At least 27 are dead in Missouri in Kentucky after severe weather alerts were delayed overnight because of DOGE cuts.
Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.
They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.
There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.
In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.
If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.
Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.
That’s why experts were shocked and outraged by budget cuts made to the National Weather Service earlier this year.
Some offices were forced to no longer operate 24 hours a day back in April.
In the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office, one of the positions they were forced to cut was the full-time overnight forecaster.
The office's website even lists the "Meteorologist in Charge" position as vacant.
Overnight forecasters are responsible for monitoring severe weather outbreaks and issuing warnings while one of the most tornado-prone areas in the countries is sound asleep.
“It’s only a matter of time before these cuts lead to tragedy,” I said back in February.
Just before midnight last night, tragedy struck.
At least 27 people are dead, with more still missing, across Missouri and Kentucky.
Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.
The risk of these cuts creating this exact problem was known before last night.
Just one day before the disaster, on May 15, the New York Times ran an investigative piece about how DOGE cuts were undermining weather forecasting improvements.
The piece specifically included the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office as one targeted by DOGE for layoffs.
Severe weather is expected to continue today and tomorrow, and NOAA’s new PR team, now run by Trump loyalists, is scrambling to deny and diffuse the situation.
We can’t ask those who died if they received the warning, so we might never know how many lives would have been saved by having minimal staffing standards in NWS offices.
As the MAGA-rampage against science continues unabated, how many more will pay for the ignorance of this administration?
With an above-normal hurricane season starting in two week, how far will Americans let these threats to public safety go?
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Comments
The thread keeps circling around the politics, but almost nobody has dug into what actually goes on in the NWS tornado warning pipeline.
It's worth being specific: the National Weather Service operates some of the most robust automation and radar ingest pipelines on Earth, but the final go/no-go warning call is almost always human—often a single overnight forecaster on a console, monitoring a swath of counties. Automation (e.g., Warn-on-Forecast guidance) can surface threats, but the NWS intentionally doesn't have an 'auto-warn' button for tornadoes, because of the asymmetry of false positives (blow credibility, cost lives in the long run).
Budget cuts reduce redundancy and experience in those overnight shifts. When you have only one person monitoring instead of a team of two or three, you get decision fatigue and coverage holes, especially during clustered, multi-cell outbreaks. We've seen near-misses in the past, and every pro-meteorologist I know says they're playing defense against process errors, not just technology failures.
Before we point fingers or blame 'technology/automation' shortfalls, let's quantify the concrete bottleneck: skilled human decision-makers are the limiting reagent; machine learning warning aids are still years away from majority trust.
By johnnyanmac 2025-05-1821:301 reply >Before we point fingers or blame 'technology/automation' shortfalls, let's quantify the concrete bottleneck: skilled human decision-makers are the limiting reagent
All the automation in the world with useless without a human guide to either transform production into a useful product, or useful knowledge to heed. That's why this act of trying to remove human labor is asinine. Even skilled human can't always get the right readings, so expecting a robot to do it all at this stage is just selling snake oil.
Actually, I'll go a step further - in the long run, we probably won't need human forecasters at all.
The current human-in-the-loop model exists largely because our technology hasn't been good enough yet, not because there's something inherently special about human judgment in this context. Weather prediction is fundamentally a pattern recognition problem. Pattern analysis at scale is exactly what computers do better than us.
Perhaps someone could apply to YC with this idea. There is one YC startup doing this already: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/atmo
By johnnyanmac 2025-05-1919:431 reply Chaos theory and brownian motion make it a herculesn for anything to predict the weather more than a few days out. There's too many micro factors to track leading to weather that constantly shifts. And The data costs to attempt to try to do so is well past even the most well compensated meteorologist.
I'm not too worried about the human factor being replaced as a whole here. Even with AI, someone needs to interpret the output and make sure the the prediction models actually work.
By Aeyxen 2025-05-2118:39 Yeah, true that.
yeah why cannot that guy sit in california or new york in a normal time zone? not like there are tornadoes in every state, its so silly to keep a person at night in an office when weather is good
By fmorel 2025-05-1920:54 There's only a 6 hour different between the East coast and Hawaii. You can't entirely avoid a night shift, so you might as well have them all work from the same location.
Fortunately the Kentucky NWS office in Jackson was fully staffed during the recent events. It's still not staffed 24/7, but at least they bring in people when things inclement weather is occuring.
https://www.weku.org/the-commonwealth/2025-05-17/kentucky-nw...
By jrs235 2025-05-188:22 They may have been been "fully staffed" according to the "new" "fully staffed" number which could be not enough to perform all the duties and responsibilities reliably and without disruptions. I've been on teams that ought to have 5-10 people minimally wearing all the hats but are only by budgeted for and allow 3 by upper management. Those teams, according to the decision makers are fully staffed, even though they are inadequate.
Edit: and during death marches those can be worked overtime on weekends to make a deadline. They're "fully staffed" and work for the short-term until burnout and turnover begins. Then those projects are always behind.
By Jtsummers 2025-05-181:58 Staffed, but not fully staffed. They worked around their staff shortages to make sure they had people working during the storm.
This seems entirely plausible, but I'm not sure this article successfully makes this connection with direct evidence. Has anyone seen anything on this with better evidence?
NYT mentioned NWS staffing shortage, but did not say this was connected to body count: "The office is also one of several left without an overnight forecaster, but on Friday, it stayed open and was sufficiently staffed for the night, issuing 11 tornado warnings. It was “all hands on deck,” Mr. Fahy said."
By casefields 2025-05-182:002 reply That's because no one can make that conclusion definitively yet. They want your brain to assume that connection. Conspiracy theorists are the kings at this psychological trick.
By throw0101d 2025-05-1811:131 reply > That's because no one can make that conclusion definitively yet.
There's a problem here though: if things do eventually deteriorate (which, admittedly, there is a change will not happen), it may be too late to fix things.
If things get broken they are broken, and in this case you have risk of people's lives. And the people who did the jobs that were fired have probably moved on because they have bills to pay. If you can realize your mistake quickly enough, you can fix it quickly. This is what happened when the Very Stable Geniuses fired the folks who maintained US nuclear weapons:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130613
Perhaps instead of l33t h4ck3rz in DOGE they should hire carpenters or woodworkers: people who, instead of a mantra of "move fast and break things", live more by "measure twice and cut once". Some measure of where the (alleged) waste is could be useful before cutting.
By sanderjd 2025-05-1812:33 I agree that DOGE is bad. But I also think it's unhelpful to claim evidence of a bad outcome directly caused by what they've done. It muddies the water and bolsters people who want to argue that people are only criticizing them out of bias.
If it's true that they got all the tornado warnings out because they were able to be "all hands on deck" for a night they knew would have high risk, then I think this just isn't the example of DOGE getting people killed that the article wants it to be.
I fully believe that understaffing these offices could get people killed. But we don't need to claim it did until it does.
And that doesn't mean we should wait for something awful to happen to criticize the risky situation!
By Abimelex 2025-05-189:09 That's mostly the thing with safety measurements. If they are there you do not recognize them and if they are missing and something happens it's hard to proof if it would have changed anything.
Have a look on "Heuristics That Almost Always Work" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
nytimes on the cuts in this area: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/weather/nws-cuts-kentucky...
By sanderjd 2025-05-1812:40 Thanks! The information here is why I think it's extremely plausible that staffing shortages were disastrous here. But it also doesn't make the direct link. I think it's probably just too soon to know whether all the warnings went out as they should.
But another problem with our current government is that I'm skeptical any investigation to answer those questions will ever happen.
