Congress Restored Earthquake-Monitoring Funding. The Vacancies Didn't Move.

Every earthquake alert Americans on the West Coast get before the shaking arrives — ShakeAlert, the system that pushed a warning to phones ahead of the March 2025 Southern California swarm — runs on a workforce the government's own advisers say is falling apart faster than it's being rebuilt.▸ The money fight over that workforce is over: Congress rejected the administration's proposed cut and funded the program above its prior-year level. The staffing fight is not. Filling a vacant federal seismology position takes more than an appropriation; it takes a hiring authority that stayed frozen through the same year the money came back.

The President's FY2026 budget request proposed slashing the U.S. Geological Survey's Natural Hazards Mission Area — the umbrella that funds earthquake, volcano, landslide, and coastal-hazard monitoring — to $136.5 million, a 31% cut from the year before, according to the Congressional Research Service.▸ Congress didn't go along with it. The explanatory statement for P.L. 119-74 enacted $200.1 million for the mission area instead — $1.5 million more than FY2025's $198.6 million, and $63.6 million above what the White House had asked for. Inside that total, the CRS report notes the Earthquake Hazards Program specifically grew $2.3 million year over year, with $34.9 million of its funding earmarked by name for "continued development and expansion" of ShakeAlert, including the first steps of bringing the system to Alaska.

Money restored is not staff restored.▸ The Scientific Earthquake Studies Advisory Committee (SESAC) — the federally chartered panel of university seismologists that reports annually to the USGS Director — filed its FY2025 annual report on September 30, 2025, the most recent staffing snapshot the committee has published. It found the Earthquake Science Center — the unit that runs the seismic networks ShakeAlert depends on — carrying "70 vacancies of approximately 190 FTE staff positions, amounting to a vacancy rate of over 35%," and noted that number "has actually increased since a year ago." The ShakeAlert program itself is worse off: SESAC put its vacancy rate at "over 50%, which unfortunately has not improved since last year."

The gaps aren't evenly spread, either.▸ SESAC reports the SoCal Seismic Network is "running with less than 50% of its staff," the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network is "50% short-staffed in ShakeAlert IT and Field Tech positions," and the Northern California Seismic Network is short enough on sysadmin and administrative support that it's "dangerously close to not being able to perform critical infrastructure functions." A separate consolidation of IT functions into the Department of the Interior cost the program eleven IT positions and one communications position outright — and because the program no longer has direct management authority over the staff who remain in those roles, SESAC writes it's now unclear "how the EHP can direct the human resources required to meet its 24/7 operations and life-safety mission." The Mendenhall Postdoctoral Program, the pipeline that trains the next generation of USGS earthquake scientists, has had its hiring frozen since January 2025, with no new recruitment round opened for FY2026 as of the report's filing.

The committee's own words, repeated unchanged from a formal warning it sent the USGS Director the year before: "staff deficits in critical scientific, technical, and administrative positions within EHP, which have been left open for extended durations, now threaten mission-critical research and monitoring projects."

Staffing figures are current as of SESAC's FY2025 annual report, submitted Sept. 30, 2025 — the committee's most recently published snapshot; funding figures reflect FY2026 enacted appropriations as tracked by the Congressional Research Service through Feb. 23, 2026.