Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Someone needs to mod the parent as funny. I assume it has to be a joke unless there are really people out there who think that, say weather.com, the weather channel, etc. are actually forecasting. They almost all use the NWS forecast, they may add a little to it, but the heavy lifting is done by that government agency.
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!".
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.
US is nowhere near a 3rd world nation, and a proposed plan (that will probably not pass) to fire a bunch of weathermen doesn't portend its slide into 3rd world status.
US has the world's largest economy, 9 out of the 10 best universities in the world, the world's largest entertainment & cultural industry, the world's largest companies, half the world's Nobel Prizes last year, we've won the World Series for like 23 years straight....
Do you find yourself watching Rocky 4 and rooting for Ivan Drago?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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
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.