NOAA has the unfortunate status of being the government's lead scientific agency for climate change—which no longer exists under the Trump administration. Today it's paying the price:
I am now hearing from multiple folks in the past two hours (including some who have personally been fired) that mass firings have now commenced within NOAA--including, yes, at the National Weather Service.
— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) February 27, 2025 at 1:17 PM
The cuts, which are said to affect between 560 and 1,830 workers at the agency, were planned for at least a week, contingent upon the confirmation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agency. NOAA reported a permanent workforce of 11,758 in fiscal 2023, meaning the cuts could affect more than 10 percent of employees.
....Staffers from the Elon Musk-affiliated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly entered NOAA offices earlier this month, before Lutnick’s confirmation. Lutnick denied any plans to dismantle the agency as Commerce secretary, but Project 2025, the sweeping conservative governance blueprint, calls for privatizing and reassigning nearly all of its functions.
It was nice knowin' you, NOAA.
The blast radius of the 2024 election fuckup is so far beyond what the Cassandras like me were saying.
I am afraid I will never find it in myself to forgive the fuckheads who voted for him or wasted their vote because some little aesthetic detail of Kamala Harris wasn't to their taste.
Double dittos on that. Today's also detonate SSA day. Unbelievable villainy.
So true. On the one hand you have a politician who maybe sometimes you did not agree with 100% on everything. On the other you had a monster supported by all the billionaires who wanted to destroy our democracy. Tough choice!
I hope every RFK JR supporter who voted for Convicted Felon Trump gets measles and bird flu and fucking dies.
I am a retired NWS employee and based on my experience with coworkers there are more Republicans than Democrats employed there, although they may not necessarily be Trump voters. But it is sad to see an agency die that provided great value to the taxpayers.
Who needs NOAA when you have a sharpie?
You mean NOAA, the agency on whom pretty much our entire agricultural industry depends on a daily basis, not to mention officials at every level of government who must plan for and deal with weather-related emergencies?
Well no worries! Private Enterprise™ (hallowed be its name) will step up!
Wait, what's that you say? All those "weather" services and apps depend either significantly or totally on NOAA data and forecasts, and mostly just reinterpret or repackage it?
[Long puzzled pause, then resolutely] Well I don't believe THAT!
(Thanks again, Republicans!)
Well, Republicans, and all those Hispanic (et al) voters who abandoned or felt abandoned by Harris and the DNC.
Yup WGN is going to have to launch its own satellite.
"Well no worries! Private Enterprise™ (hallowed be its name) will step up!"
As you note, it's a fucking scam. The idea isn't to offload NOAA/NWS functions to the private market, but to stop reporting for free the data NOAA/NWS collects at the taxpayer expense and instead gift it to some jackass private companies who will then require the public to pay for it.
This is like "privatizing" the roads by taking roads that are built and maintained at public expense and letting some company nonetheless charge a toll for their use. People should fucking riot about this.
Good enough for the Founders. Good enough for you.
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/how-do-weather-sticks-work
I suspect this is one of those cases where there will be a scramble to re-hire most of those laid off. But of course this whole oops! won’t waste more of the taxpayers’ money than it ‘saves’, will it?
If no one knows the hurricane is coming does it even exist?
And tornadoes! What good is the warning, anyway? You die or you don't die, why worry about it?
Now, now, Mr Drum. Of course NOAA isn’t being dismantled. There will still be a NOAA. With Lutnick, and just enough employees to direct people to private companies…
The thing is, private weather companies like Accuweather get their data from... NOAA. So if there's no NOAA, there are also no other private companies to use. It's like shutting down the Labor Department and then saying you can go get your unemployment data from the private sector.
And they're worse at it. The NOAA/NWS website remains by far the most reliable forecasting site.
While I can't advocate for it, I am ashamed to admit I would not be unhappy if somebody at one of those offices "went postal" on the day Elon and the DOGE team walked in. Those are some eggs that really need to be broken, in the omlet-metaphor sense.
I'll advocate for it.
Remember, "He who saves the country does not violate any law."
Ok, so no hurricane / tornado / blizzard / ice storm forecasts or warnings after he shit/cans NOAA (or puts one of Herr Musk's companies in charge of the weather), no updated flu or Covid vaccines this fall since since Secretary Worm Brain is too busy eradicating SSRI meds, or promoting raw milk, or transporting dead bears and cutting off whale heads.
Don't worry though, the MAGA GOP so called "moderates" in high tax state swing districts have reinstated the SALT deductions in the recently passed Congressional budget (just like they promised during their campaigns).
this is going to be multiple disasters.
Hopefully, one will be the storm that wipes out Trump's FL flop pad when it comes up because the peeved weather dudes forgot to tell us about it.
Sadly, it will take a lot of stupid Floridians with it. People who can't get flood insurance and think tax cut is more important than reliable weather reports and sane regulation of our environment.
The weather is political now.
So are fish and shellfish. NOAA does lots of work maintaining sustainable fisheries.
It has been, even if it was under the radar.
The NWS provides the best forecasts around. All of the private weather services just use their raw data and do it worse. The private weather services have wanted to kill the NWS for decades now, so that they can sell forecasting services to the public instead of the public being able to get them for free.
What private company would take on the potential liabilities of weather forecasting? Can you imagine the class action suits that could have been filed by folks in Appalachian North Carolina? No hurricane in recorded history took that track, and the NWS issued big warnings, but they were apparently not sufficient to get people out of the canyons.
If some private company had issued those warnings, they would be up to their throats in lawsuits today. Right now as folks have noted, they just parrot what the NWS says and when things go sideways say "It's his fault------>"
"What private company would take on the potential liabilities of weather forecasting? Can you imagine the class action suits that could have been filed by folks in Appalachian North Carolina?"
Any private weather forecast would come, as part of the subscription license, with disclaimers and waivers.
This is actually a key point that derailed privatization of NOAA under Bush 2.
You can't sue the govt for a wrong forecast (which is freely distributed to everyone), but you can sue a private company that sells one.
At that time the companies said they wanted to make the routine forecasts but wanted NWS to step in for tornadoes, hurricanes etc. Since that is unworkable (unless those people have been following the details they won't be able to get it right), the idea was dropped.
A further complication is that forecasts depend on global data. That is shared freely under govt-to-govt treaties through the World Meteorological Organization. Would the WMO nations accept private companies as partners?
So are the layoffs being done by some acting-Secretary to give Lutnick cover, or did he lie to the Senators? He might as well have; most of the other Trump nominees did. I mean, the trail was blazed by Supreme Court nominees, who shamelessly lied about stare decisis and Roe. It’s a team sport now, captained by the Liar-in-Chief.
I'm comforted by the fact that Florida and Texas are hurricane magnets. Let's see how they do without a forecast.
Brain of man that was turned into glass by Vesuvius,
https://i.redd.it/g04n16ev2rle1.jpeg
Thinks he's sharp and edgy, but really he's hard and brittle, and can't think of much at all, which makes him paranoid. Votes Republican.
lol!
But I was assured by the news media that talk about shuttering NOAA was a multi-pinnochio lie!
While it seemed likely Trump would go after this department, it was the one that corrected him when he said a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico was going to hit Alabama after all, 10% reduction in workforce seems smaller than with most other agencies. I am not saying it isn't stupid to think that giving an arbitrary number, or in this case range, of people to fire is a step towards efficiency.
But given what DOGE claims to be doing, this actually seems oddly moderate. The high number is still a trim, I have no way of knowing if it is a trim that the department can afford. And apparent the exact number is still to be determined suggesting that unlike with the other agencies some thought may be going into this. I suppose it could be that they firing all of the workers with less than 2 years in the department and don't know what number that is. That would be pretty stupid.
But this sounds less like dismantling than most of the departments they have trashed so far.
it isn't stupid to think that giving an arbitrary number, or in this case range, of people to fire is a step towards efficiency
That might be true if you were identifying "deadwood" in some way.
But what's happening here is firing the new young people without regard to how well they're doing. They might be good, they might not be (and there are established procedures to evaluate them) but firing the whole cohort is not that. In my experience these people are carefully chosen and carefully mentored. They are our future! (Says the old hand).
It is the opposite of efficient to throw away all that work and start again with a new cohort.
I graduated from Penn State with a B.S. in Meteorology. The effort to take the data from NOAA private has been alive for a very long time. From Wikipedia:
On April 14, 2005, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) introduced the "National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005" in the U.S. Senate. The legislation would have forbidden the National Weather Service from providing any such information directly to the public, and the legislation was generally interpreted as an attempt by AccuWeather to profit off of taxpayer-funded weather research by forcing its delivery through private channels. AccuWeather denies this and maintains it never intended to keep weather information out of the hands of the general public.[35] The bill did not come up for a vote. Santorum received campaign contributions from AccuWeather's president, Joel Myers.[36]
Selling off every valuable asset is their goal. Turn the entire population into renters.
Yes, but more complicated. See my comment above.
That comment was in responses to the aldoushickman'and anandakos discussion of liability for bad forecasts:
[Liability] is actually a key point that derailed privatization of NOAA under Bush 2.
You can't sue the govt for a wrong forecast (which is freely distributed to everyone), but you can sue a private company that sells one.
At that time the companies said they wanted to make the routine forecasts but wanted NWS to step in for tornadoes, hurricanes etc. Since that is unworkable (unless those people have been following the details they won't be able to get it right), the idea was dropped.
A further complication is that forecasts depend on global data. That is shared freely under govt-to-govt treaties through the World Meteorological Organization. Would the WMO nations accept private companies as partners?
And don't you want to set up autopay, so you don't have to remember to pay the bill? Sure you do! (And we sure want to suck money out of your account regularly until you die)
How do people know that they've been fired? Why should I believe that a person who says they are firing me has the authority to fire me?
This is just in time for an anticipated severe weather outbreak in much of the deep south forecast for next week.
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/exper/day4-8/
(Although this link is updated every day, the dates in question are March 4 and 5. You can take it to the bank there will be severe weather in these regions on those days.)
We know this, of course, because of the wizards at the Storm Prediction Center, who are really really good at what they do (forecasting and monitoring severe weather risks). The idea that we'd dismantle this incredible advance warning system is beyond reason.