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Will Elon Musk go after the National Hurricane Center? Billionaire’s team approaches NOAA
C. A. Bridges
USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida
In just two weeks, Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has swept through at least half a dozen federal agencies with the same explosive, around-the-clock energy and tactics he used when taking over Twitter and Tesla: move fast, work long hours, slash expenses, eliminate anything he considers wasteful or unnecessary, and fire some workers while encouraging workers to resign with promises of pay to reduce the workforce.
Is NOAA next? Will Florida lose its hurricane forecasts, or be required to pay for them?
Under Musk and his team of young aides, the advisory group the administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has pushed itself into highly sensitive agencies such as the Office of Personnel Management, the U.S. Treasury, and the General Services Administration, gained access to highly personal information and made sweeping changes that congressional Democrats and federal officials have said were done without Congressional approval or any apparent oversight.
On Saturday, the website for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the country's foreign aid agency, went dark and the agency was dismantled with the remains moved under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Thousands of employees were notified they would be placed on administrative leave. "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper," Musk posted Monday.
Musk, who donated $288 million to Trump's campaign, has said DOGE's goals are to downsize the federal government, eliminate federal programs and the jobs of their workers, and slash regulations. He's attacked these goals with breakneck speed and bragged about on the social media site he owns, X, formerly Twitter.
“Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend," Musk posted on X, "so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!”
On Tuesday afternoon, DOGE staffers reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, according to the Guardian.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientific and regulatory agency, is tasked with gathering, sharing and implementing the latest scientific data and analytic tools using a vast network of research programs, vessels, satellites, science centers, laboratories, scientists and experts to understand and predict climate and extreme weather impacts. Data from NOAA and its agencies inform weather predictions, fisheries management, coastal restoration and marine commerce.
NOAA oversees the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Ocean Service, the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations & NOAA Corps. The National Hurricane Center is a division of the NOAA/National Weather Service.
Will the Trump administration and Musk remove NOAA and the National Hurricane Center?
No details have been released about any plans concerning NOAA, but Trump has frequently dismissed climate science and the threat of climate change, something NOAA has extensively researched.
In his first term, Trump proposed slashing NOAA's budget by 18% and the agency's weather and climate research office by 43% and removed the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement. The Trump administration removed the Environmental Protection Agency's webpages on climate change and worked to downplay or dismiss studies into it, according to whistleblowers who talked to the Guardian.
Now Trump and his allies have vowed to remove any mentions of climate change from the federal government. On the first day of his presidency, Trump rescinded 78 executive orders approved by former President Joe Biden that included efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and he signed an executive order leaving the Paris Climate Agreement again.
In his first week, Trump ordered federal departments to scrub references to topics that do not fit his priorities, such as mentions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and climate change. Pages referencing climate change at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency were removed or left unlinked. Fox News reported.
And Project 2025 takes direct aim at NOAA.
What does Project 2025 say about NOAA?
Project 2025, a detailed conservative roadmap for Trump's first 100 days in office, calls out the NOAA specifically for "climate alarmism" and recommends the agency be "dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories."
Among other things, Project 2025 suggests:
- Breaking up NOAA and reassigning the ships and planes used by NOAA to other agencies
- Charging for currently free National Weather Service data
- Transfer NOS Survey functions to the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Geological Survey
- Streamline the National Marine Fisheries Service and reduce or remove regulations on fisheries, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.
- Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and disband the bulk of its climate change research.
Does Project 2025 call for closing the National Hurricane Center?
No. The project says the department's data provides "important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions, and are used by forecasting agencies and scientists internationally."
However, the project does call for a review of all data from the National Hurricane Service and the National Environmental Satellite Service to ensure it is presented neutrally, "without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate."
Is Trump or Musk following Project 2025?
It is uncertain whether Trump or Musk would agree with the project's recommendation.
While Project 2025, released last year by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, is not an official Trump administration blueprint and the president denied any connection with it during his campaign. More than 30 of the project's 38 creators were connected with the previous Trump administration, several members of his new administration have ties to it including Russell Vought, one of the co-authors and Trump's pick for Office of Management and Budget.
Many policies Trump and Musk have enacted in the past two weeks mirror, if not surpass some of Project 2025's suggestions.
The multi-pronged Presidential Transition Project was intended to assist a Republican president in the early days of his or her new presidency to "rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left."
As of early Wednesday afternoon, the climate change section on NOAA's website and its standalone site climate.gov are still visible.
Trump nominates 'Sharpiegate' scientist to lead NOAA
This week, Trump nominated Dr. Neil Jacobs to lead NOAA.
Jacobs was Trump's acting NOAA chief in 2019 when Trump seemingly altered a hurricane impact map with a Sharpie, adding a crude black loop into Alabama and doubling down on his prediction as to where Hurricane Dorian might go after meteorologists contradicted him. Jacobs reproved them, eventually leading to a Department of Commerce inspector general's report on what became known as Sharpiegate.
On Tuesday, the Union of Concerned Scientists spoke out against his nomination.
“While Dr. Jacobs has relevant expertise and credentials, he has already proven he’s unfit to lead NOAA by failing to uphold scientific integrity at the agency," said Dr. Rachel Cleetus, the policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at UCS.
What has Elon Musk done to the federal government?
So far, Musk and his team have reportedly:
- Taken over the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, brought in beds, and locked senior OPM employees out of some of the department's data systems including a database that contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, Reuters reported.
- Sent out a mass email to all federal employees offering "deferred resignations," eight months of pay through September if they resign by Feb. 6 and warning of government layoffs. The email was titled "Fork in the Road," the same subject line Musk used on a similar email to Twitter employees in 2022 when he bought the company.
- Established allies and former employees in key federal positions, according to Wired, such as former Tesla software engineer Thomas Shedd, the recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director, and many of the executives at OPM.
- Notified the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal government's real estate broker, to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to the Associated Press. The initiative is led by an X employee with a background in real estate, a GSA insider told AP.
- Pushed into the Treasury Department and its payment systems, which control the federal government's payments for Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax refunds, federal salaries, money for government contractors and grant recipients, and much more. Musk's operatives reportedly spent the weekend going through the payment system, including “the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, bank accounts and tax data, Social Security numbers and home addresses,” according to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
- Dismantled and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the agency that oversees foreign aid for women's health in conflict zones, clean water, HIV/AIDS treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work, according to Reuters. Trump has called USAID "radical left lunatics." What remains of the department is now under Secretary of State Marco Rubio and nearly all of the USAID employees were told they would be on administrative leave Friday with plans to return anyone leaving overseas back to the United States.
- "Deleted" a small technology office called 18F, launched during the Obama administration that modernized several federal software programs and helped create the popular Direct File project for the IRS.
"If we were watching this happen in Venezuela or Malawi and we saw a billionaire seize the money supply and the checkbook of the government, we would call it a coup," said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative economic policy group and a former Senate senior economic policy advisor.
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发表于 2025-2-7 22:36
发表于 2025-2-8 00:46
