Who DOGE Hurts: Gutting NOAA
Who DOGE Hurts: Gutting NOAA Joyce Vance On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration's "reductions in force" directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep. In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it. Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and ...