As the eastern seaboard girded for a winter nor’easter on Monday, President Trump met with Homeland Security and FEMA advisers to lock down storm preparations. Although the storm didn’t pack the expected punch everywhere it landed, presidents have been bested by Mother Nature before — think George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina — so the Trump administration played it safe. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s scheduled visit was delayed.
Yet (cue irony here) government officials are relying on critical data from US satellites to model the very path of this March blast of severe weather — satellites that are now the target of crippling budget cuts, according to a proposal obtained by The Washington Post. According to the four-page memo, the administration wants to slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by 17 percent, with steep cuts in research funding and satellite programs. Although numbers could change, the administration proposes cutting NOAA’s weather satellite division by $513 million for the 2018 fiscal year, and would only partially fund two polar-orbiting satellites scheduled to launch in 2024 and 2026.
While NOAA has struggled with cost overruns and delays, gaps in coverage overhead could wreak havoc. Satellites provide crucial data needed by the National Weather Service, the military, air traffic controllers, public utilities, and telecommunications companies. In hurricane-prone Florida, both Democratic senator Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio have already issued a challenge to Trump’s proposal.
The gutting of NOAA’s budget also carries with it an unpleasant whiff of political revenge. Earlier this year, a retired NOAA researcher criticized the agency’s data used in a 2015 study that debunked a reported “hiatus’’ in global warming. Texas congressman Lamar Smith, chair of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, even issued a press release thanking the retired scientist, John Bates, “for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.’’ These objections are overstated, and blatantly political. NOAA’s findings have since been independently verified.
Someday commercial firms might step in with cheaper, innovative technology that could replace at least some government weather-watching satellites. But the private sector disruption that former president Obama hoped would transform 21st century spaceflight has yet to bear fruit. The job of predicting severe weather, and protecting public safety, necessarily rests with our federal government. It’s a duty that has nothing to do with the misguided wars over climate change and should be shielded from partisan payback.
