No one should be surprised by any rehiring. Number one...it's Government beurocracy....and number 2....when you have sliced over 130,000 Fed jobs with another 100,000 to go, you are going to have some rehires.
I don't think anyone has looked into the past. But the target is 2015 employment levels with CIV FED employment with many/some of these agencies. The Goverment employee totals have increaed well over 20% since 2015.
That is absurd...especially given the crap labor participation rate.
And regarding the National Weather Service...the goal is the employment level being close to those 2015 levels. Interesting to note with some past issues regarding NWS....they have/had a terrible vacancy problem and horrible hiring process. Like really bad-and this is circa 2015 as well. Take it from the source:
NWS collects billions of weather and climate observations annually, which are fed into its supercomputer forecasting models. In fiscal year 2016, NWS had 4,218 employees, of whom 3,629 were in operational units, and NOAA’s budget for NWS was approximately $1.1 billion, according to NWS documentation
In 2025 ..guess how many were employeed prior to any action...;)
Further..I am sure this was never reported on.....read it closely:
Beginning in 2013, a series of events led to a hiring backlog at NWS. Specifically, in response to the 2013 federal budget sequestration, NOAA implemented an agency-wide hiring freeze.26 Because WFMO generally could not hire or replace departing employees during the freeze, the number of vacancies at NWS increased. According to WFMO officials, when the hiring freeze was lifted in 2014, demand for hiring across NOAA was high. Simultaneously, WFMO had experienced a high level of attrition during the freeze—in fiscal years 2013 and 2014, approximately 50 percent of WFMO staff handling hiring left the agency, according to a WFMO official—and therefore, WFMO could not keep pace with the hiring demand when the freeze was lifted.27 In fiscal year 2016, attrition at NWS outpaced WFMO’s hiring abilities. Over the course of the fiscal year, 191 staff left NWS, and WFMO hired 157 external candidates, according to WFMO data. Therefore, NWS’s hiring backlog increased. According to NWS documents and officials, NWS had resources to fill vacant operational unit positions,28 but it was unable to do so because of limited
!! It is very important to source from an appropriate venue....if one does not...they will get poor information and lack of factual data. Instead, they get opinion reporting with an emphasis on bias. And it doesn't matter which side of the fence you are on.