Lab that helps forecast severe weather in Michigan ‘crippled’ by Trump staffing cuts

Essential functions at the federal Great Lakes research lab that monitors toxic algae blooms and helps forecast Michigan weather have been “crippled” by the Trump administration’s wave of federal firings, according to one terminated staffer.

Since February, the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) in Muskegon and Ann Arbor has lost more than 35% of its staff to the Trump administration’s purges of probationary workers and encouraged resignations, former GLERL communications specialist Nicole Rice testified Thursday.

“Essential functions have been crippled. GLERL’s director, key scientists and the entire communications team have been eliminated,” Rice said. “A federal hiring freeze means none of these roles can be filled, and it’s not just people; we are losing capacity.

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has halted contract approvals, delayed vessel deployments and cut funding for basic fieldwork. That means no algal bloom monitoring, no shoreline mapping, no new data for forecasts and no shipwreck buoys for divers in our marine sanctuaries.”

Rice testified during the Michigan Senate Labor Committee’s hearing Thursday, April 17, on the sweeping federal workforce reductions by the Trump administration and how those staffing cuts will impact Michiganders.

Michigan is home to nearly 30,000 federal employees, Rice said. Two others who spoke Thursday included a marine veteran who was fired, and then rehired, at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Ann Arbor, and a financial analyst with the Department of Housing and Urban Development who was fired and later reinstated on administrative leave.

Rice had worked at NOAA for 10 years before a recent promotion and her disability placed her into a two-year probationary period. She was fired Feb. 27 then later reinstated before being fired again last week.

The Trump administration has fired thousands of probationary period employees, those who were recently hired or promoted, to slash the federal workforce. Questions over the legality of the move are working their way through the courts.

GLERL is part of NOAA, which generates and sends weather, water and climate data across the federal government and manages the National Weather Service.

When U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Michigan, learned in late February that at least 15 probationary employees had been fired from GLERL, she wrote to NOAA leadership expressing concern and stressed the importance of the lab in protecting Michigan from severe weather and other threats.

“The work conducted at GLERL is critical to the health and preservation of the Great Lakes, which are an invaluable natural resource in our region and to our nation at large,” Dingell wrote in the letter co-authored with U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio. “The laboratory’s research plays an essential role in understanding and mitigating the effects of severe weather, pollution, invasive species and other threats to the ecosystem.”

While functions at GLERL are crippled, they could be eliminated entirely.

According to the New York Times, Trump administration officials have recommended eliminating NOAA’s scientific research division as part of a budget proposal to downsize NOAA.

The move would shutter GLERL altogether and endanger Michigan residents, Rice said.

Among the impacts, beach forecasts would potentially disappear, lake effect snow and other hazardous weather would be harder to predict and U.S. Coast Guard operations would be impeded.

“Without GLERL’s expertise and data, beach forecasts will lag or disappear entirely, leaving the public unaware of dangerous conditions such as rip currents, E. Coli outbreaks or harmful algal blooms,” Rice said. “The U.S. Coast Guard will lose access to critical wind, wave and ice forecasts, slowing down life saving search and rescue operations.”

Rice said there would also be potential delays in toxin forecasting, which she said GLERL developed after toxic algal blooms in 2014 left more than 400,000 people in the Toledo area without drinking water.

And cuts to NOAA risk the agency taking a backseat on invasive species research and forecasting, potentially allowing Asian carp to get a foothold in the Great Lakes and devastate the commercial and recreational fishing industry, Rice said.

“It has taken over a century of bipartisan cooperation, investment and science to bring the Great Lakes back from the brink of ecological collapse,” Rice said, “but these reckless cuts could undo the progress in just a few short years, endangering the largest surface freshwater system in the world.”

The hearing comes as communities in Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula continue to recover from historic ice storms in late March that brought significant damage to the region, from knocked out power and communications to hundreds of miles of roadways blocked by debris.

Rice was asked about NOAA’s role in making sure the state is prepared for extreme weather.

Researchers at GLERL study how the Great Lakes affect weather patterns in the state, which is key to helping shape the National Weather Service’s forecast models, Rice said.

“Without that research ongoing, those weather models, as things shift in the climate, those weather models will, for lack of a better term, get weaker and weaker,” Rice said. “We need to have those models updated constantly. So eliminating a research office in the Great Lakes is detrimental to being able to predict things like those big ice storms or being able to predict lake effect snow.”

GLERL also manages wave modeling and monitoring and a buoy system that predicts shifts in water levels in the Great Lakes and can give a warning if there’s a dramatic enough shift.

“Without those researchers and without that laboratory, all of those programs go away,” Rice said. “We’re really talking about the safety and welfare of Michiganders and people in the Great Lakes.”

Rice said the cuts might mean the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy would have to take on some of the monitoring done by GLERL.

In late February, Congressional Democrats reported that 1,300 federal workers had been fired from NOAA.

A number of those fired workers were brought back on administrative leave after a court temporarily halted the firings. When that order was lifted last week, the Trump administration began re-firing NOAA employees, the Hill reported.