type: timeline_event
On March 12, 2026, the Trump administration carried out another round of firings at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cutting 1,029 employees — approximately 10% of the agency's remaining workforce — as part of DOGE-directed reductions.
The latest round targeted meteorologists and forecasters in National Weather Service field offices across the country. Scientists, emergency managers, and lawmakers warned that the cuts would degrade the nation's capacity to forecast severe weather, respond to natural disasters, and update maritime navigation charts essential to safe oceanic passage. The warnings came as climate scientists noted that extreme weather events were intensifying precisely as the government was dismantling the infrastructure designed to monitor and respond to them.
The March 12 cuts followed earlier waves of NOAA layoffs: DOGE had fired hundreds of probationary employees in early 2025, forcing the agency to subsequently seek to rehire some of them, and had announced plans to terminate the leases on 19 NOAA offices. The cumulative effect was an agency that had been reduced well below the staffing levels required to fulfill its statutory missions.
The NOAA cuts illustrated a recurring dynamic of the DOGE reduction campaign: agencies whose functions — weather prediction, food safety inspection, air traffic control — depended on maintaining sufficient numbers of trained specialists were being cut to levels that structurally impaired those functions, regardless of whether individual cuts could be defended as eliminating waste. The result was a systematic degradation of the government's capacity to protect the public from foreseeable harms.