Deadly storms renew calls for feds to re-invest in weather funding

CHICAGO – Victor Gensini was out in it Tuesday – launching a weather balloon with a team of researchers ahead of the supercell storm that produced a deadly tornado that struck parts of Illinois and northwest Indiana – claiming two lives.

The professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University said while the tornado and loss of life can’t be overlooked, he thinks the legacy of Tuesday’s storm may be record-setting hail stones – some of them reportedly six inches in diameter.

“The storm that eventually produced the Kankakee tornado formed almost right over top of our heads in Wenona. It started moving east, northeast, where it produced hail the size of grapefruits,” Gensini said.

Gensini said he believes the total insured loss for the storms could be in the tens of millions of dollars – and that the growth of large-size storms in recent decades drives up individuals’ insurance premiums and the cost of repairs.

“Those events always just break your heart as an atmospheric scientist, as a researcher whose kind of entire life goal is to make sure that people don’t get killed by these events. So yeah, we cannot diminish that tornado. But when you take a look at overall economic impact yesterday, it will certainly be felt by hail,” he said.

The deadly toll and cost of Tuesday’s storm have renewed attention on both weather prediction and the restructuring that happened within the federal government over the past year.

The one-time Elon Musk led Department of Government Efficiency – or DOGE – cuts a year ago led to hundreds of federal workers being fired or taking early retirement – including meteorologists within the NOAA and the National Weather Service.

“If we have 2,100 meteorologists, we can cover the U.S,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during a June 2025 Congressional hearing, where he dismissed criticism of the cuts and said that automation could help in some areas.

During the hearing, Lutnick pushed back against claims that cuts were impacting weather prediction services.

But deadly flooding in Texas last summer prompted the Trump administration to rehire 450 positions within the National Weather Service, NBC News reported in August of last year.

To be clear, Gensini says, cuts and restructuring likely did not affect the National Weather Service performance in Illinois Tuesday. But he says there is more work to done to restore cuts and staffing to weather balloon launch sites that can help meteorologists make advanced weather predictions days ahead of storms.

“We should be playing offense, not only in terms of engineering and infrastructure and resiliency to these disasters and hazards, but also making sure that we have the proper workforce that’s able and willing to be out there to warn us when these events are pending to potentially strike our communities,” Gensini said.

A spokeswoman for the Commerce Department tells NBC 5 Investigates that National Weather Service is “adequately staffed to meet our mission and we remain ready ahead of severe weather events.”

But just last week, the union of concerned scientists drafted a letter raising concerns about the Trump administration’s plan to restructure or dismantle two weather research centers in Colorado and Wyoming that they say provide critical weather information.