Alabama’s preeminent meteorologist defended workers with the National Weather Service on Tuesday as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency takes aim at the agency overseeing the NWS with job and budget cuts.

Hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees on probationary status were fired Thursday, lawmakers and weather experts said, as billionaire Elon Musk aims to shrink a federal workforce that President Donald Trump has called bloated and sloppy.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the latest federal agency to have been targeted by Elon Musk's DOGE committee. This week, the Commerce Department began

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has targeted federal agencies like USAID, CFPB, and NOAA to reduce government spending.

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Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said on social media that the job cuts "are spectacularly short-sighted, and ultimately will deal a major self-inflicted wound to the public safety of Americans and the resiliency of the American economy to weather and climate-related disasters.”

The people who once ran the federal weather and oceans agency say it touches people’s daily lives in unnoticed ways and that massive firings there could cause needless deaths and a big hit to America’s economy.

Leaders at a key US weather and science agency are compiling a list of employees who didn’t respond to an email asking them to explain what they did last week, an infraction that both President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said put the workers’ jobs at risk.

Hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees on probationary status have been fired, lawmakers and weather experts say. Federal workers w