NOAA comes under criticism again, this time over National Weather Service funding
By DON CUDDY June 05, 2012 12:00 AM
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its embattled head Dr. Jane Lubchenco are again the target of criticism after the director of the National Weather Service, Jack Hayes, resigned abruptly on Memorial Day weekend.
An environmental watchdog group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), informed the Washington Post when it learned that Hayes had been replaced and the story has since been widely reported.
An internal investigation has uncovered ongoing financial irregularities at the weather service, according to a NOAA memo. In fiscal 2012 alone, up to $35 million may have been “reprogrammed,” the term employed by NOAA to describe what has taken place, the memo said.
“This is a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, a national organization of federal, state and local employees who work in the environmental field. Structural deficits were built into the National Weather Service budget according to Ruch. “They were using appropriated funds to backfill general operations in a sort of budgetary Ponzi scheme,” he said.
A 60-page report produced by NOAA found that, for at least the past two years, the agency has been shifting appropriated funds from a number of its designated programs and using them to cover other expenses and to help avoid employee furloughs, according to Ruch.
Using appropriated funds for any purpose other than what is intended is a violation of the Anti Deficiency Act and that is a crime, he said.
Full story here
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According to credible sources, the scuttlebutt is that NOAA may be forced to put up to 5000 employees on a two week furlough, and that there are expectations of charges being filed.
At the National Weather Service Employees Organization website, they say that
NOAA Leadership’s Mismanagement of Funds
Results in Furloughs of all NWS Agency Employees
(June 7, 2012) The National Weather Service has proposed to furlough all agency employees for 13 working days in FY 2012 due to a $26 million dollar budget shortfall. The NWS notified NWSEO today about the furloughs and included a Reprogramming Fact Sheet. From that sheet:
As a result of a recent investigation, the Department determined that there were insufficient funds in the Local Warnings and Forecast program to fully pay all labor costs for National Weather Service (NWS) employees in FY 2012. The Administration’s plan is to avoid furloughs of National Weather Service employees, which could cause significant impact to forecast and warning operations. As a result, the Department of Commerce has submitted a reprogramming package to reprogram funds within NOAA to support ongoing weather forecasting operations at NWS. In order to provide the NWS with the appropriate amount of time to plan its operations for the remainder of the year, the Administration will work with Congress with a goal of executing the reprogramming before July 1 that would cover operations and avoid furloughs.
There’s no mention of taking funds away from climate programs ($346 million FY2012). Given a choice between climate and forecast/warnings programs, I’ll take forecast/warnings programs every day of the week and twice on Sunday, and I’ll bet the public will too.
They go on to say:
“National Weather Service employees are paying for the mistakes of the agency’s leadership,” said NWSEO President Dan Sobien. “Their misguided plan to furlough all agency employees is another example of the short-sighted thinking that has put them in such dire straits.” (More)
This looks really bad, it appears they have a real mess on their hands. PEER is getting involved too, saying:
“NOAA should not be allowed to self-investigate and exonerate its political leadership,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, pointing out union claims that budget juggling was needed to avoid needless furloughs of NWS employees. “We do not know whether faithful public servants are being scapegoated to divert attention from colossally dysfunctional management.”
And then there’s the internal investigative report they won’t release citing “privacy concerns”. Sound familiar? Maybe they can get advice from the Pacific Institute on how to CYA while withholding reports the public wants to see.
– Anthony
Underfunded pensions, anyone?
No, not pensions. Geez. I am not sure you understand what the underfunded pension on the balance sheet means. It says they were using appropriated funds to pay for general operations. That means they were taking money supposed to be used for another purpose and using it to buy printer paper, simplistically explained.
David Falkner says:
June 7, 2012 at 4:32 pm
Sadly nowadays that way of explaining it is up to “interruption”. I’ve seen many a report that has pension along with a host of other things that make zero sense as “general operations”.
Politics nowadays is all about redefining every words to mean something completely new.
I don’t like to talk about the US political situation being here in Canada. We have our own messes. This NOAA thing is a real mess and at the very least heads should roll at the top and money moved from long tern stuff like climate change to forecasting where it is truly important. the problem is both politicians and bureaucrats have this idea that the budgets they are given is their money. Wrong it is taxpayers and voters money. They have a job to do that involves spending some of that money but they have no entitlement to it. In my time with an unnamed provincial crown corporation I had occasion to hear senior bureaucrats such as ADM’s complaining about the citizens being critical of how they spend their (the ADM’s) money. Nothing new in this has been happening since day one but every once in a while the citizens of every country need to “take a few heads off”!
This is a typical government reaction to a funding issue. Cut the items that will bring the wrath of the people onto the elected officials in hopes of restoring funding rather than cutting the unnecessary and wasteful spending that is the true drain on the coffers. That is why municipalities always threaten to cut police and fire protection when a tax bill fails. It creates a sense of crisis when what really should happen is the administrators proposing these courses of action should be immediately terminated along with their over-funded pet projects!
The operative word is simple…trust. There is a growing theme sweeping the country that people no longer trust their government.
The rats are starting to run, Its amazing that lawyers have not yet gone for the jugular. There is so much money to be made from the law suits coming from the AGW scam. However I suspect that its now starting! Its notable the Climate Depot and some other skeptic sites closer to congress personalities are NOT emphasizing the Gleick affair or the Hockey stick stuff very much on their websites…me thinks there is some major legal stuff in the works that none of smallies know about LOL.
Notice that with gooberment agencies and unions, whenever there are budget shortfalls, the first thing to go are regular employees — particularly police, firefighters, teachers, emergency services personnel, etc. Then they cry that employees had to be laid off.
NEVER, EVER, is any attempt made to reduce the bureaucratic, entitlement, or management overhead.
There’s no mention of taking funds away from climate programs ($346 million FY2012). Given a choice between climate and forecast/warnings programs, I’ll take forecast/warnings programs every day of the week and twice on Sunday, and I’ll bet the public will too.
Have mercy! Forecasts and warnings are hard work and can be nerve-wracking. Climate Science™ is much less stressful. You already know the results before you fire up the supercomputer and run the computer game, er, simulation, er, model. More warm unless cold, more droughts and floods, and always higher temperatures, sea levels, and bigger catastrophes.
One wonders why they even bother to run the supercomputer before writing up the output. Maybe they use the waste heat to keep their coffee warm.
NOAA employees deserve to have stress-free and practically work-free careers just like other federal employees. Be fair, and let them have their well-deserved relaxation before they are cruelly forced to suffer horribly on their overly-generous federal pensions. Give them a break!
Now THIS is the way an “independent” investigation is supposed to be conducted.
“…NOAA should not be allowed to self-investigate and exonerate its political leadership,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch…”
Yet some people seem to think that Pacific Institute was within it’s rights to conduct its own investigation involving a personnel action.
If you think about how many dollars the NOAA is allocating to global warming research for outside organizations, it is too bad the employees have to personally pay for this largesse this time.
Maybe they shouldn’t be paying the Pacific Institute and Michael Mann so much to parrot the global warming theology and they could afford to pay their own employees.
When there is no cat, the mice will play.
Let’s see..
When I rob a bank, it is called stealing.
Is there anyway I could use the term ‘reprogramming’ here?
I really didn’t steal the money from the bank, I merely reprogrammed the money.
What a great defense for bank robbers.
Some historical precedents for this:
When Nazis stole artworks and the like, they were reprogramming the assets.
When Troy was sacked, the contents were reprogrammed.
When Vikings sacked English villages, they were reprogramming the goods.
Well, you get the idea.
How about, “Notional Weather Service”?
As I learned long ago as a political science student, one trick agency and
departmental bureaucrats have when bumping up against budget restrictions or
funding cuts is for the management to threaten to put the ax to the most obvious
function or service the public will notice.
At least this threatened lockout won’t be in the dead of winter, or near
Thanksgiving or Christmas.
This still sounds like a witch hunt to punish NOAA for not supporting the agenda properly. Look who is pushing this, a lefty noise generator. Don’t believe the spin. The Marxist are very unhappy with NOAA.
AS someone who witnessed how these political activist who call themselves auditor at close range, I can tell you how they work. One can not trust anything they say.
You guys are all being taken for a ride! You have been per-programed by Marxist to react to this story just as you are. If you read a study claiming that the PH of the Ocean has fallen .1 in the last decade, you are all skeptical, so when people with the same agenda say something that your preconceptions say is true, why do you buy it??? Wake up!
In local government that is called “firemen first” budget cuts. You threaten to cut the things that will make people scream the loudest, like fire fighters, hot meals to the elderly, social security benefits at the national level etc. It never is even on the agenda to actually cut waste and costs, simply find a way to black mail the public into brow beating the funding source into restoring funding under the disingenuous assertion that some “essential service” will have to be cut back to avoid a budget crisis.
It is too much trouble to actually determine they don’t need 4 color copiers on each floor and if the staff had to walk to another floor to pickup their color copies they might not print so much useless eye candy.
The government budget process actually provides negative incentive to cut costs! There is strong pressure a the end of the fiscal year to “burn up” un-expended funds to ensure they will have to ask for more money the next year, since year to year growth in budget proposals is the only way to ensure growth of the bureaucracy they work for. Departments which have unused funds at the end of the year get budget cuts and the funds simply get re-allocated to other departments in the new budget proposal so the total cost always grows.
Large organizations act very much like primitive organisms, their primary drives are to grow and gain control and dominance over their territory.
Larry
@RogerKnights
>How about, “Notional Weather Service”?
Good one. That certainly applies to the UK. It reminds me of my invented word ‘ignotion’ which means someone having ‘a notional idea that something will work, but only because of their complete ignorance of the matter’.
Thus we can set forth the difference between the US Notional Weather Service which generally conforms to reality and the ignotional forecasts of the UK Met Service.
NWS’s $26 million dollar budget shortfall:
Seems they should just take some (or all) of that $346 million for unnecessary 30-year climate prediction services and propaganda outsourcing and put it where it belongs in short-term weather services where it actually matters to the public and farmers every single day.
Ethically Challenged.
Play fast and loose with the temperature data, play fast and loose with the budget – so whats the difference?
5,000 employees on a 2 week furlough? Jeez! How many employees does NOAA have? Don’t get me wrong, I love me some weather but holy cow! I’m not privy to all that NOAA does, but I would think they could do all that would be required from a national service with about 500 employees total!!!
DesertYote: You are partially correct. The bait and switch was at NOAA when they didn’t hard-fund the observer and warning programs at the beginning of the year BEFORE they committed funds to AGW. The idea I think is to kill the quality of observation so they can “homogenize” whatever result they want. That seems to be in the MO. The threat to furlough the observer and warning functions is a way to stir us all up on the wrong target. NOAA likely set the NWS administrator up for a fall by the way they did their budget allocations for O&M. They don’t like the fact that NWS has data that is fairly clean (note the FAIRLY). The best way to get rid of a political thorn is to throw mud at it until it is buried.
DesertYote says:
June 7, 2012 at 6:22 pm
You guys are all being taken for a ride! You have been per-programed by Marxist to react to this story just as you are…..
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I really do not care if this group is one-eyed, one horned flying purple people eaters, they want an audit of a USA bureaucracy? They want an independent Auditor to do the Audit? Fine go for it. And then do all the rest of the government when you are finished!
I wish we could have thought of that when I worked for the USGS. Our lab had furloughs for about 4 or 5 months — one a pay period (every two weeks).