Florida Weatherman Warns He Won’t Be Able to Accurately Predict Hurricanes This Summer Because of Federal Budget Cuts

Screenshot via YouTube.

John Morales, a meteorologist at NBC 6 South Florida, had a dire warning for viewers as the 2025 hurricane season kicked off: due to federal budget cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), he would no longer be able to accurately predict hurricanes.

In a video posted on YouTube, Morales played an archived clip from his report on Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm from 2019 that did indeed turn and have a lesser impact on Florida, as he had predicted, one of many critically important weather reports he had given over his 34 years in South Florida.

“And I am here to tell you that I am not sure that I can do that this year,” said Morales, “because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general.”

Morales lamented the federal government cuts to NWS and NOAA for having “a multigenerational impact on science in this country” as the U.S. forfeited its leadership role before explaining how these cuts would specifically make his job harder to do.

The Central and South Florida NWS offices were 19 to 39% understaffed, he said. There had also been a nearly 20% reduction in weather balloon releases nationwide and cuts to NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter flight program meant that the aircraft might not be able to fly at all this year.

These cuts had resulted in the quality of weather forecasts “becoming degraded,” said Morales, leaving them “flying blind” and unable to know the strength of a hurricane before it hits land.

In a column on the NBC 6 website, Morales expanded on his worries that the combination of the predictions that this would be a more active hurricane season plus the budget cuts leaving them lacking good data to make accurate forecasts would be a “combustible mix” and cause a “needless loss of life” when a severe storm hit.

“Am I worried?” he wrote. “You bet I am!”

Morales did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but did identify the cuts to staff and resources as coming “since January,” when the president’s second term began.

Watch the video above via NBC 6 South Florida on YouTube.