Here’s a nightmare scenario: You’re in the emergency room of a busy hospital and victims of accidents, disasters and diseases are streaming in. Nurses and doctors huddle around computer monitors displaying patients’ heart rates and oxygen levels. Suddenly, the screens go dark. Someone is going through the building pulling all the plugs.
This is happening now to the monitors tracking the Earth’s vital signs. As Trump administration operatives from what has been called the Department of Government Efficiency race through federal agencies firing staffers, freezing funds and canceling leases on facilities — purportedly to eliminate waste — they are effectively powering off systems that track mounting environmental dangers, from weather balloons to air pollution monitors to radar stations to atmospheric observatories. Their chain-saw-waving approach to cost-cutting will only leave us blind as we head deeper into the 21st-century maelstrom of supercharged hurricanes, extreme heat waves and toxic wildfire smoke.
Right now, satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are capturing real-time images of the weather churning across the planet’s surface. The agency’s ocean buoys and radar systems help the Coast Guard perform rescues and fishermen navigate shifting tides and currents.
Those instruments need humans to operate them. But over the past three weeks, NOAA has lost about 20 percent of its work force. Layoffs hit the satellite operations division based in Maryland, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. Hurricane season is right around the corner, yet staff on NOAA’s famous “Hurricane Hunters” teams, which fly into storms to measure their strength and assess their danger, were let go.
The agency’s scientists help build the forecasting models used to predict what the weather will look like next week, and what your children’s climate might look like half a century from now. Farmers use the agency’s weather data to plan their crop planting and harvesting, and urban firefighters rely on it to anticipate high wind events and prepare for downed power lines and evacuations. But staffing reductions at NOAA’s National Weather Service offices have suspended the launch of weather balloons that collect wind, temperature and humidity readings from Alaska to Albany.
These cuts threaten your budget, too. Insurance companies rely heavily on data gathered by NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey to assess wildfire, flood, wind and other risks. Some firms are warning that any interruption in data availability could drive insurance premiums for customers even higher. Other layoffs at the U.S.G.S. could undermine programs that monitor drought and flood conditions, hazardous spills and sewage overflows and the health of salmon fisheries off the Pacific Coast.
And then there’s air pollution. On March 4, the State Department announced that it would no longer share data gathered by air quality monitors at more than 80 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. With that decision, another one of the government’s most effective global monitoring efforts went dark.
Since the first air quality monitoring system was installed atop the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2008, the initiative has yielded a huge return on a modest investment by simply telling people what they’re breathing. During a particularly severe air pollution episode in November 2010, the Beijing monitor tweeted an automated message that air quality in the city had reached “crazy bad” levels. The programmers had written that message in jest, assuming that it would never be triggered because pollution levels would never get that bad. The tweet prompted news stories around the world, and the intense scrutiny helped compel China’s leaders to act. Fifteen years later, China’s air is much cleaner.
From Lagos to Karachi, U.S. Embassy monitors were among the only reliable sources of information about what residents were inhaling every day. One 2022 study found that the air quality readings triggered local policies that substantially reduced particulate matter concentrations, leading to reductions in premature deaths and saving an average of $127 million per city each year. The State Department cited “budget constraints” as the reason for shuttering the program. But the researchers found that the program saved the State Department money — it more than covered its costs by reducing compensation for embassy workers’ pollution exposure.
On top of all that, there’s a federal-building fire sale underway. DOGE has begun the process of canceling leases on hundreds of federal properties housing operations for the U.S.G.S., the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency and dozens of other agencies.
Another property lease DOGE has slated for cancellation is for a NOAA office in Hilo, Hawaii, that operates the Mauna Loa Observatory. This research station records one of the most consequential vital signs of all: rising levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Researchers say it will be difficult to run the observatory without that office’s technical support. Canceling the lease would save $150,692 a year, DOGE claims. That means the administration’s cost-cutters are essentially gambling with people’s futures and lives, unplugging lifesaving equipment to save a bit on electricity.
Federal judges recently deemed some of the Trump administration’s mass layoffs unlawful, and ordered that some fired probationary workers be temporarily reinstated across nearly 20 agencies. But the White House is telling agency heads to prepare for another large wave of staffing cuts — touted as the largest yet.
Some Republican leaders are making last-minute appeals for programs and facilities to be spared. “I am thrilled to announce that common sense has prevailed,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the Republican head of the House Appropriations Committee, wrote on X before intervening a few days later to save the radar facility that NOAA operates in his district, which is squarely in Tornado Alley. Over the weekend, as dust storms and wildfires tore through Oklahoma and dozens of deadly tornadoes struck Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri, that facility issued lifesaving warnings. The storms have killed at least 36 people, but more would surely have perished without the advance alerts provided by the agency’s satellites and staff — a reminder of just how essential these weather centers are.
But ad hoc protection of single weather centers is not an efficient way to run a government. In the 21st century, with rising temperatures, rapidly intensifying storms and growing pandemic risks, we’re all in Tornado Alley. Common sense tells us that we need all the sentinels we have, and then some.
Jonathan Mingle is a journalist and the author of “Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future.”
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