From the horse's mouth regarding NWS underfunding/understaffing
So this got posted a couple weeks back after the Menesha EF3, on a thread questioning whether or not the Menesha tornado met Tornado Emergency criteria. Going through u/Big-Caterpillar5714's post history, it really does seem they are a veteran meteorologist at the Grand Forks NWS office, so this constitutes a first hand account of the situation there over the past couple years, and is presumably at least somewhat representative of what has happened at other NWS offices.
I think this provides some important clarification on exactly what impacts the Trump administration's actions have had on the NWS. It seems the NWS did not receive cuts directly, but staffing WAS affected by various actions the Trump administration took.
Notably, the early retirement offers they mention stand out to me, as I had heard about this happening in the context of government workers in general last year. Several creators I follow called attention to it as it was a fairly transparent attempt by the Trump administration to rotate out as many government employees as they could in order to get their own people in, and they predicted that issues just like this would come up.
This clearly had a significant impact on staffing in the NWS, especially when it came to veteran meteorologists. From my understanding, during events they still have the same number of staff working as before, but it seems those staff are coming from a smaller pool of employed mets, and those mets are taking on a larger workload overall as a result. Additionally, with many veteran mets retiring, a large amount of experience was also lost; the new hires they have made to replace them are naturally going to be less experienced than the ones that retired.
Combine these factors and it means the people putting out these warnings are less experienced and more fatigued on average than they were before. If this is the case, an uptick in warning errors makes a lot of sense.
Additionally, unless I'm much mistaken, the NWS likely relies a lot on NOAA for a lot of the data and infrastructure they use to make forecasts, so funding cuts to NOAA could be having an indirect impact on the accuracy of NWS forecasts through impacts to that. I'd appreciate if someone with actual knowledge of this relationship could give us some insight into how it might be affecting forecasts and other NWS services.
Sorry to u/Big-Caterpillar5714 for calling you out suddenly like this btw. I just felt like your posts weren't getting enough attention and that they were very relevant to ongoing discourse in this sub and in the greater weather community on social media in general. There seems to be a LOT of misinformation/misunderstandings regarding how the NWS has been impacted by the change in federal administration last year, and I think it's important to get first hand accounts like yours out there to address that. If there's anything I have misunderstood or misrepresented, please feel free to reach out to me in DMs or post here with corrections and clarifications!
u/Big-Caterpillar5714 has made a number of posts other than the one I posted that touch on this and other issues concerning the operation of NWS offices, if you're curious to look. Just browse their post history and you'll see the majority of their activity on Reddit references their career at the NWS in some way, so you can get a more complete picture of their experiences at the NWS by doing that.