As some forecast offices stop staffing overnight, the National Weather Service is scrambling to redistribute internal staffing and fill more than 150 positions to cover critical employment loopholes.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration opened the “reallocation period” on Tuesday, requiring 76 meteorologists and 155 employees to consider transfers to fill the Trump administration’s firing of probation employees and incentivizing early retirement to retire them to the National Weather Services (NWS).

The service is seeking staff to hold five top positions for meteorologists responsible for five field offices including Lake Charles, Louisiana. Houston; and Wilmington, Ohio.

Meanwhile, at least eight of the 122 U.S. weather forecast offices – including Sacramento, California; Goodland, Kansas; Jackson, Kentucky – are no longer able to operate overnight or are planning to cut overnight operations in the next half month, Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Services staff organization, which is tracking the service’s staff numbers.

Critics of the layoffs say the push for reallocating meteorologists and other staff members shows that the service has been cut too deeply and that critical public safety services have been hurt.

"This has never happened. We have always been an agency that provides 24/7 services to the U.S. public," Faxi said. "The risk is extremely high - if such cuts continue to go to the National Weather Service, people will die."

The National Weather Service acknowledged that it is temporarily changing the service levels of its provision and personnel, but said it is continuing to perform its mission while the NWS forecasts continue to remain accurate.

“NOAA and NWS are committed to mitigating the impact of recent staffing changes to ensure core mission functions continue,” the bureau said in a statement. “These efforts include temporary adjustments to service levels, as well as the offices most needed, are temporary allocations for meteorologists and permanent internal reallocations for advertising.”

Faxi said 52 of the 122 weather forecast offices nationwide have a vacancies rate of more than 20%.

The service’s on-site office leadership list was last updated on Wednesday, showing the agency was full of vacancies and the 35 chief positions in the forecast office remain open.

Since the new government took charge of the new government, the National Weather Service has reduced more than 500 employees by providing early retirement plans to senior employees and firing probation employees, according to a letter from a former director, who warned that cuts could lead to unnecessary deaths in severe weather to tornadoes, wildfires, wildfires and hurricanes.

"Our worst nightmare is the lack of staff in the weather forecast office to unnecessary lives," the director wrote earlier this month.

Recently retired NWS employees said they were concerned that staffing levels would drop below critical levels when services were recruited frozen, and many early-career workers had served as early-career workers on probation.

Alan Gerard, who underwent an early retirement in March as director of the Analytics and Understanding Branch of NOAA National Severe Storm Laboratory, likened the NWS reallocation notice to “rearrange the deck chairs” and noted that it did not address the core issues.

"They are really just moving people from one office to another, and while that might help some of the really short-term crisis situations they're having, it's not any long-term solution," Gerald said. "It's not a flood of people."

Brian Lamarre, who recently worked as a meteorologist at the Tampa Bay Area weather forecasting office in Florida and accepted an early retirement from the NWS on April 30, said he understood the impulse to modernize and simplify services.

In fact, Lamarre participated in the Trump administration’s efforts to reorganize the service.

The service program modernizes various parts of its staffing structure by implementing a “mutual assistance” system, where local forecasting offices can request and receive assistance for daily tasks in severe weather or understaffing.

“Many plans are accelerated out of urgency,” Ramare said. “Whenever you want to re-arrange your living room furniture, you don’t burn the house, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

Lamar says Northwest should resume recruitment soon experience. Meanwhile, the service reduces trial workers, including many in the first or second year of service.

“Severing off the trial staff really limits the institution’s future capabilities,” Ramare said. “It’s your bright mind, your new innovative ideas stand out from the university. That’s why it’s very important to open up hiring.”