Sorensen introduces weather service bill into Congress, aims to keep NWS positions in place, filled

As tornadoes tear across the Midwest and flooding devastates parts of Texas, a new bipartisan bill in Congress introduced by Rep. Eric Sorensen, D-Rockford, is taking aim at staffing issues within the National Weather Service.

Sorensen, who represents portions of the state’s central and northwestern regions, including Sterling west to the Mississippi River, is the only meteorologist serving in Congress. He introduced the bill known as the Weather Workforce Improvement Act (H.R. 3809) in response to workforce cuts that began under the Trump administration earlier this year, he said.

The legislation would make NWS meteorologists and support staff “mission critical” public safety workers, giving them the same employment protections as airport Transportation Security Administration agents and making it harder for future administrations to lay them off.

“This is a direct response to the [Trump] administration cutting 10, 20% of the workforce of the National Weather Service,” Sorensen told Shaw Local. “We need to make sure that the people are there at the decision-making desks, that we have the National Weather Service meteorologists who aren’t overworked, who aren’t working six and seven day weeks, 12-hour shifts. I want them bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

The proposal comes at a crucial moment for the region.

Reports from former employees familiar with the Quad Cities NWS office, which covers much of northwest Illinois including parts of the Sauk Valley, claim the office has seen staffing drop by 42% – from 24 to just 14 employees, including its hydrologist – even as the Davenport-based office monitors the Mississippi River and severe summer weather as it moves from Iowa into northwestern Illinois.

Shaw Local reached out to the Quad Cities NWS office to verify those claims. Although they declined to comment on specific staffing numbers and positions, a representative said their office has been granted an exception to the Trump administration’s hiring freeze order, allowing them to refill “mission critical” positions.

Sorensen insists residents can feel safe for now.

“I can tell you as the only meteorologist in Congress, we’re in good shape. We have not seen excess rainfall, nor are we expecting it,” Sorensen said. ”We’re still in a minor drought situation. So we’re in good shape here.”

But Sorensen emphasized that this relative calm should not lead to complacency.

“We need that person because our forecasting, especially when we look at a river basin, we can look out with specificity for the next couple of months and say that, ‘Sterling and Rock Falls, you’re going to be fine. Prophetstown, you’re going to be fine. Dixon, you’re going to be fine,’” Sorensen said.

The stakes are particularly high for area farmers, many of whom rely on rainfall data for planting and chemical applications, he said.

“Farmers need that data to understand where to apply the herbicides, where to apply the pesticides,” Sorensen said. “In our region, especially in Whiteside County, you see a lot of crop dusters. That’s not free. Farmers have to pay for those things.”

H.R. 3809 also seeks to address a loss of technical staff, including electricians responsible for maintaining Doppler radar systems.

“You can’t just go through the Yellow Pages or go on Google and find an electrician to do that,” Sorensen said. “We can’t afford for Doppler radar to be down.”

The urgency behind the bill has been amplified by recent tragedies, including the Fourth of July flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas, where over 100 people have been confirmed dead, including children and staff from Camp Mystic. Sorensen, while not attributing the deaths to NWS staffing cuts, said a gap remains in how warnings are acted upon.

“There is a misconnect somewhere between when the National Weather Service meteorologist, at 1:15 in the morning, issued a catastrophic flash flood emergency, to the point where at 4:15 it hit Camp Mystic,” Sorensen said. “What happened that we didn’t take precautions in the three hours?”

[ Authorities deflect questions about weather monitoring during deadly Texas floods ]

He suggested the country needs an investigative body for weather disasters, akin to the National Transportation Safety Board for plane crashes.

“Every time that there’s a plane crash, the NTSB goes out and looks at every different factor so that we can learn, so that the disaster doesn’t happen again,” Sorensen said. “We should be doing that with weather disasters.”

Sorensen said Sauk Valley parents concerned about school safety amid severe weather events should take comfort in the safety protocols now in place, pointing to hard lessons learned from the 1967 Belvidere tornado that injured his aunt and claimed the lives of several children.

“We learned at that point that we needed tornado drills. We needed tornado safety,” Sorensen said. ”We needed to make sure that the kids were protected.”

Still, Sorensen warned that even with recent approvals to rehire 126 weather service staffers nationally, the move is not enough.

“A lot of the people that took a buyout, they’re not going to come back,” Sorensen said. “We do have a problem because it’s not like you can just snap a finger and then everybody is back.”

For now, the Sauk Valley remains out of immediate danger but Sorensen wants to keep it that way.

“It doesn’t matter if you are in Lee County, Whiteside County, Carroll County, Stephenson County, or Jo Daviess County, you’re going to be protected,” Sorensen said. “But if we continue to allow this government to be able to cut all of these people, it’s going to create meteorologists who are weary... and that’s what I don’t want this to get to.”