A 16% Raise for a Tsunami Warning System Missing a Third of Its Staff

Two buildings decide whether the West Coast evacuates.▸ One sits in Palmer, Alaska; the other in Honolulu. Between them, the National Tsunami Warning Center and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center run 24 hours a day, analyzing every Pacific-basin earthquake to decide whether a wave is coming. Right now more than a third of their seats are empty, and the Alaska center just lost nine of the seismic stations that feed it data — casualties of a federal grant that lapsed last year and that the Trump administration declined to renew. On March 4, 2026, the Senate Commerce Committee answered with a bill that raises the program's budget 16 percent. It is not law yet.

The Tsunami Warning and Education Act — the law authorizing NOAA's tsunami program — has been due for reauthorization since it lapsed.▸ The Tsunami Warning, Research, and Education Act of 2026 (S. 3881), introduced by Sen. Maria Cantwell with Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, was first written to authorize $35 million a year through 2031. By the time the Commerce Committee passed it on March 4, the number had been cut to $30 million a year through 2030 — still described by the committee as a "$4.235 million (16.4%) increase above fiscal year 2026 appropriations," which puts the current baseline at roughly $25.8 million a year.

Sixteen percent sounds like relief until it's measured against what the same program has already lost.▸ The National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program — the piece of this budget that funds state-level tsunami risk reduction — was cut to $4 million in 2025, down from the $6 million NOAA had historically provided. Michael West, director of the Alaska Earthquake Center, called it being kept "on life support." A raise for a program still doesn't undo the cut that came before it.

The dollars fund a machine that runs on people: seismologists and duty officers who read incoming earthquake data and decide, in minutes, whether to issue a tsunami warning.▸ According to Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, as reported by NBC News, the Alaska center has 11 of its 20 full-time positions filled; Hawaii has 12 of 16. No public federal personnel roster confirms the exact seat count — this is union-reported, on-the-record testimony, not an agency filing — but both centers, Fahy said, are actively trying to hire scientists into the gap.

The Alaska center's understaffing compounds a second, separate loss: nine seismic stations across the state went dark this month after the federal grant funding them lapsed and the administration declined to renew it.▸ That data fed directly into tsunami forecasts along the Alaska-Aleutian Subduction Zone — the fault West says produced the last domestic tsunami and is likeliest to produce the next one. "All the things in the tsunami warning system are going backwards," West told NBC News. "There's a compound problem." Fewer stations means the same short-staffed warning centers now have less data to work with when a quake hits — and less time to get an evacuation call right.

Funding figures describe authorized appropriation levels, not guaranteed future spending — S. 3881 had passed committee but not the full Senate or House as of this writing, and authorized amounts can differ from what is ultimately appropriated. The FY2026 baseline of $25.8 million is backed out from the Senate Commerce Committee's own stated dollar and percentage increase, not independently confirmed against a line-item federal budget document. Staffing figures are union-reported, attributed to a named official, not drawn from a public federal personnel roster.