President Trump and GOP slash budget for weather forecasting?

For those of us who live in Texas, weather always hits close to home. It’s either too hot, too cold, too little rain, too much rain, an occasional freeze, a drought that never seems to end, terrible floods, a hurricane somewhere along the coast from Brownsville to Port Arthur, or the occasional tornado.

Four days a year, South Texas gets perfect weather. Okay, five days. Still better than Dallas, which only gets two days of perfect weather each year.

Obviously, that’s overstating Texas’s weather, but it is a challenging forecast for meteorologists.

Meanwhile, the terrible July 4th Central Texas flooding is still in the news as the search for the last body is still ongoing.

Then this week, the state of Florida pops up with news — Tampa hit its first 100- degree day on record. (Source: TheWeatherChannel.com.)

On the West Coast, California, this year kicked off with wildfires never seen before in some coastal communities.

Clearly, the weather is acting very strange.

So, what does President Donald Trump want to do about the changing weather patterns, which usually always carries with them some loss of life?

He and his administration, along with the congressional GOP, want to slash the federal budget for the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which oversees the National Weather Service.

NOAA is also responsible for various aspects of the environment, including weather, oceans, and atmosphere, but in today’s age of weather anomalies, it’s the forecasting that most of us deem the most important. Planning ahead, thanks to weather forecasting, saves lives, which doesn’t take a genius to understand the connection.

No matter, if you’re the president and his minions in Congress, for some unexplained reason known only to them, this is the perfect time to slash NOAA’s budget, which has already created holes at the National Weather Service.

Crazy Weather

Floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, freezes, why is there a problem if the president’s budget will slash 10 NOAA labs for the next fiscal year? This includes one in Miami that sends out the hurricane hunter planes that fly into storms to collect data to try and gauge how strong the hurricane/tropical storm may become before it hits land.

In his defense, President Trump (his administration) has said that cuts to bloated federal bureaucracies are needed that no longer serve us well. Us, being the American public.

Okay, sure, but last year, according to multiple news sources, the U.S. experienced 27 weather-related disasters that cost taxpayers more than $1 billion each.

If the trend continues, which looks to be the case, then why are we slashing NOAA labs and cutting jobs at the U.S. Weather Service?

I know a lot of conservatives, Trump supporters, dislike The New York Times. I did, too, when it went out of its way to help Bush Jr. lie us into attacking Iraq, helping push the fake WMD (weapons of mass destruction) narrative, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t publish quality journalism, investigative reporting.

In a July 13, 2025, NYTimes news story about this very subject — budget cuts at NOAA —there is this paragraph that sums up this topic in succinct fashion, which should worry all Americans. But for some crazy reason, it will become politicized as if the next flood will distinguish between a Republican and a Democrat:

“Since Mr. Trump took office, the Weather Service has shed about 600 jobs from its work force of roughly 4,200 people. They are part of a greater exodus of nearly 2,000 employees from NOAA. Nearly half of the Weather Service’s 122 forecast offices had lost at least 20 percent of their staff as of April. Thirty offices were lacking their most experienced official, known as the meteorologist-in-charge, as of May.”

The loss of seasoned meteorologists, in today’s age of crazy weather?

What, me worry?