Update: Senator Harry Reid laments the loss of the “Cowboy Poetry Festival” due to federal budget cuts. Seems that there is indeed some fat to be cut from the proposed $3.7 trillion budget.
The National Weather Service Employees Organization needs your help to protect against the draconian budget cuts suggested by the House for the rest of FY11. From the Member News website:
(March 7, 2011) The Senate Appropriations Committee has released a proposed alternative to HR 1 that would make a $110 million reduction to NOAA operations for the remainder of the fiscal year, rather than the $454 reduction approved by the House. Of the $110 million cut, $104 million was from earmarks that are no longer funded. This effectively only cuts the NOAA ORF budget by $6 million.
The Senate Appropriations Committee justified the higher funding levels for NOAA stating in their March 4 press release, “The House cuts an additional $340 million which would threaten critical weather forecasts and warnings.”
The sample form letter to Boehner and Cantor follows:
Dear Mr. Speaker (for Speaker John Boehner) OR
Dear Mr. Cantor (for Rep. Eric Cantor)
I am writing to ask you to support the Senate’s proposal for NOAA’s budget. This proposal will help NOAA and the National Weather Service continue the mission of saving lives and property.
The Senate’s proposal includes responsible funding levels in stark contrast to the draconian cuts included in HR1. HR1 would have resulted in the following impacts on the National Weather Service:
- Reduced staffing at Weather Forecast Offices and River Forecast Centers would result in incomplete forecast production which could prove disastrous in a significant weather event. Even in the best of cases, it will still mean incomplete forecast production at WFOs that have major product workloads for aviation, marine, tropical and public services.
- This is going to have a negative impact on the economy and on almost every aspect of our daily lives. There will be a large scale economic impact on aviation, agriculture, and the cost shipping food and other products.
- Service backup of 24 Weather Forecasting Offices has never been tested and runs a very significant risk of a missed tornado, flood or severe weather warning. It is risking lives at the onset of both tornadoes and hurricane season. This is also doubling the area of responsibility for operations and adds the risk of degraded service delivery.
- The National Hurricane Center is not immune to these cuts as furloughs and staffing cuts will add strain to the program. The Hurricane Hunter Jet, which provides lifesaving data and helps determine a hurricane’s path, could also be eliminated.
- Information that is vital for weather modeling and accurate tornado watches and warnings will be reduced and in some cases lost. Reduced upper air observations currently made twice a day could be reduced to once every other day. Buoy and surface weather observations, the backbone of most of the weather and warning systems, may be temporarily or permanently discontinued.
Recent advances in aviation weather forecasting have resulted in as much as a 50 percent reduction in weather related flight delays. The Senate’s proposal for funding will help progressive programs such as these continue and may, in turn, prove beneficial to strengthening the economy.
For the safety of our citizens, the protection of property, and the large scale economic impact on aviation, agriculture, and commerce, I am asking you to vote in support the Senate’s proposal for NOAA’s budget.
Sincerely,
——-
Bill Hopkins, the NWS Employees Organization vice president predicts lives will be affected and lost because of the budget cuts. From KSAT12 ABC in San Antonio:
Bill Hopkins, vice president of the NWS Employees Organization, said the public may be in real danger a House bill is passed that would slash The National Weather Service’s budget by $126 million.”It could potentially lead to a loss of lives, not necessarily in San Antonio, but it could in other parts of the county,” Hopkins said.Local NWS offices would likely deal with rolling closures and furloughs, leaving the Corpus Christi NWS office to take over issuing warnings for the San Antonio area.”Not only will they be watching your area, but they will also be watching their area, and there will be no increase in personnel to do this,” Hopkins said.The national NWS office said President Obama has opposed to such harsh cuts. Hopkins said the cuts would significantly affect those along the Gulf Coast.”The National Hurricane Center would be reduced to 32 hours a week,” Hopkins said.There would also be far fewer hurricane hunter flights, which are often vital parts of hurricane forecasts.According to Hopkins, large amounts of weather data would be lost.”Can you imagine flying into an airport and they lose all their surface data? There’s really drastic impacts in this cut,” Hopkins said.
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According Sen. David Vinter, La. The department of interior has reduced shallow water drilling pemits to one a month. Sen Vinter says we need 29 a month just to maintain production. He said eight deepwaters rigs have left the US and six more are about to do so. Possibly 90,000 jobs to be lost and Obama wants to tap the SPR.
As a government employee, I lived through the last shut down, and people did not die. Government agencies always play the “Washington Monument” card. (Cut our budget and we will have to close the Washington Monument, and the public will riot!).
Fact is, most cuts are targetted and not at the items cited by the NWS or NASA or NOAA. And were cuts are not targetted, the agencies have the freedom to make their own cuts. If they choose to cut programs that actually do save lives, then they should be fired for cause.
/Sarc on
Could cut Jim Hansen’s program with out a problem . . . but my job is essential!
/Sarc off.
See: http://mises.org/daily/5072/The-Political-Economy-of-Government-Employee-Unions
We (US) are currently borrowing approximately 40 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government. This is unsustainable and will bankrupt this country. There is no money to fund Obamacare. The lack of an energy policy is driving up our heating, electrical and gasoline costs, not to mention what cap and trade will do. The EPA is blocking any new oil drilling and power plants. We will have less money to spend on other things which will depress the economy. Could it get any worse? There are a lot of places where budgets must be cut; I doubt that there are any that should escape being cut. We all need to sacrifice.
Whenever there is budget cut in a government organization, the management of that organization chooses to cut the most valuable functions of the organization or the function that consumers would most miss. A school system, for example, will go immediately to cutting teachers and sports. A local government will immediately decide to cut fire and police.
This is the same principle applied to the NWS.
ThomS
Bingo,
I always thought cuts should be from the top down. All the work by top bureaucrats is performed by their assistants. Cut the dept. heads and no one would even notice a change, and each gets paid many times the salary of the lower tiered employees.
Budget cuts are guaranteed to stampede all the sacred cows and oxen. A wise man will step to one side and let them go over the cliff.
That’s a very interesting letter. It says, in effect, they won’t look for a few efficiencies to adapt to what is, after all, a vanishingly small fraction of their overall budget, but will instead seek to damage the effectiveness of their operations to protest the cut.
Very inspiring.
You just have to collateralize the budget by getting a hedge fund to bet on the odds of fair/foul weather. Just like mortgages, they could make billions in profits and bonuses and pay for the whole thing in no time… /sarcoff
Growing up in Missouri back in the 1950s when the weatherman said it was going to snow it did by golly! A lot too!! Nowadays with all the new technology at the finger tips of weather folks (being PC) their forecasts seem to miss the target more than hit it. What’s up? Maybe getting back to some basics through hefty budget cuts might make more of these government types pay better attention to their work and serving the public. Worth a try!
Cut it! We don’t need NOAA. They are a complete failure in my eyes. Virtually nothing that they have turned out in the last decade has been worth a tinkers damn. Sounds like easy savings.
Don’t take this post in a political way, but if they are really worried about death, cut back on abortion a bit and we would have a fresh crop of 21 year old replacements 21 years from now.
If we are really worried about death, drop the standards on gas mileage. The tiny cars will be several thousand more deaths per year.
Of course the National Weather Service needs funding as do scientists to do their research but it must be honest and without bias and accomplished without the intent of supporting a political agenda.
Looking at funding for service and research that is in support of a political agenda the question has to be how many lives will be lost by promoting a fraud and how many tax dollars are wasted.
Everyone does understand that all of the computer models used in forecast from the not only the Weather Service but the Weather Channel come from a NWS source, don’t they? Also major radar imagery and satellite data comes from the NWS and NOAA. Yes cuts can be made, but until private industry can invest in a large observational network and detail model forecast than the NWS is important.
Most communities already have weathermen at the local TV stations with better and newer equipment anyway.
There’s quite a difference between public and private sector unions. I was President of my Local for four terms. 1,200 members. My pay: $10 a month for incidentals.
Except for teachers unions and a few professional unions, almost all paid union officials are just high school graduates. I’m sure most government union officers are the same.
“This is going to have a negative impact on the economy and on almost every aspect of our daily lives. There will be a large scale economic impact on aviation, agriculture, and the cost shipping food and other products.”
Don’t get your hopes up. This law has an extremely limited domain; it only applies to any actions taken to cut government programs, not to government actions restricting energy, fuel, and production in the private sector.
There is almost no government service that you can propose to cut that cannot in some way be tied back to lives, and therefore justified, for no one can put a price on a life…so we have to fund this.
WRONG!!
I always use the same example. Suppose there was one person who had a strange medical condition. They could only be kept alive via a treatment so expensive that everyone else in the country had to live on starvation rations, close all the schools, hospitals, everything, for that one person. Would we? Of course not!
It isn’t about how many people MIGHT die if we cut back THIS service. It is about how much money is there available, and what services can we spend it on that save the most lives?
The sense of entitlement that has grown up in government administrations based on the notion that the lives they supposedly save are somehow not connected to the lives someone else couldn’t save because of lack of funding is appaling.
What a shock. Even the NWS could’ve predicted that headline. The NWS infrastructure is based on open source software (eg AWIPS runs on Linux), so why does the NWS spend millions of dollars every year on MSFT products? Does a forecaster really need a MS Word license to do his job? Is Active Directory needed? Anti-virus software? IE? Constant hardware upgrades to support MSFT’s latest offerings? Does the NWS really need to spend millions on web servers and the personnel needed to run them so they can compete with private companies (hey, great web site and no annoying popup ads!)? There’s a ton of fat that’s crept into the NWS over the years just like the rest of gov’t. Something has to be done. Perhaps cutting the MSFT-cord would be a good start. Why should public monies be used to fund Mr Gates monument to himself?
I’m inclined to think that the abrupt increase in heating oil prices would have a far greater, and much more immediate impact on deaths from weather. (The cold weather…that comes from warming)
Funny, though, we’re not hearing ANY discussion of that.
My name is Wendell Malone and I live in Carlsbad, New Mexico. I am the Volunteer Regional Skywarn Coordinator for the Midland, Texas, National Weather Service Office which has forecast and warning responsibility for my area in southeastern New Mexico. I am and have been an active storm spotter and storm chaser since 1973. So I think I have a pretty good feel on how well our local National Weather Service Offices do their jobs, which in my opinion is outstanding.
As I write this, homes are burning in the southwestern corner of our state because of a human caused wildfire yesterday afternoon. The flames were fed by 70 mph southwesterly wind gusts, aided by a developing severe drought over the area. This is only the beginning of what promises to be a potentially long and dangerous fire weather season in New Mexico and nearby areas.
Anyone who thinks that the NWS needs to take a budget cut hit as is being proposed, needs to take a closer look at what these dedicated and hard working meteorologists and staff are doing for their local communities.
This proposal is just stupid! If anything these offices need more money not less. They are already stretched to the limit, especially during times of severe weather, such as the high wind event currently fanning the flames in one of nearby communities.
I live on the very western edge of Tornado Alley. We get on average around a dozen or so tornadoes here in E/SE NM every year. We are very sparsely populated so this tends to lessen our chances of one of our communities being hit. But it occasionally does happen, such as in Clovis a couple of years ago when two people were killed , and several dozen were injured by an EF2 Tornado. The Albuquerque NWS Office had issued a tornado warning some 15-20 minutes ahead of time for the Clovis area, and there isn’t a doubt in my mind that this warning contributed to there being fewer casualties than there were.
During Skywarn Operations the NWS Forecasters in these offices are incredibly busy. Constantly updating the public and the media with watches, warnings, special weather statements, and advisories. Many times they are called in to work overtime and help out during significant outbreaks of severe and threatening weather.
In all of the thirty-eight years that I have been involved with these folks, I have yet to see them fail to rise to the task of saving public lives and protecting property. They are heroes in my books!
They don’t need to loose their jobs because our government is too inept and stupid to do the right thing. Its not their fault that the budget is in such a mess, so why the hell are they being punished for doing such an extremely important job?
Please contact your Congressional Representative and ask them to stop this insanity.
Gordon Ford says:
March 8, 2011 at 11:32 am
“If you don’t give us the money we want, people will die. Sounds like civil service blackmail to me.”
Yes indeed. Extortion is standard operating procedure now. Everyone has seen how successful that model is – see the military-industrial complex, the AGW research-industrial complex, or the WHO-Big Pharma research-industrial complex (remember swine flu?), and, of course, ‘if we don’t give the banksters zillions the world will end.’
Fear sells. So these guys are just making us an offer we can’t refuse, as the Godfather would say.
I’m all for calling their bluff, on any of these issues.
@ur momisugly Wendell L. Malone says:
March 8, 2011 at 2:02 pm
I live in the middle of “Dixie Alley”. Let me know when y’all can actually stop a tornado, and I might support a bigger budget.
Now that they’ve made that threat, negative feedback to reduce the threat should be set up.
To ensure that the public remains protected, the future budgets should require additional cuts if weather-related deaths do increase. So the internal budget decisions will have to be those which protect the public, or they lose more.
You should’ve seen the fight the NWS put up when they wanted to close the NWS office here in Colorado Springs and open one (or keep one open?) in Pueblo, CO. (They finally did close the office in Colo. Springs, despite immense opposition from the public.) Funny, that everything’s OK when THEY want to do something, but they get upset when others influence their decisions.
“Recent advances in aviation weather forecasting have resulted in as much as a 50 percent reduction in weather related flight delays.”
Great, the airlines can use these savings to buy the forecasts from private industry! This will create tons of new jobs as private companies compete to take over weather forecasting. Those that do a good job will survive, those that don’t will fail. thenet result will be better forecasts for less $$.