When a tree is badly overgrown and in danger of falling over, does a tree surgeon simply lop off the new growth and walk away?
No. The tree expert examines the tree holistically, determining the alterations required to ensure its health and longevity. Importantly, the tree surgeon determines which healthy sections should be left alone.
NOAA and Federal agencies dealing with weather and climate are no different.
They provide functions acutely needed by the American people. But, without proper management for too many years, problems have developed. Reforms are needed. Some programs should be enhanced, some left alone, and others ended.
Like an expert tree surgeon, the administration needs a deep understanding of the entity it wishes to improve before taking action.
Unfortunately, the current administration has not done this, deciding to simply cut the recent growth (new employees) irrespective of whether their roles are important or critical.
This is a mistake that may undermine the U.S. government's ability to provide critical weather and climate services to the nation.
Yesterday, hundreds of NOAA employees, including many in the National Weather Service, were told their positions were ending. Nearly all were probationary employees, generally those hired during the last year. Some are in essential jobs.
Local National Weather Service Offices play a key role by providing weather forecast services to local communities. Most of these offices are understaffed at this time, some seriously so, because of poor management decisions by NOAA/NWS administrators.
By firing dozens of new weather forecasters and support staff, some offices will no longer be fully functional; all offices will be degraded.
There is little doubt that many Federal agencies have been increasingly ineffective and wasteful of resources. This is certainly true of NOAA, and I have written several papers on this subject and testified in Congress on the issue.
Members of both parties know about NOAA's problems. For example, 15 years ago, many of us in the Northwest weather community made the case that our region acutely needed a coastal weather radar. NOAA management was not interested. Senator Maria Cantwell had to intervene and force them to do it.
NOAA has fallen WAY behind in critical technologies such as numerical weather prediction and machine learning. Its local forecasts are generally inferior to those provided in the private sector. Its computer resources are inadequate for its mission. Its bureaucratic structures are often duplicative and ineffective. NOAA has often rejected working cooperatively with others, such as the academic community.
I am only warming up on its problems😀.
But despite its deficiencies, NOAA does have strengths in many areas, such as atmospheric and ocean observations. Thunderstorm and severe storm prediction. Hurricane warning and forecasting. Its role is still essential.
The simplistic, mindless cutting of new employees is not the way to deal with NOAA's problems.
Instead, the new administration needs to gather a group of topical experts and users to identify the problems and to propose cost-effective solutions. Importantly, it needs to immediately reverse the position terminations until a rational, fact-based plan is ready.
We can have a more effective NOAA and probably spend less money, but this can only be done with knowledge of its strengths, weaknesses, and potential.
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Announcement
You seem to assume that this administration is competent and that this is a unique blunder. This was planned well in advance. Private weather companies want the government to give them data, and then to buy it all back. And they want all of us to have to pay for weather information. These companies have been angling for this for a long time. They are big Republican funders. This isn't a mistake or a one off. This is just one more example of the Trump administration screwing the average American to benefit private companies that line their pockets. This is going to be a really difficult 4 years on so many levels.
ReplyDeleteThis private sector talk is baseless. They want NOAA to stay in business....I know these people and talk to them.
DeletePrivate weather companies, taking "govt data". If this is so, say who and how. I rather doubt outfits like Weather Underground are relying on "government" data, but don't know what their models are fed.
Delete@GlacierBake: You think Weather Underground or any of these other services operate their own weather satellites, doppler radar, weather sensors on land and at sea, or is constantly launching and tracking weather balloons? Kinda doubt they have the budget for half of that, let alone any of it.
DeleteGutting federal agencies of their work force with zero awareness or concern for what those people actually did isn't about making things more efficient, it's not even about waste, fraud, and abuse (always a BS excuse for this). It's about destroying these agencies from within and watching them die. Just ask the people who used to work at USAID or the soon to be destroyed Dept of Education.
By knowing these people and talking to them, do you mean Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick? Russell Vought? Thomas Gilman? Those are the people deciding what to do with NOAA
ReplyDeleteLast week, people in the comments told you this was exactly what was going to happen, and you said it wouldn't. You were wrong. The good, sensible people are not in charge, and this will get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
ReplyDeleteThis is not correct. People claimed that Trump was going to get rid of NOAA and the NWS. This is not correct. They are trying to reduce government employment levels generally.
DeleteI’m sorry Cliff but the current administration is focused on dismantling most government functions (we’re less than two months in and they have already done serious harm to the scientific community - and it will only get worse).
DeleteI hope I am wrong, but I am seriously worried about what the Trump Administration and Elon Musk might try to do. This might be only the beginning. They want more fossil fuels, less public healthcare, less protection for our parks and wilderness areas, and less support for our allies. I don't know how, but Congress has got to rein these guys in.
DeleteVery nicely said, Cliff, the tree surgeon analogy is good. Across the federal government, not just in NOAA, mass layoffs have begun with new employees still on probation. There is indeed a "strategy" here - employees on probation are easier to fire under union rules. Firing other employees takes more time, and I strongly suspect that the plan is to get to them eventually. The new administration sees the federal workforce in general (as well as extramural grantees and contractors) as an enemy that needs to be neutralized, if not put to sleep. I think it will get a whole lot worse unless people push back hard. Your blog post helps.
ReplyDeleteThe Trump Administration is forcing change. Knowing they only have two years, there are not many things they can do. Now the agencies can gather groups of topical experts and users to identify the problems and to propose cost-effective solutions. Maria Cantwell or another can force a single issue, but no one, apparently, has moved NOAA to improve. Some of us are optimistic about the future. Other agencies also need this behind-the-woodshed treatment.
ReplyDelete+++
DeleteYour analogy of "behind the woodshed" is telling. That's an old reference to taking your children out to where your neighbors won't see you and whipping them with a belt.
DeleteCouldn't agree more with you analysis, this chain saw approach is going to end badly for NOAA and the country.
ReplyDeleteIt's concerning how many people post feelings of anger and despair at the downsizing of government. A big brother government that is there to make your decisions for you and take care of you is not why the Founders created this nation. My how naïve, helpless, and dependent so many have become..
ReplyDeleteAlmost everybody supports downsizing and reducing waste in the government. But how we go about it matters. Their approach so far has been incredibly irresponsible and naive. Cliff's absolutely right on this one.
DeleteDo you support completely getting rid of all of the agencies that have been affected? Because this approach only makes sense if that is their intent.
JHK, the Founders empowered the courts to interpret our Constitution. I do not recall any court, in any state, ruling that weather forecasting or scientific research were unconstitutional functions of government.
DeleteNo one is objecting to downsizing, it's the sheer stupidity and outright malice with which it is occurring, and the complete disregard for any damage that might result. This isn't downsizing for efficiency, this is destruction for the joy of it.
DeleteMountain snowpack 70-75% of normal in Cascades. Looks like we will end the year well below normal.
ReplyDeleteWith the storm train setting back up, why would you make that conclusion already. Plus most stations I looked at over 80%
DeleteOn the other hand, NOAA weather date protects lives. Government doesn't have to make decisions for us; but they need to provide uninterrupted weather data to base our decisions on! I have worked for NOAA as scientist and Merchant Marine engineering officer. Ship captains make decisions on where to route their ships on the ocean based on NOAA's weather data. Ship captain friends are writing me and their companies expressing their fear of sailing ships out to sea without reliable weather data. This is why surgical precision is required in downsizing government; lives are at stake.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter was supposed to go work for the Forest Service in the fall in a career track position targeted at promising young people. She would have been working on landscape restoration in the Idaho Panhandle, righting 150-year-wrongs that have damaged the fish runs and meadows. She is a liberally-minded graduate of an Ivy-League college, and didn't really want to go off to the loneliness of the Idaho Panhandle, and all its crazies, but she felt strongly about the work and the career opportunities to do something ground breaking. A few weeks before she was supposed to start, they said not to come, and now those IRA-funded efforts are gone altogether. Bureaucratic delays in getting hired on for the lead-in jobs the summer before cost her a month of earnings and experience that year. The lesson for a young person in all this is not to trust the government, both because of politics and bureaucracy, and to go put your energy and enthusiasm somewhere else. The great thing about the current generation is that they will, but the quality of government will suffer for years from missing those great hires.
ReplyDeleteMy sympathies, Rod. Tonight I spoke with my daughter in Seattle, who's on staff with the Washington Trails Association. They're counting 70% layoffs in key USFS districts there. All the key staff people she worked with there are laid off. They include the muscle of the service, including loggers, blasters and horse packers. WTA remains well funded, they can't be effective using only volunteers. Expect our national lands to become less accessible and less safe in the coming years.
DeleteIs this good or bad? https://www.axios.com/2025/03/03/doge-noaa-weather-building-leases-trump
ReplyDeleteVery, very bad if true. It would be madness.
DeleteI’ve spent 40+ years in high tech at many startups as well as long stints at Commodore, Apple, and Microsoft. IMHO, Musk is exhibiting a behavior you see often in high tech: old solutions are stupid and it is easy to make things much better. Moore’s Law drives this attitude as each new generation lands in a world profoundly richer than the previous generation. A world beating Cray-1 from 1976 pales in comparison to your cell phone, which is easily 1000x that classic. So, I would argue that a person like Musk may view weather prediction a rather trivial matter from a computational standpoint. What is often missed in this naive view of the world is that the source data is hard to get, requires care and understanding, and needs to work 24/7 to be effective. I am sure there is a lot of legacy crap at NOAA but institutional memory is deeply important. Navigating that intelligently is non-trivial. Losing people with process understanding easily leads to losing the data those people were uniquely experienced in. A simple example of this is the surprising and delightful durability of the Voyager probes - without institutional knowledge those probes would have become space junk long ago.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to preface this statement by acknowledging that the federal government "tree needs to be trimmed."
ReplyDeleteThe hubris of this administration doesn't surprise me, unfortunately. It appears that Musk doesn't know that he can run, only after NASA learned to walk with countless billions of tax-payer dollars. The BLIND cutting of costs and positions across the United States' science infrastructure and community will have an immediate and long-term consequence on American leadership and progress. No public entity will/can do the work done by NSF and NIH-funded scientists. The discoveries made by these scientists have improved lives and created countless jobs in the tech and pharmaceutical industries. Our science infrastructure is the world's envy and has led to the recruitment of some of the world's best and brightest talent, further driving job creation and ingenuity. These communities form friendships and bonds across the world. Longer lines at National Parks, more clear-cut forests, less/no scientific expertise in consequential positions such as HHS, Trump sycophants heading all federal departments, but hey, maybe we will have cheaper gas by summer....to maybe get somewhere driving blind.