As tornado season ravages the Midwest and South, a contingent of Republican tornado belt lawmakers say they’re working to ensure their storm-prone constituencies have the forecasts they need during severe weather events.
President Donald Trump made cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ahead of what’s shaping up to be the U.S.’s most active tornado season in over a decade, and is gunning for even deeper cuts at the agency. The National Weather Service, a part of NOAA that predicts and tracks storms, was already short-staffed before Trump took office; after sweeping layoffs, nearly half of the agency’s field offices are “critically understaffed.” Experts and former employees say the cuts could hinder storm preparedness and delay warnings.
Rep. Mark Alford, a Missouri Republican, told NOTUS he’s gathering information to “put forth a reasonable request based on facts to the administration” regarding cuts to the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also tracks weather patterns.
“At the same time we are scaling down our government through DOGE and these other processes, you’ve gotta make sure that people’s lives are protected,” Alford said. “The White House is responsive, we just need to make the case for that.”
Storm systems killed at least 28 people over the weekend, with most of the deaths occurring in Kentucky and Missouri. The cuts forced one Kentucky field office to halt overnight weather monitoring, but the office scheduled its staff to work anyway in anticipation of the violent storm system.
Alford said he’s heard “repeated concern” from his constituents about National Weather Service cuts even before tornadoes ripped through his state over the weekend.
Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma — a state where one House lawmaker has already bellyached over proposed NOAA cuts — on Monday underscored the National Weather Service’s importance, hours before at least five tornadoes hit in Oklahoma and Nebraska. (No injuries or deaths were reported.)
“The National Weather Service is not just a local thing for us. It’s a national piece, and most every bit of commerce actually functions on, ‘How’s our weather doing?’” Lankford told NOTUS. “It is important we do it right, and that doesn’t mean every position in the National Weather Service is essential … They also have some layoffs and rehires as well, so we’re waiting to see how all of that gets shook out.”
His Oklahoma colleague, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, mentioned several conversations he’s had about forecasting capabilities in his state post-cuts, which he said gave him confidence that everything was still up to par.
“We’re still very mission-capable in delivering what we need to deliver on time and still provide the news to the National Weather Service and everything else,” Mullin told NOTUS. “From what I’ve been briefed on, their capabilities have not changed at all. We got rid of some of the bloated government that we didn’t need, but we were very strategic on who we got rid of.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama told NOTUS he was taking a wait-and-see approach to whether staffing shortages would be a problem at the National Weather Service.
“Everybody should be concerned about bad weather. Not a whole lot you can do about it other than possibly a little bit of early warning,” Tuberville told NOTUS. “You want as much security as you possibly can, but we’ll have to wait and see if any of these cuts affect any of that … we’ll wait to get a report on it. I mean, that’s all we can do.”
Many Republicans from storm-ravaged states brushed off concerns that National Weather Service staffing shortages would hurt preparedness.
“It’s hard for me to match the reductions with funding bureaucracy with whether the job gets done accurately or not. It’s possible that the job could be done more efficiently with fewer funds,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee — a state finding itself increasingly barraged by tornadoes as Tornado Alley slides east.
Rep. Tim Burchett, a fellow Tennessean, was unfazed by NWS’s staffing shortages.
“Everybody has a cell phone now, and everybody can follow the radar, and it’s a pretty simple thing. The old days of the siren going off, alerting people, just aren’t quite as accurate in today’s automated society. I think we’re gonna be OK,” Burchett told NOTUS. “They cut a lot of the bureaucracy and things. I think it’ll probably be more efficient, from what I’ve seen.”
Though almost all weather information Americans consume relies on NWS data, Burchett wasn’t the only House Republican to suggest that technology could replace the government’s meteorologists and the staff who assist them.
“The nice thing is, AI takes over a lot of responsibilities for that stuff now,” Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia told NOTUS. “We’re gonna have to have more and more hard decisions in the future about how we actually generate the same amount of work with fewer people, and I think we can do that very easily nowadays with the advancement of technologies.”
The American Meteorological Society, a nonprofit that promotes weather services and research, issued dire warnings last month about Trump’s cuts, saying they threaten the entire U.S. weather monitoring system, where federal staff and resources play a large role in forecasting.
“A failure of these systems would be catastrophic, causing, for example, shorter tornado-warning lead time, more uncertainty in hurricane landfall intensity and location, and worse forecast of snowfall amounts, all of which will put the pocketbooks and lives of hardworking Americans at greater risk,” the organization said in a statement.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, told NOTUS she experienced the storms near St. Louis and southern Illinois.
“It’s absolutely egregious, and it’s absolutely going to put more people in danger,” Duckworth said of reductions to NWS. “We can’t afford either for the health and safety and well-being of people, but also for our businesses, to have responses slowed because of these cuts.”
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Emily Kennard and Em Luetkemeyer are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.