Two retired hurricane experts are sounding the alarm over proposed federal budget cuts that they say could seriously undermine the accuracy of hurricane forecasts and put coastal communities at greater risk this storm season.
James Franklin, the former director of forecast operations at the National Hurricane Center, said key reductions would affect the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s Cooperative Institutes — research hubs that provide vital data and modeling support to the agency.
“The budget that has been proposed would cut a couple of very key contributors to a hurricane forecast,” Franklin said.
“So if these groups go away, the hurricane center will still be there, they will still be making a forecast, but they won’t have the same kinds of tools that they have come to expect,” he added.
The Cooperative Institutes work in partnership with NOAA to help determine where hurricanes are likely to make landfall and how strong they could become.
He also warned that removing these partnerships would strip away essential components of the forecasting process.
A joint statement from the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association raised similar concerns over what they say is a sweeping rollback of NOAA’s research capabilities under the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget.
Joe, a retired NOAA ocean engineer who asked to not share his last name due to fear of the nation’s current polarizing climate, is another critic of the proposed cuts.
“In my mind, when I heard this, it scared the crap out of me,” Joe said.
Joe spent 28 years with the federal government, including time in the U.S. Navy, and holds a degree in ocean engineering.
He described NOAA’s mission as vital to public safety — and questioned who would carry it forward if specialized staff and programs were eliminated.
“I was proud of everything we ever did at NOAA,” he said, choking up as he spoke to Local 10’s Christina Vazquez.
“The question is: Who is going to do it, get the data that is needed? Has there been any thought to, if we get rid of these people, how are we going to do this?” Joe asked. “And then what is going to happen about hurricanes coming in — are we going to get accurate forecasts?”
He said data collection and weather forecasting are nonpartisan, performed by federal subject matter experts that are the backbone of the country’s nonpartisan civil workforce.
“For them to just cut us lose, just throw us to wolves is ridiculous, there is work that needs to be done. It is work that helps the American people and it shouldn’t be just thrown aside,” he said. “How it would impact my fellow neighbors is that if there is a forecast for a hurricane coming and the information that is put in the model is not correct? It could tell us the hurricane is going to travel further north and yet it is actually going to travel and hit us and so we wouldn’t have enough warning to get out of the way, to leave.”
Franklin echoed those concerns, emphasizing that NHC forecasters rely heavily on a network of external support to maintain the accuracy and credibility of their predictions.
“The forecasters at the hurricane center don’t work in a vacuum,” he said. “There is a whole support structure around them that provides data, that provides techniques, that helps keep things running. We are throwing that out the window with all of these cuts. It is a generational loss of progress that is going to be very, very difficult to restore.”
Without that foundation, Franklin said, the risk of forecast failure increases could have deadly consequences.
“It means that somewhere down the line there will probably be a big forecast failure,” he said. “It creates uncertainty, it erodes eventually trust in the forecast, which erodes response, and you have people making poorer decisions.”
Asked whether the outcome could be dangerous, Franklin was blunt.
“I think ultimately you will end up killing people when people don’t trust the forecast, or you have too many people who have to evacuate, get stuck on the roads — it is not a recipe for keeping people safe," he said.
“It is all this support structure that is at risk so you can have the forecasters there doing their thing but if the support structure collapses, then the forecast accuracy collapses as well,” he added. “It means that somewhere down the line there will probably be a big forecast failure. A storm goes somewhere that it wasn’t expected to go or intensifies much more rapidly than it was expected to and because of that uncertainly.”
The NWS released a statement on its staffing changes:
Vazquez contacted some of South Florida’s federal lawmakers to get their take on this issue and learn what steps they are taking on this public safety issue ahead of the start of hurricane season June 1.
That includes the offices of U.S. Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar (R), Mario Diaz-Balart (R), Carlos Gimenez (R), Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D), and the offices of Florida’s U.S. Senators Rick Scott (R) and Ashley Moody (R).
We are waiting for a response.