NOAA braces for mass layoffs, fueling concerns about lifesaving weather services
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(SILVER SPRING, Md.) — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s mandate for agencies to prepare “reductions in force,” according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The cuts are fueling concerns that NOAA’s ability to deliver lifesaving services, such as weather forecasting, storm warnings, climate monitoring and fishery oversight, will be hampered. The concerns are especially acute as hurricane and disaster season looms.
NOAA was “already significantly understaffed, so this is devastating. This is beyond a s—show,” Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Ca., the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in an interview with ABC News. “It means we’re going to be less safe. It means there will be all sorts of collateral damage.”
A person familiar with staffing levels at NOAA told ABC News that the agency is already down about 2,000 people since January as a result of the first round of the Trump administration’s cuts, the “Fork in the Road” offer and regular retirements. In January, this source said, staffing was at about 12,000 employees, which is described as average. With an additional 1,000 cuts looming, the agency would be down 25% since the start of the year.
“There is no way to absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting into these core missions,” Huffman said. “This is not about efficiency and it’s certainly not about waste, fraud and abuse. This is taking programs that people depend on to save lives and emasculating them.”
NOAA’s reduction in force plan is currently in the Department of Commerce and is due to be delivered to the Office of Management and Budget this week, sources familiar said. It’s unclear when exactly the resulting cuts will be announced, but sources said it could be as early as Friday.
“NOAA was required to submit their cut plan today, and they were asked to eliminate entire functions, not just individual personnel. The number of terminations is more than 1,000, and that is on top of the probationary folks who’ve already been let go,” Huffman said. “Our ability to forecast flood conditions and tornadoes is reduced, and in a matter of days, it’s going to be significantly reduced, as we head into fire season, which is almost all year round now in the West.
“Our ability to forecast red flag weather conditions for wildfires is significantly reduced,” he added. “Literally, the people that run these systems are being terminated. The people that run these offices where these programs do this critical work are being terminated.”
Between the already announced and looming cuts, plus the funding battle that could reduce the agency’s budget, a source familiar said NOAA “could be at a breaking point,” adding that amid all the talks of reducing costs, taxpayers only pay 6 cents per day for all of the services provided by the agency.
“More importantly, the services provided by NOAA wouldn’t be as robust or functional — or maybe even exist at all,” the source said.
(WASHINGTON) — As President Donald Trump starts to defend his executive order ending birthright citizenship in court, parents are beginning to grapple with the uncertainty stemming from his unprecedented executive order and the possibility that their future children could become “stateless.”
Five pregnant undocumented women and two nonprofits on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in Maryland District Court challenging the order, which seeks to interpret the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship as not applying to the children of undocumented parents. Joining the lawsuit under pseudonyms, the women argued that Trump’s order deprives their future children of their constitutional rights.
“The principle of birthright citizenship is a foundation of our national democracy, is woven throughout the laws of our nation, and has shaped a shared sense of national belonging for generation after generation of citizens,” the lawsuit said.
The complaint makes a similar claim as the four other federal lawsuits signed on by a combined 22 states and two cities; however, this lawsuit differs by having multiple plaintiffs who would be directly impacted by the executive order. The 38-page filing provides personal details of how the lives of each woman and their future children would be changed under Trump’s plan.
Monica – a medical doctor from Venezuela with temporary protected status who joined the lawsuit under the pseudonym– said she joined the lawsuit because she fears her future child will become stateless, as her home country facing an ongoing humanitarian, political and economic crisis.
“I’m 12 weeks pregnant. I should be worried about the health of my child. I should be thinking about that primarily and instead my husband and I are stressed, we’re anxious and we’re depressed about the reality that my child may not be able to become a US citizen,” she said.
Maribel – who joined the lawsuit under a pseudonym along with four other women – has lived in the United States for more than half her life after emigrating from El Salvador and Guatemala. She is due to have her third child in July but worries Trump’s executive order will split her young family, the lawsuit said.
“She fears her unborn child will not have the same rights to citizenship as the future child’s older sisters, and could even be subject to deportation, separating the family,” the lawsuit read.
“Every day, babies are being born in the United States whose constitutionally guaranteed citizenship will be called into doubt under the Executive Order,” the lawsuit argued.
Liza and her husband Igor fled Russia to the United States for asylum, and they are expecting a child in May. They can’t imagine being forced to bring their newborn back to a country that will likely prosecute them, the lawsuit said.
“Neither Liza nor Igor feel they can return to Russia without being persecuted, and they therefore do not feel they can apply for Russian citizenship for their child. Because of that, Liza and Igor are worried their child will be stateless,” the lawsuit said.
Juana – who is two months pregnant – fears what the future might hold for her and her future child if they are sent back to Colombia if her asylum claim falls through, according to the lawsuit.
“She wants her unborn child to be able to grow up without fear and with a sense of belonging in the United States. The thought that her unborn child could be denied U.S. citizenship and deported to Colombia without her is terrifying,” the lawsuit said.
Trinidad is a Venezuelan immigrant who is due in August, but she fears that her child will be stateless under Trump’s executive order, caught between Venezuela’s democratic crisis and the legal tumult of the United States immigration system, the lawsuit said.
Monica and her partner both have Temporary Protected Status after seeking asylum from Venezuela in the United States, but they are worried their child may be ineligible for both the United States and Venezuelan citizenship. Monica said she came to the United States in 2019 with her husband and thought they were doing “everything the right way” by paying taxes, working and buying their own home, she said.
“We had reached a point of stability in this country and wanted to have a child,” Monica said.
A happy change in their lives quickly devolved into fear, she said, when they saw Trump act on his promise to end the United States’ promise of birthright citizenship with the swipe of a sharpie.
“This is a really difficult situation where I truly do not see a way out for my child, a way forward for my child to be able to get through this,” she said.
Because Venezuela no longer offers consular services in the United States, Monica said she is unable to explore the possibility of getting her child citizenship there. Her lawyers do not know if Trump’s executive order would apply to people with temporary protected status, so determining if her child will be an American citizen meant filing a lawsuit against the president, she said.
“This executive order has just left us with more uncertainty than even before. Will my child be a US citizen? Will he be nothing? We just do not know what to do,” she said.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Six weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump addressed Congress and the nation Tuesday evening, laying out his goals for the next four years.
ABC News, along with PolitiFact, live fact-checked Trump’s speech statements that were exaggerated, needed more context or were false.
TRUMP CLAIM: Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control—and we are working hard to get it back down.
FACT-CHECK: Lacking context.
Though egg prices did increase under President Joe Biden, they have recently surged under Trump too — and that’s because of bird flu, which has led to the deaths of 136 million birds since 2022, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
While the price of eggs was consistently rising due to inflation under Biden’s administration, the first significant price hike occurred in 2022, when bird flu began infecting flocks of birds in the U.S. Egg prices rose from $1.93 per dozen to $4.82 per dozen over the course of just that one year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The prices moderated again, back down to the $2-$3 range during the rest of Biden’s presidency — but have shot back up to a record-high $4.95 this January, again due to bird flu.
-ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett
TRUMP CLAIM: Trump won a mandate in the election
FACT-CHECK: This is in the eye of the beholder.
Trump’s victory was clear, but by historical standards, it was no landslide.
Trump has reason to celebrate winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote. In fact, he became only the second Republican to win the popular vote since 1988, after George W. Bush in his 2004 reelection win. Trump won each of the seven battleground states that political analysts said would decide the election.
In addition, the vast majority of U.S. counties saw their margins shift in Trump’s direction, both in places where Republicans historically do well and places where Democrats generally have an edge.On the other hand, Trump’s margins of victory — both in raw votes and in percentages — were small by historical standards, even for the past quarter century, when close elections have been the rule, including the 2000 Florida recount election and Trump’s previous two races in 2016 and 2020.
Trump’s victory also came without a big boost for down-ballot Republicans. Republicans lost a little ground in the House, which was already narrowly divided, and while Republicans flipped the Senate, Democrats won four Senate races in key battleground states even as former Vice President Kamala Harris was losing those states to Trump.
-PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman
TRUMP CLAIM: “We ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto workers and companies from economic destruction.”
FACT-CHECK: Needs context.
There was no electric vehicle mandate put in place by the Biden administration. The Biden Environmental Protection Agency implemented tailpipe emissions standards last March that established an average of allowed emissions across a vehicle manufacturer’s entire fleet of offered vehicles.
The standards would have only impacted cars from model years 2027 to 2032. The standards allowed for a range of useable technologies, including fully electric cars, hybrids and improved internal combustion engines. Trump did sign an executive order on his first day in office to revoke these new standards.
-ABC News’ Kelly Livingston
TRUMP CLAIM: The Paris Climate Accord was costing the U.S. “trillions”
FACT-CHECK: False.
Trump defended his decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, saying the pact was costing the U.S. “trillions of dollars.”
That’s untrue.
The Trump administration defended the decision to withdraw from the climate agreement, in part, based on projections by consultant NERA Economic Consulting. It concluded that restrictions on fossil fuel emissions would result in a higher cost of production, and a higher cost of production would translate into the closure of uncompetitive manufacturing businesses. Those closures, in turn, would mean fewer manufacturing jobs.
The consultant estimated that these losses and their knock-on effects beyond the manufacturing sector would amount to 1.1 million jobs lost by 2025 and 6.5 million by 2040. The loss of jobs results in a corresponding decline in gross domestic product, with a loss of $250 billion by 2025 that accelerates to $3 trillion by 2040.
So the climate agreement wasn’t costing the U.S. trillions of dollars. It hypothetically could.
But even if it did, the study says that the long-term projections did not factor in all of the offsetting job gains and GDP growth associated with a clean tech transition.
-PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman
TRUMP CLAIM: Elon Musk found people in the Social Security system as old as 369
FACT-CHECK: This is misleading.
Elon Musk shared a chart on X and said he found millions of people in a Social Security database over the age of 110, including 1 who was in the 360-369 age bracket.
The acting Social Security commissioner said that people older than 100 who do not have a date of death associated with their Social Security record “are not necessarily receiving benefits.” Recent Social Security Administration data shows that about 89,000 people aged 99 and older receive Social Security payments.
Government databases may classify someone as 150 years old for reasons peculiar to the complex Social Security database or because of missing data, but that doesn’t mean that millions of payments are delivered fraudulently to people with implausible ages.
-PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman
TRUMP CLAIM: “Gold cards” don’t need congressional approval
FACT-CHECK: Misleading.
Immigration experts say Trump can neither create a new green card program nor shut down an existing one without congressional action.
Trump announced a plan to give people legal permanent residency in the U.S. if they pay $5 million. The so-called “gold card” would be similar to a green card in that it would let people live and work in the U.S. permanently and provide a pathway to citizenship.
Trump has described the program as a way to cut the U.S. deficit and has said it would replace the EB-5 immigrant investor visa program. But he hasn’t provided an official document creating the program.
-PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman
TRUMP CLAIM: “Hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” found by DOGE
FACT-CHECK: This is unverifiable.
This claim is unverifiable because DOGE has yet to release the entirety of its work or specify which cuts have been “fraud” as opposed to “waste.” DOGE has claimed to have saved $106 billion in total savings, not “hundreds of billions” in fraud, and even Elon Musk himself has said they have mostly found “waste” and “mostly not fraud.”
DOGE has claimed it has saved a total of $106 billion in federal money from a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.” The figure remains unverifiable and DOGE’s website claims to have posted only 30% of the receipts supporting this total.
Even Musk himself said on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week that most of what DOGE is finding is “waste,” rather than outright fraud. “Only the federal government could get away with this level of waste. It’s mostly waste. It’s mostly not fraud, it’s mostly waste. It’s mostly just ridiculous things happening,” Musk said.
-ABC News’ Soo Rin Kim and Will Steakin
TRUMP CLAIM: There will be a little disturbance for Americans because of tariffs
FACT-CHECK: Lacking context.
The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the tariffs could cost the average household up to $2,000 annually. Cars and car parts are big exports from Canada and Mexico, and tariffs could increase the cost of a new car by over $3,000 per vehicle on top of last year’s average new car price of $44,811, according to JP Morgan Research. Most economists predict that prices, and therefore, inflation will go up, with consumers seeing higher prices for food, gasoline, clothes, shoes, toys and other household items.
-ABC News’ Soo Youn
TRUMP CLAIM: “Not long ago … 1 in 10,000 children had autism. Now it’s 1 in 36. There’s something wrong”
FACT-CHECK: Partially true but lacking context.
It’s unclear where Trump — and Kennedy, who repeats the same stat often — got the 1 in 10,000 number, though he is correct about the current number, which is 1 in 36, and he is correct that autism cases are rising.
In 2000, approximately 1 in 150 children in the U.S. born in 1992 were diagnosed with autism compared with 2020, during which one in 36 children born in 2012 were diagnosed, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some psychiatrists and autism experts told ABC News it’s important to highlight the rising rates of autism, and that at least Trump and Kennedy are putting a spotlight on it.
“On the bright side, I think it is really important to place an emphasis on these very high rates,” Dr. Karen Pierce, a professor in the department of neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego and co-director of the UCSD Autism Center of Excellence, told ABC News.
-ABC News’ Mary Kekatos
TRUMP CLAIM: Mexican authorities handed over 29 of the biggest cartel leaders because of tariffs imposed on them, “They want to make us happy”
FACT-CHECK: True
Last week, while the Mexican security cabinet and the Mexican economy secretary were in D.C. for bilateral meetings with their U.S. counterparts to negotiate ahead of the possible imposition of U.S. tariffs on Mexico, Mexico announced they were handing over 29 criminals to the U.S.
One of these criminals had been requested by the U.S. for decades, Rafael Caro Quintero. He was wanted for the murder of DEA’s agent Kiki Camarena back in 1985.
While some of these criminals had their extradition suspended by Mexican judges, others had been detained for less than a week without the option to fight back their extradition in Mexico before they were sent to the US.
Although the Mexican government definitely bent some Mexican laws and were highly questioned, they defended the move by saying this was a matter of national security and that they acted within hours after receiving a request from the U.S. government.
Many in Mexico saw the move as a way to please President Trump and convince him to suspend or cancel the U.S. tariffs against Mexico.
-ABC News’ Anne Laurent
TRUMP CLAIM: India charges US auto tariffs higher than 100%, China’s average tariffs on our products is twice what we charge them, and South Korea’s average tariff is four times higher.
FACT-CHECK: False
India has historically imposed high tariffs on imported vehicles with rates as high as 125% but in a bid to improve trade relations with the U.S. they have reduced the highest rates on luxury cars from 150% to 70%. With other surcharges the tariffs still stands above 100% but the Indian government are actively reviewing their import tariffs.
China’s tariffs are actively changing due in part to the tit-for-tat trade war with the Trump Administration.
South Korea’s average tariff rate is around 13.4%. However, the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement signed in 2007 (effective 2012) reduced or eliminated most of the tariffs between the two countries. South Korea claims that as of 2024, the average tariff rate on imports from the U.S. is approximately 0.79% based on the effective tariff rate before duty refunds.
-ABC News’ Karson Yiu
TRUMP CLAIM: The U.S. has “spent perhaps $350 billion” on supporting Ukraine’s defense
FACT-CHECK: False
According to the special inspector general responsible for overseeing the spending related to the war in Ukraine, Congress has appropriated or otherwise made available $182.75 billion for the overall U.S. response to the war since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Of that money, about $119 billion has been for the direct benefit of Ukraine, including approximately $65.9 billion in military assistance.
White House officials have offered various explanations for how the Trump administration has arrived at the significantly higher figure of $350 billion, but most of the arguments rely on dubious logic–such as factoring in inflation–which has no bearing on the actual dollar amount appropriated by Congress.
Trump also said Europe has spent “$100 billion” on supporting Ukraine’s war effort; according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, European countries have spent around $140 billion to back Kyiv, and pledged another roughly $120 billion to the cause.
(WASHINGTON) — Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee want the Justice Department to preserve all records related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into Donald Trump, in addition to all existing and future records related to the department’s investigations and prosecutions of efforts to interfere with the transfer of power following Trump’s 2020 election loss, they wrote Monday in a letter to the DOJ obtained by ABC News.
Trump has vowed to shut down all ongoing investigations into his dealings upon returning to the Oval Office later this month. The letter, addressed to current Attorney General Merrick Garland and signed by all Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, comes just one week before Trump’s inauguration.
“As President-elect Trump has repeatedly made clear, he intends to swiftly shut down any investigations related to his alleged misconduct and involvement in 2020 election subversion efforts and his mishandling of classified documents,” Democrats wrote in the letter. They said the Department must take “immediate” steps to preserve documents “in light of these threats.”
Smith, who investigated Trump over allegations of interfering with the 2020 election and his alleged unlawful retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, formally resigned as special counsel last week after submitting his final report on the probes to Garland.
The release of Smith’s final report on the two cases has been the subject of a recent court battle as Trump and lawyers for his former co-defendants have attempted to block the public release of the report. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who dismissed Donald Trump’s classified documents case, ruled that DOJ can release Volume One of Smith’s report, covering his election interference case against Trump — but is reserving ruling on whether the DOJ can make Volume Two, on the classified documents case, available to congressional leadership for review.
In their letter Monday, Democrats on the committee said they want to ensure that they can later request access to the report if merited.
“The Committee recognizes the current injunction against the release of Special Counsel Smith’s report and related materials and reserves its right to request production of the report and relevant records at an appropriate future date,” they wrote.
The letter to Garland also comes just days before the Judiciary Committee is slated to consider former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s nomination to serve as the new attorney general, after Trump selected her for the role following former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration.
Bondi has long been a fixture in Trump’s orbit, allying herself with Trump early in his political ascension and later serving as the chairwoman of a think tank set up by former Trump staffers after Trump’s first term in office. She defended Trump during his first impeachment trial in the Senate, and has been vocally critical of many of the cases that the Department of Justice has pursued against Trump, including those whose records Democrats now hope to preserve.
“The President-elect’s intended nominee for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has promised to weaponize the Department of Justice against those who were involved in these investigations, threatening: ‘When Republicans take back the White House… [t]he Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted–the bad ones. The investigators will be Investigated,'” Democrats wrote in their letter. “In light of these threats, it is critical that the Department take immediate preservation steps related to these investigations and prosecutions.”
Democrats in their letter reminded the Justice Department of its legal responsibility to preserve all documents, whether physical or electronic, as the transition process continues.
ABC News has reached out to the Justice Department and Trump transition team for comment.
Trump pleaded not guilty in 2023 to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information. He also pleaded not guilty in 2023 to separate charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an effort to subvert democracy and remain in power.
Both cases were dismissed following Trump’s reelection in November due to a longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.
