the blanket cuts DOGE made to the NWS without determining their impacts is only making things worse.
"If you're going to cut weather balloons, there are probably better ones that could be cut that wouldn't impact the ability of forecasters, in severe weather areas like this," Randby said. "To have a void of data right in the middle will make it harder for the computer models to be accurate all across the country."
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