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| The DOGE and Trump ongoing attacks against NOAA and the National Weather Service aren't really about cost cutting as they'd have you believe. It's all about denying reality while enriching the billionaire and corporate class at the expense of the rest of us. |
Which I guess is fine if you want a future where if a tornado bearing down as a complete surprise, because there was no decent National Weather Service to warn you about it.
Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE is attacking NOAA just like is many other federal departments. Since NOAA is primarily a science-oriented organization, we can't have that! To the MAGA crowd, Science = Bad.
The fantasy is that if you deny science and reality, things will just do what you want.
Until reality bites you in the butt.
Those bitten butts clearly haven't happened yet, so Trump and Musk and the MAGA crowd continue to have their gleeful field day.
CUTS AND JOB LOSS
The DOGE crowd is already telling NOAA employees to get ready to pack their bags.
"Former NOAA officials told CBS News that current employees have been told to expect a 50 percent reduction in staff and budget cuts of 30 percent."
Not that Congress or anybody else in Washington seems to care, but Musk and his snotty-nosed frat pack bros in his DOGE troupe aren't the ones that are supposed to be cutting staff and budgets. (I swear when somebody asks the parents of these young bucks how/what they're doing, they change the subject).
Congress has the power of the purse. President Trump can of course propose big budget and staff cuts and ask Congress to approve them. Which they might, since so many in Congress are his fan boys and girls.
So we're so far just standing by while Trump and Musk and their minions circumvent the Constitution in their oligarchical, billionaire ways.
Of course, if there is waste and mismanagement at NOAA, that needs to go. A fact-based review of expenditures is a great idea. But a dictatorial purge? As the cost of public safety?
Further staff reductions at the National Weather Service "means we have a higher - a maybe much higher probability of missing life-saving weather warnings and giving people a heads up they need," said Mary Glackin, former president of the American Meteorological Society and former high ranking NOAA official.
Hurricane forecasting is just one area of potential trouble.
As CNN points out, a dozen people work in the National Hurricane Center's specialist forecasting unit. That's the staffing level that's been in effect for years, even as the number of storms increase. Cutbacks would likely harm hurricane forecasting.
SECURITY
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| The big Vermont flood of July, 2023 killed two Vermonters, but superb warnings from the National Weather Service prevented more deaths from this very dangerous weather event. |
Former NOAA officials told CBS that these DOGE bros showed up at NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland and at the U.S. Commerce Department building in Washington DC . (The Commerce Department oversees NOAA like they owned the place.
"'They walked through security like it didn't apply to them' Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director for NOAA, said of DOGE staff. 'They were there and they were going through IT systems.....They're not asking substantial questions about what NOAA does and the importance of its role. This isn't a review to figure out efficiency."
At least one Congress creature is making a bit of a public stink about this, so we'll take anything we can get. CBS News reports:
"Democratic Sen. Chris Van Holler of Maryland, who represents the state where NOAA is headquartered, said his office is investigating DOGE's work on NOAA, which includes such agencies as the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
'Hearing reports that Musk's cronies are targeting NOAA - infiltrating key systems and locking out career employees,' Van Hollen posted on X Tuesday. "NOAA is vital for weather forecasting, scientific research & more. Their critical work saves lives. My team and I are looking into this & we will not stand for it.'"
It's not just Van Hollen that's hearing about this. Aides to various Congress creatures have heard the same thing.
SCIENCE
Getting rid of career employees at NOAA damages the work of science and of weather forecasting, but the Trump administration is going further with this anti-science tirade
"'A number of federal employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. federal agency that monitors and models the oceans and atmosphere for the purpose of predicting changes in climate and weather, have received orders to temporarily cease communication with foreign nationals, including those working directly with the U.S. government, WIRED has learned."
Wired reports that NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service had received orders to pause "all international engagements" including "foreign national colleagues" including emails "with foreign national colleagues."
It's unclear how extensive this directive extends in NOAA. The Marine Fisheries Service deals with offshore wind energy among many other things, and Trump hates, hates offshore wind energy for some reason
So that might be part of it.
But, Wired's reporting gets even more ominous.
"According to another source at NOAA, the incommunicado orders extend to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service. In addition to gathering data from across the federal government, NESDIS relies on a wide range of international partners. NESDIS's weather and climate data is essential not only to air transportation safety but also to combat drought, monitor coral reef destruction and safeguard railway shipping carriers against dangerous weather."
If the directive to stop communicating with foreign nationals ends up extending across NOAA, that right there cripples our ability to forecast weather.
What goes on in the atmosphere over other countries doesn't stay there. Weather systems are interconnected globally. A big change in the jet stream over, say, Mongolia, could well have a big influence on what kind of weather eventually happens in Peoria.
You want an America First policy? Then you have to keep tabs on what's going on elsewhere in the world. Which means cooperating with other international meteorological an climatological organizations. We need to keep close tabs on weather conditions worldwide to help determine if we in the United States face dangerous storms.
They of course there's climate science. You know, global warming? It affects the United States, too, though Trump seems not to think so. It's getting to the point that I'm actually starting to hope a climate-powered hurricane storm surge damages Mar-A-Lago just to teach him a lesson. After all, just because Trump decrees climate change is a hoax, doesn't make it so. Jokes on him, right?
You need global cooperation to study and combat climate change, including the effects it has on the United States. America First, indeed!
THE GOAL
Like all the lofty talk from DOGE and Trump that they're trying to end government waste, this is largely about making billionaire and corporations richer.
Project 2025 calls for privatizing NOAA and the National Weather Service. Here's one reason why, via The Guardian:
"....it had been a longtime goal of corporations that rely on NOAA data to prevent the agency from making the data public, instead of giving it directly to private corporations that create products based on it, such as weather forecasting services."
You get more details on this from NPR, which noted in one interview that websites made detailed National Weather Service data for anybody to access. That doesn't sit well with private companies, noted Wailin Wong of the Planet Money podcast The Indicator. "If customers can get sophisticated data from the government for free, maybe they wouldn't pay for that kind of information anymore," he said,
If you go full bore and privatize the National Weather Service, which seems to be an eventual goal here, people will need to pay for their weather forecasts. Sure, they already do in taxes.
Each individual taxpayer in the United States spends $3 a year for all that the National Weather Service does. Everything from telling you to bring the umbrella to work with you tomorrow to telling you to hide in the basement NOW because that tornado is headed toward you.
You can be sure a privatized system would cost all of us more, at least those of us who can afford it. People who can't would just be out of luck. I guess in a billionaire's mind, the poors don't deserve the warnings that would save their lives in hurricanes and floods and such.
Americans were sold on the idea of limiting government waste. I'm sold on the idea of eliminating government waste
I think many of the people who voted for Trump had gotten themselves convinced he's the guy who would combat this huge, gaping growing inequality between the billionaire class and everyone else.
I just hope people soon realize that's not what's going on here. It's not about giving us taxpayers a break. It's a all a grift. NOAA is the one many pieces of that grift in action.
And we'll all be the losers because of it. Except of course for Elon Musk and his merry band of oligarchs.
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