Hundreds in US climate agency fired in latest cuts | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds in US climate agency fired in latest cuts

bbc.com

42 pointstartoran47 comments

> "I was fired from my dream of working at NOAA. I'm so sorry to everyone also affected," climate scientist Zack Labe wrote on X. He said that he had worked on strengthening the agency's machine learning and AI tools.

https://xcancel.com/ZLabe/status/1895244032923836498#m

Note the replies

https://bsky.app/profile/zacklabe.com/post/3ljapdyp7os2u

What a negative conspirasist (if that is even a word) platform X has become. Really something to be proud on. Every sound you make on that platform, a truckload of sh*t you get dumped on you - especially if you have something like “scientist” or government employee in your profile.

I agree it’s a horrible experience, so I left. I see no reason to add to user and engagement counts that might help with their ad sales.

> LeArN tO cOdE

Hope everything works out, because if it doesn't, it's going to be really hard for me to have any empathy for Trump supporters if bad things happen to them.

https://github.com/zmlabe

> Huffman lamented the loss of "hundreds of scientists and experts at NOAA" who helped collect data that kept the public informed about dangerous weather events.

Perhaps I should learn to stop worrying and love this anti-science (anti-intellectual?) zeitgeist we find ourselves in.

(Bummer, seems divinginrods.com is taken, redirects to britishdowsers.org Gotta move fast, I guess.)

> "We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission," the NOAA spokesman added.

"except for anything related to Climate Change, there is no such thing as Climate Change per our all powerful co-dictators. Also, we hope to be closed down so we can be privatized, this way if you want forecasts you need to pay 20 USD per week to obtain them."

I think the spokesman left something out, so I added it here above. Best to know all the facts since Musk/Trump likes to skip or lie about the important stuff.

I have to pay for these regardless with my taxes. Except with privitization I have a choice.

Until they decide to subsidize AccuWeather as party the buddy system as the create a new swamp of their making by draining the existing swamp

Getting life saving weather reports should not require a paid subscription. I know I'll get laughed out of the room, but medical care should not be either.

But it does. You can't avoid it costing money. Either you are taxed and the money gets laundered to pay for it. Or you pay for it directly. Either way you are paying for it.

move fast and break things, except now it's storm warnings, weather prediction and climate forecasting. What could go wrong?

In a country of ~340M and a budget of trillions, what does this really save? Having a few hundred scientists on staff seems worth it. Pretty obvious DOGE is just a propaganda campaign and won't accomplish any of its listed goals. It's just hurting the American people.

They could save a lot more if they started firing all people who wear glasses.

Areas with dense populations will be financially incentivized to generate their own storm warnings, and we'll save money on sparsely populated areas, so probably rather than spending money equally on tornadoes and hurricanes, we'll see more money spent on hurricanes and less money spent on tornadoes.

So you are saying, all states need to fund weather research themselves. That way there will be hundreds of vehicles following tornadoes and many planes studying hurricanes.

Also each State will need to fund and launch weather satellites ?

Nothing like saving money, I guess you can buy and launch satellites cheaper by the dozen ?

Right, but what you are forgetting is, that in exchange for all the efficiency provided by a central government agency, millionaires with only 2 yachts will be able to leverage this private contract into enough money to buy a third yacht.

When the co-president is the CEO of a company that launches satellites, this sounds like a winning solution

Sparsely populated areas? You mean the areas where we grow all our food? Yeah, we don’t need solid weather reports for areas like that.

Well I don't know. Despite all this chaos, the economy is doing better than ever (?), we have the best jobs (?) the best salaries (?), very beautiful salaries. Who knew that a Republican administration would be bad for most people, no one could have predicted it.

We are one month into the Trump admin. I expect the economy will not do so well after the tariffs hit next week and several hundred thousand government employees are laid off. Oh, and I expect we might see further problems when people aren’t getting social security checks.

> The cuts come as Elon Musk, as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge)

Musk isn’t the head, Amy Gleason is.

Musk does not work for DOGE, nor are there any conflicts of interest between Musk's company and DOGE's activities.

Oh sweet summer child.

I think you forgot to add /s???

Otherwise, you might want to stop drinking so much kool-aid.

I thought my last sentence made it obvious.

Think I overestimated HN

I think you underestimate the number of people that actually believe what you wrote

Given the downvotes I think you’re right.

I especially like the response from Mrs Gleason upon learning she was in charge of DOGE.

"Wait, I thought you told her!" was said by pretty much everyone involved

Poe’s Law is hitting hard right now. There are people out there making the arguments you are satirizing. These are rough times…

Then why do we keep seeing musk talking about the “achievements” of doge at press conferences and meetings instead of her? Musk is a special government employee, and his companies are beneficiaries of government subsidies, how is that not a conflict of interest?

The idiots think they're slick at hiding their corruption. This is all middle school to them. It's about all they're intellectually able to handle.

Apparently it's easy to fool people that don't have great critical thinking skills, but I did not expect for someone to use these tactics on here. At least they're getting called out for it

Why do you think they are trying to hide anything. They have been given carte blanche by SCOTUS that anything they do as official acts cannot be illegal. Congress has also abdicated their responsibilities as well. They are not afraid of anything the opposition side says/thinks/does. They have an agenda, and are making strides to accomplish their playbook.

I don't understand why people keep saying things like hide, shadow, etc. They're doing it right there in front of everyone live on TV or posting step by step on social media.

They think we don't know that it's corruption. It may be legal corruption, but it's corruption all the same. Even the MAGA folks are starting to figure it out.

Okay, I think I have to be more obvious:

What I don't understand about people complaining about governments removing programs and reducing their staff is that implies either the status quo is just right or it's already not enough. Should they have hired 900 new workers too or just left it alone? Where were the complaints about previous governments not growing them fast enough? Will they accept any correction from an overshoot in finding the right amount?

Apparently NOAA grew rapidly in the previous few years [1], so was it underfunded by Obama?

[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12406/3

Sudden unconsidered change in any direction is virtually always harmful.

Given the need to walk back some firings [1], it's reasonable to infer that the ongoing cuts aren't being done in a particuarly thoughtful manner.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302019/bird-flu-usda-f...

> that implies either the status quo is just right or it's already not enough

Or it implies headcount is not the only variable you can tune to increase efficiency.

See Chesterton's Fence.

I'd be surprised if it was not increasing, BTW, given the increasingly volatile climate we find ourselves in.

Musk has said that if you remove something that turns out to be important, you can always put it back. I think this is how they're operating. Like a giant scream-test. Some staff and agencies will return but only when the problems of their absence have become clear. This is one way to improve efficiency which may be very effective at the cost of some disasters here and there.

That only works for things that have immediate impact, less so for things that take time to blow up. But then all people involved have moved on and you’re left plugging AI, I guess.

I don't think anybody is against optimizing government agenesis and their spending. People question the motives behind it. This is clearly done with ideological intentions, because Elon and Trump thinks that the big government in itself is a problem – as all fascists do. When you remove all government agencies and replace them with corporate interest you get what Mussolini called Corporatism but what we now know as fascism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

Leaving motives aside, I question the process. There doesn't appear to be any cohesive plan or vision. It's all slash-and-burn, damn the consequences. I'd like to see a plan put together and put before Congress. The Republicans have the majority, so they can ultimately do what they want. But it would at least provide an opportunity to review the consequences, so we don't have an "oh shit" moment when some critical service fails.

Their approach is breathtakingly reckless.

> What I don't understand about people complaining about governments removing programs and reducing their staff is that implies either the status quo is just right or it's already not enough

One might be able to make that case when just considering a single agency. However this is happening across many agencies. It is extremely unlikely that they would all be significantly overstaffed.

Another sign that this is not a legitimate effort at just getting rid of workers that aren't needed is that they aren't deciding who to fire based on merit. They are deciding based on who is easiest to fire procedurally.

>complaining about removing programs and reducing staff implies either the status quo is just right or it's already not enough.

It doesn't imply that. How could one possibly feel this is comparable to a numeric slider being adjusted, where everybody simply has an opinion about which number it should be at? For every single cut: What, specifically, is being cut? By how much? Which positions? How is the cut being executed? What's the ostensible reason/expected outcome? What's the actual motivation? Under what authority/process? What are the side effects? Are there other ways of improving the process besides cuts? Is the person doing it also mocking the people who they're firing?

People give a shit about a lot of things, and they don't need to have all these questions in their head explicitly to do so. Systems and human opinions aren't that simple - especially super-gigantic systems and the opinions of hundreds of millions of people.

Here's an earlier complained about NOAA being understaffed:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-shutdown-is-weakening-ou... from January 11, 2019:

> The shutdown exacerbates a long-term problem within the NWS: it’s badly understaffed. According to the most recent Government Accountability Office report about the NWS, 11 percent of positions within the agency were vacant as of 2016. Then, last year, the Trump administration cut the agency’s budget an additional 8 percent and recommended cutting 355 jobs.

That report is from 2017 at https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-17-364.pdf , which further cites a 2012 review by the National Academy of Sciences and a 2013 National Academy of Public Administration report.

The article says forecasts would be fine even during that temporary shutdown but long-term research would be reduced. There's no ceiling to how much long term research you can do so they'll always be understaffed as long as somebody believes that even more research could be fruitful.

You asked 'Where were the complaints about previous governments not growing them fast enough?'

I answered with an example of a previous complaint.

I take it then you did not read the report? It goes into details of why they were understaffed compared to what they were in 2012:

> Beginning in 2013, a series of events led to a hiring backlog at NWS. Specifically, in response to the 2013 federal budget sequestration, NOAA implemented an agency-wide hiring freeze.26 Because WFMO generally could not hire or replace departing employees during the freeze, the number of vacancies at NWS increased. According to WFMO officials, when the hiring freeze was lifted in 2014, demand for hiring across NOAA was high. Simultaneously, WFMO had experienced a high level of attrition during the freeze—in fiscal years 2013 and 2014, approximately 50 percent of WFMO staff handling hiring left the agency, according to a WFMO official—and therefore, WFMO could not keep pace with the hiring demand when the freeze was lifted.27 In fiscal year 2016, attrition at NWS outpaced WFMO’s hiring abilities. Over the course of the fiscal year, 191 staff left NWS, and WFMO hired 157 external candidates, according to WFMO data. Therefore, NWS’s hiring backlog increased. ...

> According to NOAA budget officials, an administrative spending cap has limited WFMO’s ability to increase its hiring activities to address the hiring demand ...

It also mentions some of the problems which have nothing to do with long-term research:

> However, taking these steps, according to managers and staff, at times led to their inability to complete other key tasks, such as providing severe weather information support to state and local emergency managers. ... managers in five operational units said that managers and staff worked overtime to cover forecasting shifts and ensure forecasts and warnings were issued.

If the reason for the downsizing truly was due to being overstaffed and having many duplicate roles, then sure, that would be a good move. However, the RIFs are coming because of ideological differences with the co-presidents' beliefs or vendetta for some aggrieved idea.

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