The National Weather Service has paused automation that provided language translations to severe weather alerts after the government contract paying for the services expired.

The contract for artificial intelligence modeling used to send emergency alerts in different languages is just one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) contracts that lapsed this week.

The translations have been provided by Lilt, an artificial intelligence company, since 2023. It provided them in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Samoan. The contract lapse comes as President Donald Trump’s administration cuts spending at federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that have led to high employee vacancy rates at NWS offices.

NOAA employees told PBS News that if the contract with Lilt is not signed again within 30 days of the April 1 expiration, the project would be difficult to restart because it will have to seek new bids for companies to provide the AI services.

Nearly 68 million people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home, including 42 million Spanish speakers, according to 2019 Census data.

The translations are important for more than extreme weather events, said Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University.

“If [non-English speakers] don’t have access to that National Weather Service information in the different languages, that could be the difference between life and death for somebody,” said Norma Mendoza-Denton, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles,