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Comment by iamthirsty | Hacker News Reader

> The National Weather Service Employees Organization, its labor union, said the lack of staff is taking a toll on forecasting operations and that the agency is “for the first time in its history teetering on the brink of failure.” Managers are being forced to scale back certain operations, and staff are stressed and overworked.

> “It’s gotten so bad that we’re not going to be able to provide service that two years ago we were able to provide to public, emergency managers and media,” said Dan Sobien, the president of the union. “We’ve never been in that position before.”

It makes me deeply discouraged that something so vital to life in general is almost impossible to keep staffed (mostly because of a lack of funds), yet the military's budget increased by $54 Billion this year — to a total of $639 Billion for FY2018.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

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That's not how I read this at all:

>National Weather Service Employees Organization

>“The NWS leadership has been incapable of placing their budget priorities correctly,”

> “understaffing is not due to underfunding,”

> “unspent carry-over funds” in the tens of millions of dollars

In federal government budgeting dollars are allocated for specific programs or services.

You might have a program, say climate change, that the administration doesn’t like because politics and refuses to perform work in, despite the wishes of Congress.

You may have other programs like forecasting that have no money allocated at all.

This is mismanagement by design. The GOP types want to outsource the NWS function and have been trying to do so for many years through the budget process. The senator from Pennsylvania tried to prohibit free release of weather data to make some rain for Accuweather, which is a PA company.

The article quotes the union “understaffing is not due to underfunding”

But also had this to say:

“The Weather Service has faced different obstacles in trying to fill positions, including the 2013 budget sequester, related hiring freezes, and changes in administrations. In 2012, challenged to find funding to compensate its workers, it was embroiled in a “reprogramming” scandal, in which it moved around funds to cover payroll, without congressional approval.”

That's the pattern you'll find in many government agencies — they might in aggregate have the money available but it's hard to spend on the right things or there are policy changes needed for quality of life improvements which cause people to leave. People outside might not have appreciated that the sequester lead to things like mandatory furloughs — i.e. your boss telling you to pick the day you're going to stay home and not get paid, even if you need the money and have work to get done — which were really bad for morale.

Traditionally job security was one thing which lead people to endure some of those problems but that's been under attack for awhile and you had recent things like congress considering cutting retirement, all of which aren't going to be great for getting people to take jobs:

https://federalnewsradio.com/retirement/2017/10/house-set-to...

Budget Sequestration has had a dramatic effect on military spending as well. Silo'd funds make it difficult for long term procurement etc etc.

I know someone who worked on a big navy project which almost had a (IIRC) multi-year delay because even though it was almost certain to be funded, they couldn’t legally commit money on a contract with a shipyard and missing that deadline would mean the facility would be booked by someone else.

Those kinds of hit to long-term planning really crank up the stress and costs.

As peterwwillis points out below, a part of it is due to a direct Trump order to not hire any staff earlier this year.

The article does not mention Trump once.

This is all pre-Trump

> An independent report from the Government Accountability Office showed staff vacancies increased 57 percent from 2014 to 2016. The overall vacancy rate reached 11 percent or 455 positions at the end of 2016 up from just 5 percent (211 positions) at the end of 2010, the report said.

Both are correct. Funding is not the issue, but the Trump order did exacerbate the issue, as well as the lack of nominating key positions in NOAA and NWS.

Both being correct does not make them both equally correct.

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