My Opinion: A dangerous storm is threatening NOAA and the National Weather Service… again
Dismantling and privatizing NOAA and the National Weather Service was a bad idea in 1995, and it’s a worse idea now.
In the summer of 1995, a bad idea was circulating in Washington, D.C. The broad-brush proposal was to eliminate the Commerce Department, the parent agency of NOAA and the National Weather Service. The U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs was tasked with taking testimony for and against the plan to merge NOAA and NWS’s responsibilities into other agencies and to farm some of their functions out to private companies.
Senator John Glenn’s office called one Friday and asked me to come to Washington to share my thoughts with the committee the following Tuesday. Senator William Roth of Delaware was the chairman and the only committee member in the room. Other senators sent members of their staffs.
Here’s a link courtesy of Google to the testimony the committee heard. My part starts on page 186.
I thought, of course, that the proposal was a terrible idea. The main point of my testimony was that public safety is one of government’s core functions. We don’t want critical services farmed out to the lowest bidder. Rigorous standards and public accountability are the cornerstones of any public safety system, including the data gathering, forecasting, and warning systems executed by the National Weather Service.
The profit motive has no place in the baseline weather services that Americans rely on every day. We should not be a nation of haves and have-nots when it comes to weather forecasts. A family farmer deserves the same alerts and expert predictions that the corporate farms up the road rely on to make critical decisions.
By the end of that first day of testimony, his body language told me that Senator Roth could see that the dismantling dog was not going to hunt. The idea was going nowhere. Which, of course, is exactly what happened.
Now, these same bad ideas have new life. And the demoralizing and thoughtless mass layoffs within NOAA and the National Weather Service take the destructive ideas to a new level.
Anybody in business knows that layoffs are sometimes necessary. But no competent CEO would arbitrarily fire recently recruited young talent along with experienced people who were only “on probation” because they received and accepted a promotion within the last year.
Indiscriminately firing skilled workers is bad in private business. Add the threat to public safety caused by haphazard and indiscriminate layoffs, and the government actions are impossible to justify by any rational, performance-based standard.
In my decades of interaction with NOAA and the National Weather Service, including of course, the National Hurricane Center, I have found the personnel to be exceptionally skilled, hard-working, and, most importantly, dedicated to serving the American public. Their commitment stands in dramatic contrast to the negative characterizations used to justify these mass layoffs.
In the modern age, we need a strong National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center more than ever. Hype and misinformation are endemic to modern media, social and otherwise. Only strong, professional, and official sources of information can cut through the noise to give life-saving forecasts credibility.
None of this reasoning addresses the morality or legality of the government’s actions. Those issues are for others to judge. But common sense tells us that critical research into how AI can improve hurricane forecasts, and development of new protocols for forecasting rapidly strengthening hurricanes will suffer when key people are indiscriminately removed from the already understaffed National Weather Service.
The administration's approach defies common sense and sound management principles. In the private sector, such haphazard decision-making is well known to be a formula for failure. But when applied to government agencies tasked with keeping Americans safe, it’s not just counterproductive, it’s dangerous.