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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
Eliminate the NWs entirely, there are numerous private sources of weather forcasters so the government needs to step away from yet another unconstitutional government program.
... that Trump wants to fire them in order to hold them responsible for the bad weather?
Can any history nerds supply any information about a world power transforming itself into a 3rd world country as quickly as the US is? I know that other countries have fallen due to war, but have any other countries/societies/cultures fallen so far, so quickly, due to their own stupidity, as suddenly as the US?
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
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.
the Trump administration is proposing significant cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) and hopes to eliminate the jobs of 248 weather forecasters
Geez, who rained on his parade?
You obviously know absolutely nothing about how weather forecasting works.
Shouldn't they have seen it coming if they were any good at their jobs?
The Spanish Inquisition of Psychometrics; Burning all the heretics.
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
... their forecasts are FAKE NEWS. Sad. Listen, don't blame the hurricane only. Their were bad houses as well, ok? Bad things on both sides.
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!".
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
-- from the twitter feed of @realDonaldTrump
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
That's a nice, and in this case, very accurate addition to the "under the bus" analogy.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
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
It's not like it is going to be doom and gloom for weather prediction. Most of those cuts should be in management, even though they have a $1B budget and the meteorologists are coming in at $28k/year salary, they're not exactly attracting talent.
How about we start with the union reps, they are collecting $50/pay period and couldn't even negotiate a deal to prevent this or keep the service from becoming top-heavy. Then remove every manager that is not directly managing 15 or more employees.
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The chart shows that they did the right thing in the 1930s. Did not matter how deep the depression got, they always balanced the books. Worked real good.
Then that evil Rosevelt ran up a huge deficit just because there was a war on. Crippled the country. The depression was over, no more dirt cheap labor.
Moving on, we see the deficit from Obama during the Global Financial Crisis. Weak. He should have been tough like Hover in the depression. When the economy shrinks you tighten your belt. Stands to reason. Then we could have had another result like the 1930s.
Reaganomics, on the other hand, is clear and purposeful. Cut taxes, increase military spending so you can create a crisis and then cut those socialist services that rot the morality of the working man.
The NWS has nearly 5,000 employees, the 248 cuts proposed in the budget document represent less than 5% of the current NWS staff level. With 122 forecasting office across the nation, that works out to two fewer forecasters per office, and the NWS is currently 10% under-staffed (10% of staff positions open/in-filled at present time).
Ken
You do realize that if the Trump administration gets everything it wants at NWS, they will STILL have a $1BN+ annual budget. He's not shuttering the agency, he's taking funding from $1.114BN to $1.024BN - oh, the horror!
Ken
I'm a professional pilot and this is a very bad idea for the safety of air travel. We rely on weather forecasting to make decisions about how much fuel to carry, what diverts to plan, and to make decisions if the flight can be safely conducted or not. The public benefits in many not so obvious ways from weather forecasting. Getting on an airplane with a good expectation that you will safely reach your destination, or not run out of fuel going to a weather divert is just one of them. The President should think of that next time he gets on Air Force One, or in his private 757. Making weather information freely and publicly available increases the safety for everyone in the air and on the ground.
My political rant for today: I suspect there's a lobbying bonanza going on in the background and all of these privatization initiatives coming out of this administration and this congress have more to do with cronyism than the common good. When a Republic stops representing the common good, it is no longer a Republic, but a Plutocracy or an oligarchy. This is the bigger issue of our time, not collusion, not Trump, and not any of the other issues being touted in the media. Having an NWS is in the public's best interest.
The point is not by how much the Trump administration is cutting the budget, it's where.
Links in TFA indicate that an RIF in the forecaster staff was contemplated before Trump's residency. Fine. No union can expect to get a no-layoffs clause in its contract.
The point here is that it's the Trump administration, not the NWS, that is indicating where the cuts need to be applied. That's micromanaging.
And per TFA, the cuts "caught the agency by surprise" as well, not just the union.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
no one said things like "Obama [**inser crazy thing**]"
Sure they did, they said that quite a lot actually, there was a complete news network dedicated to come up with new crazy things to insert there. Sometimes it's correct that the administration of the current president is the instigator of some crazy things, but motsly it's as you say just things that comes with governing. In this case, I don't know, but budget cuts of $75 million is nothing to scoff at.
I agree that we need to get away from this black and white kind of reporting it doesn't help either side in the long run. I do not know if you are a Trump supporter, but if you are then you better concentrate on the reporting in your own camp, it's better to discuss these things with people that trust your intentions. If you are not a Trump supporter then yey for you.
"We can't take any more cuts and still do the job" is the dependable whine and moan of every labor union that ever came into existence. Then the cuts happen anyway and somehow the job still gets done.
This isn't about the USA falling into the weather forecasting dark ages; it's about union dues and union membership, both of which have been dropping like flies for a while now.
Seriously, there's a labor union for weather forecasters??? Why? At what point have they been exploited as laborers for crying out loud? It's not like they're in a sweatshop somewhere. Sheesh.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky