A Florida weatherman stopped his show mid-air to sound the alarm about a looming national disaster—one that’s entirely manmade.
As the country prepares for the next hurricane season, Miami newscaster John Morales issued an ominous warning about how the steep federal government cuts are impacting meteorologists’ ability to predict and track threats.
He started his forecast by showcasing a 2019 video of a hurricane and emphasized his experience of more than three decades informing viewers and quelling their fears.
“As you’ve grown accustomed to my presentations over my 34 years in South Florida newscast, confidently, I went on TV and told you, ‘It’s going to turn. You don’t need to worry,’” he started.
But then he dropped a bombshell.
“I’m here to tell you I’m not sure I can do that this year,” he said. “Because of the cuts—the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general.“
The Department of Government Efficiency, led by the recently retired “special government employee” Elon Musk, slashed the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses it, in its effort to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government.
The Trump administration is proposing cutting a total of $1.7 billion from NOAA’s budget for the 2026 fiscal year. In early May the NOAA announced that they were decommissioning certain services due to the government cuts, including databases to track national disasters.
It not only gutted the agency but eliminated its climate work.
Morales said that the government’s assault was creating a “multi-generation impact on science in this country.”
The screen behind him flashed with startling statistics, showing that the Central and South Florida National Weather Service is also 19-39 percent understaffed.
But the federal cuts especially are creating staffing shortages and having impacts across the country, he added, and revealed that there has been a 17 percent reduction in weather balloon launches across the United States.
“What we’re starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded,” he continued. “There’s also a chance because of some of these cuts that NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft will not be able to fly this year and with less reconnaissance missions may be flying blind. And we may not exactly know how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline.”
He urged viewers to call on Congress and fight the funding cuts.
Morales recently shared on his X a New York Times op-ed by fellow Miami hurricane specialist Michael Lowry and added a frowning face emoji.
The article noted that the NWS costs the average American $4 per year and has an 8,000 percent annual return on investment.
“Without the arsenal of tools from NOAA and its 6.3 billion observations sourced each day, the routinely detected hurricanes of today could become the deadly surprise hurricanes of tomorrow,” Lowry said.
He then noted: “The irreparable harm the Trump administration is doing will imperil the nation’s longstanding weather warning network for hundreds of millions of Americans in the decades ahead. It’s only a matter of time before the next Milton is at our doorstep—but with our weather intelligence severely compromised, will we know it?”
