Without employees in these roles, they say the U.S. is less safe] One of those employees was Tom DiLiberto, a climate scientist who has worked at NOAA since 2010 and ran the agency’s blog about monitoring and forecasting El Niño and La Niña climate patterns and their regional and global impacts.
Impacts from the decisions to lay off NOAA employees are already happening] “Everything that’s happened is just making the U.S. less safe and really making the world less safe,” he told The Independent on Friday.
“The idea that there’s going to be this big blind spot across the United States moving forward, for the global community, is just terrifying when it comes to weather and climate and the oceans because the oceans and the weather don’t care about borders,” DiLiberto said.
The mass firings also come just days ahead of a potential severe weather outbreak in the southern and central U.S. and less than 100 days away from the Atlantic hurricane season.
Around 800 employees at the 12,000-person agency were impacted by the unceremonious firings, which came even after the Trump administration has scrambled to reverse some of its previous terminations at the National Park Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Agriculture.
