President Trump’s cuts to the federal government have touched many aspects of life in Alaska. Federal employees across a wide variety of agencies have lost their jobs — people planning road construction, forest rangers staffing visitor centers and maintaining trails, even biologists who monitor federal fisheries.
Some of those cuts have been reversed or paused due to ongoing court cases. But a lot of federal workers are in limbo, and the extent of the cuts isn’t always clear.
Alaska Public Media’s Eric Stone has focused on one agency in particular: the National Weather Service. He spoke to Alaska News Nightly host Casey Grove about what he’s found.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey Grove: First of all, why focus on the Weather Service?
Eric Stone: Everyone loves to talk about the weather, even if you’re just making small talk. And it makes sense, especially here, right? I don’t have to tell you — the weather here is terrible a lot of the time. And it’s a safety thing — you need to know the weather, regardless of whether you’re diving for sea cucumbers in Sitka, hunting seals on the sea ice in Utqiagvik, or flying out to your cabin pretty much anywhere in Alaska.
CG: And tell us what you’ve found — not just here, but around the country.
ES: So I started off here in Alaska. Pretty quickly, I found out that there were about two dozen people here who were no longer with the agency. About a 10% cut. And I should note here — I reached out to the federal government on a couple of occasions, telling them what I’d found, and they wouldn’t confirm anything. Not a big surprise — even the congressional delegation is having a hard time getting straight answers.
But I kept digging. I found out a lot more about the scale of the cuts across the country. There are at least 275 people who have left or been fired since Trump took office, a little less than a 10% cut. And the national Executive VP for the National Weather Service Employees Organization — that’s the union — told me the Weather Service was already short-staffed, and the cuts are threatening its ability to do the work it’s done for decades. The VP’s name is Brandon Dunstan — take a listen.
“There's national impacts with regard to, you know, some of the national centers that affect everybody, but there's also some of the local impacts to where you have weather forecast offices that are critically understaffed,” Dunstan said.
One of those critically understaffed offices is Fairbanks, which covers an area bigger than Texas. Tons of Interior Alaska, plus a gigantic chunk of Western Alaska and, of course, the Arctic. Dunstan told me they’re down about half from where they should be.
“When you're talking about a forecast staff of 15, and you've got, you know, seven forecasters out of the 15 down, that's critical staffing,” Dunstan said. “That's where we struggle to be able to maintain our operations.”
Some of those people were the probationary employees that we’ve heard so much about being fired across the federal government. Now, it’s important to note here that, number one, not all of the probationary workers at the Weather Service were fired, and number two, that the fired employees now have their jobs back, at least on paper, thanks to a court ruling. A lot, maybe all of them, are on administrative leave.
Meanwhile, there’s still weather happening and there’s still just as much work to do, just fewer people to do it. Folks are worried about burnout and stuff getting missed because meteorologists are overworked.
But I want to flag a big element of this that I don’t think has gotten enough press: the so-called Fork in the Road and the resignations that came with it.
CG: Oh yeah — that’s the email federal employees got a little while ago offering them a chance to resign and basically take a buyout, right?
ES: Exactly. And that has hollowed out some really key positions here in Alaska.
Some very senior people took the Fork in the Road — we’re talking the people who have tons of institutional knowledge about how forecasting and the Weather Service’s complicated network of weather stations works. Decades of experience walking out the door.
The Fork deadline passed a while ago, sometime last month. But we’re still expecting more people to leave.
Just a few days ago, the Commerce Department — which includes NOAA and the Weather Service — sent out an email offering another round of buyouts and early retirements. Folks have until mid-April to decide whether they’ll stay put or jump ship for the private sector. And there are plans for further layoffs, so you might see people take the sure thing and get out of Dodge instead of gambling on surviving the next round of cuts.
And the cuts — resignations and firings — are already having a tangible impact. The Weather Service has cut back on weather balloon launches, including in Kotzebue and at two sites down south in the Northeast. Experts tell me that makes forecasts less accurate around the world — there’s less data for weather models, so they make worse forecasts.
By the way — the people who develop those complicated mathematical weather models at the Weather Service’s Environmental Modeling Center? The union says nine of them were fired — we’re talking Ph.D-level scientists — and that center now has about half the staff it should. And that means updates to hurricane models might not be happening this year. Maybe not the biggest deal in Alaska, Typhoon Merbok notwithstanding, but a big deal around the country.
CG: But this isn’t just about people losing their careers, right? I mean, you said earlier that a lot of people depend on the Weather Service’s work.
ES: They sure do. I talked with a bunch of people about this, from weather experts to senators to people who care about staying safe in our harsh climate. A lot of people are up in arms.
Heck, Sen. Lisa Murkowski was just here in Juneau a few days ago, and she brought up the Weather Service as she condemned the cuts Trump is making across the government.
“Do we no longer recognize that our weather forecasters save lives in our state?” she said.
Sen. Dan Sullivan also got a question about it, too, from a Juneau state representative. He told people to fill out a form and tell his office why it makes Alaska less safe.
Marine safety folks are also worried. And of course, we get most of our cargo and a lot of our food from the ocean. Like, there’s a reason that Discovery Channel show is called Deadliest Catch. The weather can be absolutely brutal at sea.
I was talking to Ed Page — he’s a former Coast Guard captain who founded the Marine Exchange of Alaska — and he told me knowing the weather is literally more important than wearing a life jacket.
“Of the top 10 things you need to worry about when you go to sea, number one is, What’s the weather?” Page said.
That’s the view of some aviation folks I talked to, too. Adam White with the Alaska Airmen’s Association told me he understands the stated reasons for the cuts But he says knowing the weather is critical to anybody flying a plane in Alaska, or anywhere, and he’s worried.
“Even the people who are really excited that this is all happening, if they were honest, would admit that we probably should be careful how we do these things and not start amputating limbs just to fix a cut on the finger,” White said.
And with more cuts coming, there’s a lot to worry about.
Reach reporter Eric Stone at estone@alaskapublic.org, or chat securely on Signal at estone.15
_
