National Weather Service seeks to fill 155 ‘critical’ vacancies ahead of hurricane season
By Andrew Freedman, CNN
(CNN) — The National Weather Service is seeking to fill 155 positions at offices throughout the country by offering reassignment opportunities for qualified National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees, who are currently working elsewhere.
The scale of the voluntary reassignments illustrates how depleted the nation’s top weather forecasting agency is as it heads into hurricane season, which begins June 1.
The wave of early retirements, firings of probationary workers and other Trump administration incentives for federal employees to leave government service led to more than 560 departures from the NWS, according to a NOAA employee who requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
The positions that were promoted in an agency-wide email on Tuesday, which was obtained by CNN, represent “critical holes,” the NOAA staff member said, calling the effort to fill them with reassigned specialists from elsewhere a “Band-Aid” approach given that the agency is still under a federal hiring freeze.
“This is not the best solution,” they said.
NWS leadership has been trying unsuccessfully to get the agency designated as a public safety department and therefore exempted from the hiring freeze.
This has left one weather forecast office — Houston — without any management staff, and caused at least one NWS facility, in Goodland, Kansas, to cut back on its operating hours from the longtime standard of 24/7 staffing.
The patterns revealed in the openings show that some offices are worse-off than others. The job openings, which must be filled by people who already achieved a particular level on the federal pay scale and have relevant experience, include functions such as electronic technicians, IT specialists, hydrologists and meteorologists at the helm of a forecast office.
In total, the NWS is looking to use these transfers to fill four vacant top meteorologist slots, which are people in charge of the forecasts and warnings coming from one of the agency’s local offices scattered around the country. In addition, this involves one top meteorologist assigned to the Spaceflight Meteorology Group in Houston.
The agency is seeking to fill 22 physical scientist roles with voluntary reassignments, including 10 in Norman, Oklahoma, alone, seven in Boulder and five in College Park, Maryland. There are 76 meteorology positions that the NWS is seeking transfers for, along with 16 electronics technicians, who repair Doppler Radars, and 16 hydrologists who focus on river and flood forecasting.
The meteorology positions would fill some of the gaps in the Goodland office as well as in Houston, but they have a far broader geographic reach than that. The jobs range from assignments in Guam and Alaska to cities across the Lower 48 states, indicating how many NWS weather offices are critically short on staff.
The NOAA employee said this step involves “moving people around” until a more permanent solution can be found.
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