Noaa cuts El Niño risks: weakened US forecasting faces super El Niño, experts warn
Former Noaa officials and scientists say Noaa cuts have raised El Niño risks by badly weakening US weather forecasting just as a potentially historic super El Niño arrives this winter. The agency has lost roughly 20% of its staff since January 2025, according to a new report.
Noaa cuts El Niño risks: weakened US forecasting faces super El Niño, experts warn
Noaa cuts have created serious El Niño risks for the United States, former officials and scientists say, because the agency's forecasting capacity has been badly weakened just as a potentially historic super El Niño arrives this winter.
A workforce hollowed out
Sweeping cuts to Noaa under Donald Trump have severely hampered the country's capacity to forecast, research and respond to extreme weather, according to former officials and scientists cited in the report. The agency has lost roughly 20% of its staff since January 2025 - more than 3,000 staffers, per US office of personnel management workforce data last updated in August 2026, the biggest staffing drop in a decade.
- The public affairs team was roughly halved, and information technology management workers were reduced by roughly 27%.
- More than 500 science staffers were lost, with only 46 new hires; meteorologists and meteorology technicians were about 10% fewer going into autumn 2026.
- Only 40 meteorologists were added across Noaa between January and August 2026. The agency brought on just 525 new hires overall since January 2025, leaving a 2,500-person deficit.
- The National Weather Service operates 122 forecast offices with hundreds of meteorological and other technical positions still vacant; some stations have delayed data collection and cut operating hours.
What the cuts have already cost
The National Weather Service collects roughly 6.3bn observations each day and releases 1.5m forecasts and up to 50,000 warnings each year. With fewer staff, weather balloon launches have been delayed or limited, leaving parts of the Great Plains unprepared for tornadoes and weakening warnings for rural Alaska communities where floods displaced more than 1,500 people earlier in 2026.
- The GAO found the NWS failed to adequately provide multilingual weather alerts because of staffing and funding cuts, leaving 26 million people in the US at higher risk.
- The administration terminated dozens of grants representing a loss of more than $28m in funding, per Grant Witness calculations, and the number of climate science grant awards in fiscal year 2026 was 37% lower than the 2021-2024 average.
- The administration began removing ocean monitoring systems and shaved roughly $6bn off an investment secured for weather satellites, which the GAO said could create a gap in satellite coverage.
A super El Niño arrives
The 2026 El Niño is described as a super El Niño, already climbing off the charts and expected to strengthen through the northern hemisphere's autumn and winter. It is expected to supercharge storms in parts of the American west and raise sea levels in California by up to a foot, setting the stage for debris flows, landslides and flash floods.
The contrast with past preparation is stark: during the last strong El Niño a decade earlier, Noaa deployed planes, balloons, unmanned aircraft and a research ship into the Pacific; this year only a handful of unmanned watercraft will be deployed, NPR reported in September.
Experts' warnings
Tom Di Liberto, a former Noaa climate scientist now at Climate Central, said the forecasting system has not faced a real test since the workforce was cut.
The system has not really been tested since all the cuts happened
Di Liberto questioned whether the country is ready for what may come: whether, he said, we as a country can handle the kind of coast-to-coast extremes that could potentially happen this winter is a big question. He also said people at Noaa are nervous and afraid of contradicting the administration's anti-climate narrative, comparing the position of scientists to being told the number six doesn't exist and then being asked to do math.
Monica Medina, Noaa's principal deputy administrator under Obama, said she fears for public safety as the winter approaches.
I worry about loss of life and about our inability to be protected at a time when we need our government the most
If this is a real test of a hotter, more precarious future, she added, we're going to flunk.
Rick Spinrad, Noaa administrator under Biden with three decades at the agency, named gaps in staffing, operations, and engagement with the public as his top three concerns, and said the administration's actions suggest Noaa's technological capabilities cannot be sustained, asking whether the country is at a turning point. Dr Anna Zivian, a climate researcher and policy expert, said there has been a hollowing out at the agency with no time to do anything other than the very basics, and the worst outcomes may not yet be seen.
The cuts reach beyond the US as well: Noaa's data-sharing arrangements track severe weather across Europe, coordinate disaster response in the Caribbean and monitor deforestation in the Amazon.
Trump has proposed cutting a further $1.6bn - a 26% drop - in Noaa funding for next year's budget, while funding for the decade-long Biogeochemical-Argo floats ocean monitoring project expires at the end of October 2026. Requests for comment sent to Noaa and its parent agency, the Department of Commerce, were not returned before publication.
