Once again, the Trump/Republican budget proposal wants to end funding for weather forecasters. Because who needs them, right? The Huffington Post writes that Trump’s budget would cut over a billion dollars in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) thus reducing their workforce by 8 percent, including 248 forecasting jobs.
Government forecasters were faced with a particularly active hurricane season in 2017 that, alongside other natural disasters, caused a record of more than $300 billion in damage. NOAA said in January the country was hit with 16 separate billion-dollar disasters last year, including hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, and a string of wildfires in California. [...]
Other proposed cuts at the NWS include $11 million slashed from the tsunami warning program, and a $15.5 million reduction to ocean surface and marine observation programs.
Estimates of the damage caused by weather disasters this past year run upward of $300 billion. Those costs are likely conservative and do not take into account all kinds of other ongoing costs. So, the team of non-scientists in the White House figure the best plan of attack is to continue to give away taxpayer money to rich people and hope that they can build big enough gated communities to hide from nature in. To be clear, according to the Washington Post, this is a “surprising way” to cut NOAA funding as it is so disabling to the National Weather Services.
The reduction in forecasting jobs is the biggest surprise in the budget proposal. Its justification is the 2016 Weather Service Operations and Workforce Analysis that found “there is a mismatch in some areas [of the Weather Service] between workforce and workload” and “that the current distribution of staff across the country can evolve.”
The president’s proposal directs the agency to reduce staff to increase “flexibility within NWS’ operating model” and “begin implementing a series of operational reforms aimed at increasing staffing flexibility to best match service demands with available resources.”
“… increasing staffing flexibility to best match service demands with available resources,” is another way of saying that the guy that does accounting may also need to be available to send out tsunami warnings if we are short-staffed—which we will be. This is not a new Trumponian phenomenon. This is the ongoing Republican Party’s philosophy of letting Jesus take the wheel, while hoping that the Republican herd of camels can sneak through the eye of God’s needle.