Large Trump administration cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have hit a crucial part of the agency that runs a fleet of more than 100 coastal weather buoys. The buoys enable national and regional weather forecasting, safe maritime navigation and tsunami warning systems.
The staff losses stand to slow down maintenance of the essential system, which will leave shippers, fishermen and others who navigate the notoriously perilous mouth of the Columbia River in a more dangerous and less informed position. The buoys enable shippers to safely transport the more than $31 billion in goods that move up and down the Columbia each year.
The National Data Buoy Center lost three of its 34 total government employees to the Trump administration’s early retirement offer, said its chief of engineering, Craig Kohler, who retired today after nearly 17 years at NOAA.
Kohler said emails firing probationary employees were sent out Thursday night. While it isn’t yet clear how many people were let go in that move, he estimated Thursday the center would lose three or four staffers.
Before the layoffs, the center also employed about 120 contract employees who support its work and whose jobs are funded through March, he added. It’s unclear how many are still employed because many of NOAA’s 2,500 contract employees are also expected to be fired, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Kohler stressed the buoy center will do everything it can to continue to keep its systems operational and data coming in to inform forecasts and weather warnings.
“We’ll see. Hopefully it won’t get to the point where it kind of falls apart,” he said. “Everybody has high anxiety right now with everything that’s going on, but everybody’s working hard every day to get the mission done. So we’ll just do what we can to keep it going.”
Representatives for Columbia River shippers, bar pilots and crab fishers told The Columbian that the layoffs put river users at risk.
Kohler’s successor, Brett Taft, declined to comment Friday. A national spokeswoman for NOAA declined to comment on the cuts or their impact on navigational safety.
Local impacts from the losses at the buoy center are further compounded by firings in Washington and Oregon NOAA operations reported by OPB. The staff losses impact local weather forecasting capabilities and leave Oregon with 30 percent to 40 percent fewer staff than needed, Salem, Ore.’s Statesman Journal reported.
A national spokeswoman for NOAA’s National Weather Service declined to comment on cuts to local weather service offices. She also declined to comment on the impact those cuts will have on regional navigational safety.
Sweeping cuts
The local firings are part of sweeping cuts to NOAA around the country. The cuts are expected to impact about 1,200 people, which is about 10 percent of NOAA’s workforce, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
NOAA is a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The scientific and regulatory agency is most notably responsible for weather forecasting and providing extreme weather warnings. It also plays a leading role in climate research, fishery management and more, its website stated as of Friday afternoon.
The agency was a target of the Trump administration-affiliated Project 2025, partially because its research has helped show the extent of climate change, the Seattle Times reported.
NOAA’s budget was $6.4 billion for the 2024 fiscal year — or about one-tenth of 1 percent of total U.S. spending that year.
Economic analyses have found the agency has a positive return on investment — meaning it generates more money than it costs to fund.
Kohler said he couldn’t share the buoy center’s yearly budget but said that it delivers a significant return.
“Compared to other agencies, it’s very small,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe it for how much we do.”
Kohler added he isn’t political and that the center hasn’t had a budget increase in 15 years.
Former President Joe Biden had also targeted NOAA for large cuts for the 2025 fiscal year. He proposed to shrink NOAA’s budget by 2 percent from the previous year.
Dangerous impacts
For people like Dale Beasley — who is president of the Columbia River Crab Fisherman’s Association and fished for 45 years — less information about weather and river conditions at the mouth of the Columbia has high stakes. Missing a day during the first month of crab season can mean potentially losing as much money as most people make in a year, Beasley said. That’s important when startup costs in the industry are about $2 million.
But going out crabbing when the weather is bad can have higher stakes still.
“The pressure to fish on marginal days, it’s always there and it’s a difficult decision,” he said, “and hopefully guys never make mistakes but sometimes it happens, guys make mistakes and don’t come home.”
Beasley — who said he supports some cuts to NOAA and has fought the agency on Dungeness crab fishery management — said crabbers use weather buoy-informed NOAA weather forecasts to make daily choices weighing their economic and literal survival.
Crabbers aren’t the only ones. Capt. Dan Jordan is administrative pilot for the Columbia River Bar Pilots, which guides commercial ships in and out of the Columbia.
“We move ships in rough conditions,” Jordan said, “and we rely heavily on the weather forecast office in Portland to provide forecasts for us and to update them when we get into extremely rough conditions like last Monday night.”
During storms like the one on Feb. 24, the pilots will be in near-continuous contact with the Portland office to make choices about whether to suspend and then restart piloted service on the river. That choice essentially turns on or off the region’s economic tap and affects tens of thousands of jobs across wide-ranging industries.
They’re choices Jordan said he doesn’t take lightly — and he’ll now have less information to make them.
“Cuts to NOAA, particularly to the (National Data Buoy Center), threaten the reliability of this essential system, putting safety and supply chain efficiency at risk,” said Kate Mickelson, executive director of the Columbia River Steamship Operators’ Association.
It’s a regional commercial maritime trade association that’s made up of private shipping interests, public ports, state and federal waterway groups, pilot associations, and the tug and tow industry.
“This system supported over 49.7 million tons of international trade in 2022, valued at more than $31.2 billion, and sustains at least 40,000 local jobs,” she said.
The cuts were also condemned by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
“The firings jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods — putting communities in harm’s way,” Cantwell said in a statement. “They also threaten our maritime commerce and endanger 1.7 million jobs that depend on commercial, recreational and tribal fisheries, including thousands in the state of Washington.”
She added that NOAA’s workforce provides products and services that support more than one-third of the U.S.’s nearly $30 trillion gross domestic product, an economic measure that represents the total market value of goods and services produced within an area during a year.
April voyage
Despite the reduced staff and other challenges, including freezes to government credit cards, that will make operations even more challenging, Kohler said. The next Pacific Ocean maintenance voyage is still scheduled for April.
It’ll start out of San Diego to fix the buoys that monitor and predict El Niño and La Niña storms. From there, they’ll head up the coast fixing more buoys. Then, in the fall, they’re slated to do another mission, that time fixing buoys more than 100 miles off the coast, Kohler said.
That mission will be especially important for Columbia River navigators because the furthest out to sea of a trio of buoys which reveal weather at the river’s mouth hours before it hits has been down since November.
