Well, so much for hoping they would escape the cuts after all.
NOAA has fired (or been forced to fire) over 800 employees, with possibly more to come today. I AM PISSED. This is going to put a whole lot of extra work on the people who do manage to keep their jobs. I’ll tell ya, they are one of the places who keep watch on things like potential hurricanes and this is going to be a mess. Yes, there are various weather channels that keep an eye on this sort of thing, but it’s not the same.
We need all the information they give us. We need their forecasts. We need THEM. And we need them for a lot more than the obvious. Most divisions of the agency, which employs scientists and specialists in weather, oceans, biodiversity, climate and other research and planetary monitoring fields, were affected. I have to say I didn’t know all of that, but it will teach me to assume that all they handle is weather.
“Probationary” employees, those with a year or less time at NOAA were the first to go. Of course we’ve seen all of that across the board with people getting cut from organizations across the gamut in the US, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. The people who were charged with conducting the terminations seemed to have acted in a way that would minimize paper trails, a source close to NOAA said, making it difficult for others at the agency to know who was affected and leaving news of the firings to spread by word of mouth. And of course they got the usual bogus reason. The terminated NOAA workers’ letters said, “The Agency finds you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.” Still a nonsense reason like it has been for everyone else. And absolutely incorrect.
NOAA has been understaffed for years and this is going to make it worse. Meteorologists and computer engineers across the board were also cut. The Hurricane division, where employees work to improve hurricane (of course) forecasts, was impacted. And these are the ones we know about. What else is there that we don’t?
So the mass stupidity that is Elon Musk and his cadre of boy toys continues. And it’s going to get worse. Will this get any better? Probably not until organizations everywhere are reduced to a shadow of themselves. And it still might not get better.
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Who would have thought that the side that has spent the last sixty years saying ‘Government Doesn’t Work’ would finally get around to wrecking it so that it doesn’t?
All those Koch-suckers finally prevailing over good judgement and common sense.