Hurricane Harvey, the category 4 storm that devastated the Gulf Coast in 2017, made landfall on a Friday night. By Saturday night, torrential rainfall engulfed the Texas coast, and League City, where the National Weather Service’s Houston/Galveston forecast office is located, was right near ground zero. Jeff Evans, the meteorologist-in-charge at the time, recalled the uncertainty of whether he’d be able to get his staff into the office that Sunday; he made preemptive calls to the NWS office in Tallahassee about a contingency plan to handle emergency operations if need be. “I had to ride with a coworker who had a pickup,” said Evans in a recent interview. “We were driving through flooded roads, which is what we tell people not to do.”

They did eventually make it to their office, where they relieved the employees who’d been there all night monitoring the developing disaster. Evans checked the radars and models to see how much rain had fallen and how much more was expected to come, and he communicated that information to local officials and emergency managers. He checked the river gauges, which registered flood levels he’d never seen before. “We had employees whose wives were calling and saying the water was starting to get in the house,” said Evans. “It’s a tough position to be in. You’re trying to take care of your family too, but you can’t just leave and say, ‘I’ll be home in a minute.’ ” NWS plays a critical role in emergency preparedness for severe weather events, which have been growing in frequency and severity in the Houston region and Gulf Coast. It’s a big job for a small staff, said Evans. He added, “We’re like first responders in that we can’t just go home when things are going bad.” 

In January of this year, Evans received the email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” He was one of the more  than two million federal employees across the country who received the email as part of a purge spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The email presented a deferred resignation program that promised employees full pay and benefits for eight months should they resign. Evans, who is 56, had planned to retire in a couple of years, but with rumors of forthcoming federal employee pension cuts under the Trump administration, he didn’t want to take any chances. “If they were going to try to roll back my retirement benefits within a year of leaving, that was certainly a concern,” he said—so he took the offer. He retired in February, after working for 34 years with the NWS, eleven of which were in his role as meteorologist-in-charge, the highest rank in a forecast office. 

Evans’s departure represents one of 10 vacancies at the Houston/Galveston office—more than a third of its staff of 24. The staffing shortage prompted some Texas leaders to raise concerns ahead of hurricane season, which officially begins on June 1. Earlier this month, Democratic Congress members Lizzie Fletcher, Al Green, and Sylvia Garcia, all representing Houston-area districts, penned a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—the government agency operating the NWS and other weather services—calling the situation at the Houston/Galveston forecast office a “crisis”: “Adequate staffing for the NWS, especially as we go into hurricane season, is a critical matter that could cost lives if left unaddressed,” they wrote. 

“This whole idea that these efforts are making things more efficient, I do not think that that is bearing out,” Fletcher said later, in an interview with Texas Monthly, referring to the sweeping DOGE cuts that have significantly affected federal agencies across the board. “We have these offices fully staffed to keep us safe.”

Some staff members took DOGE’s early retirement offer in January, while others left during a subsequent push for early retirement by the administration. But five of the vacancies existed before President Donald Trump took the helm. Evans, whose job responsibilities included hiring, said it can be a long, protracted process at NWS. Wary of a probable hiring freeze in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, he and his staff scrambled to fill those empty positions and even identified three candidates. “We were trying to hire as quickly as we could before the inauguration, but we couldn’t get everything done,” he said. “None of the hires happened.”

Sure enough, Trump instituted a federal hiring freeze by executive order on Inauguration Day, and in April he extended it to July 15. “What exacerbated a lot of this is that they put out the early retirement offers but the weather service was kept under that hiring freeze,” said Evans. “I left in February. They’ve not been able to even consider filling it.”

Last week, NOAA announced it was seeking 155 staffers—including 76 meteorologists—to take reassignment positions at short-staffed local offices. Erica Grow Cei, an agency spokesperson, said those reassignments, and other adjustments, are temporary. “Work is underway to restore services at local forecast offices around the country,” she said. 

Todd Lericos, who is the acting meteorologist-in-charge while the NWS Houston/Galveston office grapples with its vacancies, said that despite the staffing challenges, the office has been able to maintain essential services and operations. Lericos felt confident going into hurricane season, with the assistance of other NWS offices. As part of the plan, the NWS office in Corpus Christi will assist the Houston/Galveston office. However, as a long-term strategy that is not sustainable, Lericos noted: “While we feel confident that we have things covered, it’s not something you would want to see in permanence.”

Evans, who no longer works at the office, is less optimistic. “This is something we haven’t done before,” he said. “It’s not ideal.”