What you don’t know won’t hurt you
You may live along the Mississippi River subject to spring floods, or in Tornado Alley (needs no explantaion), or where lake effect snows bury your city, or along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts subject to increasingly powerful hurricanes, or in areas of the west subject to seasonal wildfires. Even in places like my region, still recovering from devastation wrought by Helene’s visit last fall. Or you make your living farming? Or as a mariner or an aviator. One of the first things most of us check every morning and before bed is the weather forecast.
As the Good Book says, the rain falls on the just and the unjust (and on rich and poor). So do Trump 2.0 budget cuts. The White House announced on Friday cuts of $1.5 billion in funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Weather Service’s parent agency. The agency is already looking at a 20 percent cut to staffing.
Guys like Big Balls who’ve spent most of their young lives in cyberspace instead of IRL think the National Weather Service needs a budget haircut.
Former Weather Service leaders issued a public letter warning about the perils of what’s coming (New York Times):
“N.W.S. staff will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services,” they write in the letter, dated Friday. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
Hundreds of Weather Service employees, or about 10 percent of the agency’s total staff, have been terminated or accepted buyout offers since President Trump began his second term, according to the letter.
The letter notes that the coming weeks are “the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes,” and it points to a wide range of activities that rely on accurate forecasting: “Airplanes can’t fly without weather observations and forecasts; ships crossing the oceans rely on storm forecasts to avoid the high seas; farmers rely on seasonal forecasts to plant and harvest their crops which feed us.”
“Perhaps most importantly,” they write, “N.W.S. issues all of the tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, flood warnings, extreme wildfire conditions and other information during extreme weather events.”
But no worries. Elon Musk and his techbro friends surely will sell back to you the weather data your taxes already purchased.
Joe Friday led the Weather Service from 1988 to 1997:
The proposed cuts at NOAA echo a plan laid out in Project 2025, a policy playbook published by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2023 that described the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It called for NOAA to be “broken up” and for the Weather Service to be privatized.
Dr. Friday said he worried that a forced decline in the accuracy of Weather Service products could eventually offer a pretext for the agency’s privatization.
“If you want to basically wipe out an organization, the personnel policies that are going on right now under DOGE are probably about the best way to do it,” Dr. Friday said. “You destroy the organization from the inside.”
He don’t need a weatherman to know which way DOGE winds blow.
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