The Trump Administration’s slashing of the federal workforce has hit the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is laying off 1,300 employees of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the weather forecasting agencies. 

Andy Hazelton is one of the DOGE victims. He isn’t the guy you see on television telling you where the hurricane’s going, he’s one of the NWS employees who work on making the forecast models as accurate as they can be. Now he’s gone. 

“It kinda hit me very heavily, I mean I think we all thought it was possible,” Hazelton said. 

Possible, they thought, but not likely, because their work is vital for public safety. Hazelton was at the National Hurricane Center, working on improving the GFS storm tracking model, when the email came in. He was fired after working more than eight years with NOAA, as a contract employee and recently as a federal staffer, still in his probationary period. 

I asked him if it seemed callous.

“Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it, no personal authorization, just this form letter that doesn’t have anything to do with our individual performance, in my case, I just had a review that said I was exceeding expectations and doing a great job,” Hazelton said. 

Kerri Englert is featured in a video on the NOAA website. She is, or was, a hurricane hunter, the crew member who gathers data during those daring flights into the eye of the storm, until she got the pink slip yesterday. 

“I think that I was initially in a state of shock, as well as perhaps a bit of denial, I think I still am to some extent,” Englert said. 

I asked her if, considering she and her crewmates risk their lives for the American public, she now feels betrayed by the federal government. 

“Oh absolutely,” Engler responded. “I do feel an anger and a frustration and to some extent, I will say a devastation simply because this isn’t just a job to me.”

What do hurricane hunters do? A look at the teams that fly into tropical beasts

“If we don’t do this America will go bankrupt, that’s why it has to be done,” Elon Musk said in the president’s cabinet meeting Wednesday. 

Speaking for the Trump Administration, Musk says the layoffs are trimming fat, even though employee salaries make up only four percent of the federal budget.

“I think we’re the people that an organization should be trying to keep and trying to build off of,” Hazelton said. “Our work is to serve the American public regardless of who’s in office so I hope that gets recognized across the political spectrum.”

The work isn’t nine to five, it’s a calling. Englert has flown 75 missions into hurricanes and storms. 

“Again, it’s not just a job to me, it’s my passion, like, I would do it any day of the week,” Englert said. 

Obviously, they don’t work for the money, their salaries are modest, but they are hoping to get their jobs back. Englert and Hazelton are drawing some hope from a federal judge’s ruling this week that the widescale, arbitrary firings of probationary employees are not legal. 

However, the court process takes time and the outcome is far from guaranteed. In the meantime, they have to find other jobs to pay their bills. They represent a level of expertise and commitment which could be working for the public’s benefit.