Thousands of federal workers Has been fired recently, and there may be more risks of being released.
Umair Irfan – Vox’s correspondent for climate change, energy policy and science – especially Focusing on layoffs is imminent The nearest National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). His report showed a great perspective to understand the shots of the firing, and he and I discussed with me the information that NOAA could tell us about the federal reduction in the impact of the federal reduction on everyday Americans. Our conversation is for length and clear editing, as follows.
Umair, what is NOAA and why is it so important?
NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its mission is to develop weather forecasts for the United States, conduct oceanographic and atmospheric research, and develop long-term climate and weather models. It is also responsible for fisheries and promoting commerce, especially in the ocean, which means it can do a lot of navigation and map transportation and conduct offshore oil and gas drilling.
have Reports as many as half of NOAA employees May be dismissed. If this happens, what will Americans lose every day?
NOAA has about 12,000 staff, most of whom are scientists and engineers. If you lose half of it, you will lose research that many people do, informing our weather forecasts and understanding of the weather and the research that industry players rely on. For extreme weather, we will also lose a lot of emergency predictive power.
NOAA is one of the reasons why air travel is so safe and one of the reasons we see few people dying from natural disasters in the United States: It does the job of placing satellites in space, while in the ocean and planes enter hurricanes The aircraft and leverage its decades of data collection to develop excellent predictive capabilities and continue to improve through continuous work.
If we lose all of these features, we will lose a lot of progress. However, extreme weather will remain dangerous and if we do not continue to invest in this, our ability to involve the risk of reducing weather over time will eventually decrease.
NOAA is obviously not the only agency facing cuts here. doAre Americans getting any gains by narrowing the administration in Trump’s way?
The current and former agents and leaders I talk about said that the cuts will not help the agency with tasks and will actually go against any efficiency goals, as the remaining employees will have to try to achieve the function of firing colleagues in a suboptimal way.
That is, there will always be room to optimize large institutions like the government. But we need to do this carefully, take a step back and see what our needs are and what we expect from government in general.
Especially looking at an agent like NOAA, it is about looking at how its core functionality meets its core functionality, where it falls and where it can be enhanced. So far, we really haven’t seen any exploration and interest in how these institutions can play a role from the current government.
The big picture, what do you think Americans should learn from the NOAA case?
I think it’s easy to forget that the federal government is everywhere in our country – 80% of federal employees are not in DC.
NOAA is one of the institutions with a very distant footprint as it has to do a lot of local research and data collection on site, as its mission is to protect the entire country.
Like all institutions, NOAA is closely related to people’s lives in ways they may not expect. You may not have NOAA app on your phone, but the weather app you do have and the predictions you get from your local TV meteorologist are all subject to information collected by NOAA’s satellites and data.
While there may be a hierarchy between you and the products that the government consumes, it does provide the basis for what we take for granted. If an agent like NOAA disappears, we will definitely lose what we may not expect.
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