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Trump Administration Wants To Fire 248 Forecasters At the National Weather Service (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: After a year that saw over $300 million in damages from hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters, the Trump administration is proposing significant cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) and hopes to eliminate the jobs of 248 weather forecasters. The idea, which is part of the 2019 fiscal budget proposal and caught the agency by surprise, is being derided by the NWS's labor union, which says the cuts will impact the reliability of future weather forecasts and warnings. All totaled, the Weather Service faces cuts of $75 million in the initial proposal. Some or all of those cuts could be jettisoned before the bill is voted upon. "We can't take any more cuts and still do the job that the American public needs us to do -- there simply will not be the staff available on duty to issue the forecasts and warnings upon which the country depends," said Dan Sobien, the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization.
Further reading: The Washington Post
Further reading: The Washington Post
After a bunch of so-called deficit hawks and fiscal conservatives were finished with their 1 trillion dollar giveaway to the rich, they had to do something they could point at in November to reclaim their conservative bona fides. So they're going to attempt gutting every non-military program in the federal budget.
#DeleteChrome
Donâ(TM)t need them.
Over 5000 employees, and over a billion dollar annual budget.
248 jobs is a 5% reduction in staffing overall. $75 million is less that 7.5% of their budget. And these numbers were bandied about with the expectation that they'd be lowered after push back.
When most of the work in forecasting is increasingly automated and computerized, it makes sense to trim the fat.
But of course the labor union is going to get upset. That's what labor unions do when told the truth.
have any other countries/societies/cultures fallen so far, so quickly, due to their own stupidity, as suddenly as the US?
Na, our slide has been going on for quite a while now. See my sig.
Yes, that far ago.
Basically, after Apollo, it's been one long slide, only in the past 20 years has it been really accelerating and becoming quite apparent. And this guy now? The \ has turned into a |
And it ain't just us, bub. It's the UK, too. And Japan had their moment of "oh... shit.." what.. 20 years ago and are *still* recovering?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It's not like any big things like emergency preparedness will be effected. In case the previous sentence did not come across properly, it was intended to be incredibly sarcastic. Weather forecasters help emergency management agencies and accurate forecasts are critical for helping to save lives and avert disasters.
You obviously know absolutely nothing about how weather forecasting works.
Somebody should create an app that shows you how fscking stupid your post is!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I don't need 248 to tell me what a single app can do in real time with better accuracy.
Lol, right.
You don't need weather forecasters.
You don't need weather satellites.
You don't need weather stations.
You don't need weather-forecasting models.
You don't need supercomputers to run the models.
You don't need a communication infrastructure to deliver the results.
You just need an app. Wow, the savings.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Why not eliminate 247 white house staffing positions? The country saves money, the public doesn't notice anything different, we're good, right?
Oops, I forgot the #1 rule of cutting government spending. You don't cut the waste where it's painless, you cut the meat where it hurts like hell. Then the politicians say "See! they don't like it when we cut spending!".
Further, the union president is the last credible source. His primary job is to extract money from the treasury to line pockets.
No, his job is to protect the jobs of union-members. That makes him a biased source, but not necessarily a dishonest one.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Hyperbole much?
Just so we're clear, the actual budget for forecasting proposed calls for a 4% reduction in forecasting services, not the 8% suggested by a careless reading of the Washington Post's article, though that may have been their intention for readers. As an aside, the Washington Post is just about as much a joke as Fox News... I can't believe anyone takes their articles at face value.
Anyway, here's the actual budget. You'll want to look at Chapter 5 for the National Weather Service:
http://www.corporateservices.noaa.gov/nbo/fy19_bluebook/FY19-BlueBook.pdf
Key take away: the budget for "ANALYZE, FORECAST, AND SUPPORT" services was $492,014,000 but now it's $471,792,000. Will that reduction break forecasting? Perhaps, but I strongly doubt it. More likely, it'll result in cuts to people who have been there for a while, but hardly do anything (legacy folks), yet cost a lot, and/or cuts to open recs that have yet to be filled, or were just recently filled. In other words, people who, despite all of the yammering, are actually expendable with regard to the services they're supposed to provide.
Still, it's easy for partisans, such as yourself, to observe a 4% cut, and babble, "[the US is] transforming itself into a 3rd world country." After all, Trump's suggestion is a bit like suggesting cuts to a fire department: regardless of how much deadweight is involved, there are always going to be fires, and only an 1ns4n3 politician would suggest cutting any of the fat, right?
Oh, and just so you don't dismiss me as a Trumpkin (even though you or someone else probably will), I'm not a supporter, and there's a lot to despise in Trump's budgetary plans. Calling for more military bloat for an already bloated military, for example, is pretty cringe-worthy to me. Still, even if substantial budgetary increases to the military are the wrong call, minor decreases to the weather service may in fact be the correct call to make. It's a major, really unsupportable, leap to suggest that the weather service decrease is a shortcut to 3rd world status, and it just makes you look, well, childish.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Indeed. People have no clue how extremely difficult some things are. Fire these weather experts and you may just lose forecast accuracy for a few decades. And that may kill a lot of people and destroy a lot of property. Since mostly poor people will be hit, I am not surprises the present administration does not care.
Reminds me of the utter stupidity when some Italian earthquake experts got dragged into court because they were wrong. So not more earthquake forecasts worth a damn in Italy. This is inherently a guessing game, but one worthwhile for society to be done well. Punish the experts when they guess wrong and the result is no more experts. Or rather they just move somewhere where the people actually understand the value they provide.
There is a point in any civilization when it separates itself into those with a clue and those too dumb to survive. The smart ones leave when the morons take over. Come to think of it, I now know several US citizens that moved to Europe and do not want to go back.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And then you talk to an actual expert and find out that technology only provides input for the forecasters. They then take their experience and knowledge of local peculiarities a create an actual forecast from that. In the case of natural disasters, that may be the difference of a few more hours to evacuate, for example. So no, technology is (once again) not nearly as advanced as some people like to think.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I quite agree. Trump is a symptom, not the cause. When an obvious moron gets voted in to run the show, then the problem is the voters. The voters cannot be fixed, unfortunately. They will sink the ship now, evermore trying to vote themselves bread and games and glory ("Make America great again!"), unless nothing is left anymore and everything collapses.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They want to part out the vital functions of a modern government, and let their donor class pocket as much of money as they can get on the back end. Don't be fooled into thinking that there is a genuine ideology motivating this, only a few of these guys are true believers, and quite a few of those are genuine radicals.
Deficits are a good thing for them, if it helps them loot and destroy the government sooner. It's hard to effectively eliminate the necessary government operations and programs with a wide base of popular support unless you create a crisis first.
If "Trump" is proposing eliminating 248 NWS Forecasters, exactly how many are there currently?
Apparently there are 122 NWS forecasting offices
So "Trump" is proposing the elimination of, on average, 2 forecasters per office - that doesn't seem so bad - but how many are there in those 122 forecasting offices?
It seems the NWS may already have over 248 "vacancies" currently in it's organization, so this may be nothing more than "Trump" adopting current staffing levels, rather than actually cutting people from eliminating positions.
For what it's worth, it seems the NWS has nearly five thousand employees, cutting 248 forecasters represents a 5% cut in staffing.
You may have noticed I put the name Trump in quotes - that's because only a fool would imagine that a sitting President has anything to do with actual staffing levels in an organization, but in today's hyper-political environment, many tend to refer to any action undertaken by anyone in an administration to be the responsibility of the sitting President - oddly, just a few years ago no one said things like "Obama illegally blocked tax-exempt applications by conservative groups" or "Obama illegally encouraged/facilitated running guns into Mexico in a program called "Fast n' Furious"" and so on - I wonder why that is?
Ken
You're right! All forecasters at the NWS are absolutely essential to accurate, timely forecasting. Why even a random bus crash may be enough to send the US hurdling headlong into 3rd world status.
Oh, and I have a tiger-repelling rock I'd like to sell you.
We will never be the change to the weather and the sea
The headline is a lie. The Trump Administration hasn't proposed firing anyone. If you look at the story this story is based on, it says "248 forecasting positions". Reading further, the agency currently has more open forecasting positions than that. So basically, if this 5% cut to their budget was fully implemented, they simply wouldn't get to hire as many new people. Oh, the drama!!!
You're worried about where the cuts will happen? Let's read the underlying WP article some more and see if we can figure out how they decided that:
Oh, you mean they did a study back when Obama was President and looked at where stuff could get streamlined and realigned and are basing this budget proposal on that? How sinister!!!
This is much ado about nothing. The only travesty here is that they aren't proposing to cut more. Why, this proposal will take the NWS almost back down to the budget level they had in 2015, when they couldn't get anything at all done!!!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I know right. We're number 1 in many things that people just don't appreciate.
Number 1 in debt, Number 1 in citizen incarceration rate, number 1 in mass shootings, number 1 in climate change denial, number 1 in letting our infrastructure collapse under our feet, number 1 in letting poor people die due to lack of medical insurance, number 1 in bankrupting people who go to our universities.
USA! USA! USA!
I think you'll find that most people used many loop holes to avoid that maximum rate of tax, and that the more blatant loop holes have been closed.
The voters thought Trump was better than the establishment politicians. How much of that is on the voters, and how much of that is on the establishment?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.