EDITORIAL: Man-made stormy weather for NOAA

Indiscriminate firing of NOAA staff members skilled in the sciences of weather forecasting, water and air navigation and climate change monitoring may not quite be the most harmful act of the government wreckers rampaging through federal agencies, but it is looking to be the stupidest.

As for the most damaging effects of the DOGE onslaught, Social Security currently seems to be in first place, and this is before all of the threatened firings have been executed. Blunders by Elon Musk’s team of whiz kids (famously including a 19-year-old self-proclaimed tech genius who has attracted a social media following using the moniker “Big Balls”), have left the agency in a dysfunctional state and Americans who depend on it for their retirement income fearful.

After rummaging through Social Security records, Musk and his firing team announced their scandalous discovery that benefit checks were being sent to millions of dead people. And then they took it all back. It turned out they weren’t able to understand the data they seized.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a relatively small government agency whose employees accounted for only 0.43% of the federal workforce before recent firings. When the purge ends, it is expected that as many as 2,300 NOAA employees will have lost their jobs by order of the Trump administration.

Significant consequences from that draconian downsizing, some of them dangerous, will be unavoidable. NOAA and its National Weather Service supply almost all of the country’s weather forecasting, both directly to the public and through commercial weather services that rely on data furnished by the NWS.

This service goes far beyond the routine forecasts checked millions of times each day by people on their smart phone apps and delivered by TV weather personalities. It includes tracking hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and tsunamis and providing critical information on life-threatening weather events to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the military and the airline, shipping and fishing industries. It operates 13 satellites and hundreds of deep-water weather monitoring buoys.

NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey produces and constantly updates more than 1,000 electronic and paper navigation charts to guide mariners on 500,000 square miles of U.S. waters used by vessels ranging from the yachts and charter fishing boats berthed in the Port Washington harbor to ocean-going container ships, tankers and cruise ships.

NOAA’s research, scientific observations and analysis are considered some of the most valuable resources in understanding how climate change is developing.

The NOAA cuts will be especially harmful to the Great Lakes, where before forced layoffs the agency had roughly 800 workers, including captains and crews of research vessels and scientists tasked with the stewardship of the largest freshwater system in the world.

NOAA’s scientific mission on Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes is carried out under the aegis of the agency’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich. Mandated staff cuts have forced the laboratory to suspend its public communication operation, which regularly provided vital information about the lakes’ volatile weather systems.

The fallout from the potential crippling of NOAA could include halting progress on the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, much to the detriment of Ozaukee County and its northern neighbors along the Lake Michigan shore in the sanctuary area.

If the sanctuary falters, it will be a cultural and economic loss. Covering 962 square miles of Lake Michigan, the sanctuary protects 36 shipwrecks that are icons of maritime history and tells their stories in presentations to the public. Its benefits include education, water quality research and an expected surge of tourism in communities along the shipwreck coast.

The sanctuary accounts for a fraction of federal spending that is almost too small to measure. NOAA’s overall cost to U.S. taxpayers is less than 1% of the annual federal budget. But that is of no concern to the DOGE squad because its mission is really not to root out government bloat or waste. It is to wield political power in service of anti-government ideology.

The NOAA firings follow the conservative manifesto named Project 2025 to the letter. “Break Up NOAA” is the title of a chapter on page 674 of the 900-page document. The chapter goes on to instruct that the pieces of NOAA after the break-up should be parceled out to private companies.

Judging from the Social Security debacle, it should be safe to assume that the Musk proteges and employees on the DOGE strike team, who have been described as too incompetent to realize they are incompetent, have no idea of what the NOAA workers they are firing do or why it matters. They will be the last to know that undermining an agency whose work is as vital to understanding and living with the forces of nature as NOAA’s is flat-out stupid.