One agency that explains what the government actually does for you

Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired recently, and more may be in danger of being let go.

Umair Irfan — a climate change, energy policy, and science correspondent for Vox — has been specifically focused on layoffs looming over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of late. His reporting presents a great lens for understanding the firings, and he and I discussed what the NOAA can tell us about the effect federal reductions have on everyday Americans. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Umair, what’s NOAA and why is it so important?

NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s tasked with developing weather forecasts for the United States, conducting oceanographic and atmospheric research, and developing long-term climate and weather models. It’s also in charge of fisheries and promoting commerce, particularly in the oceans, which means it does a lot of navigation and mapping work for shipping, and for offshore oil and gas drilling.

There have been reports that as much as half of NOAA staff might be dismissed. What would everyday Americans lose if that happened?

NOAA has a staff of about 12,000 people, most of them scientists and engineers. If you lost half of that, you’d lose a lot of people doing the research that informs our weather forecasts and our understanding of weather, as well as a lot of the data that industry players rely on for things like aviation and air travel. We’d also lose a lot of our emergency forecasting capability for extreme weather.

NOAA is one of the reasons that air travel is so safe, and one of the reasons that we’ve seen fewer people dying in natural disasters in the US: It has done the work of putting satellites into space, of having scientific ships on the ocean, and aircraft that fly into hurricanes, and has used its decades of data gathering to develop excellent forecasting capability — and one that, through continual work, is improving all the time.

If we lose all those capabilities, we lose a lot of progress that has been made. Extreme weather will stay dangerous, however, and our ability to drive the risks involved with weather down over time will eventually diminish if we don’t continue to invest in that.

NOAA obviously isn’t the only agency that’s facing cuts here. Do Americans gain anything by shrinking the government the way Trump has been?

Current and former agency staffers and leaders I talked to say the cuts aren’t going to help agencies accomplish their missions, and will actually run counter to any goals of efficiency, because remaining employees will have to try to fulfill the functions of their fired colleagues in suboptimal ways.

That said, there’s always going to be room to optimize a big institution like the government. But we need to do so thoughtfully, stepping back and seeing what our needs are, and what our expectations are from government in general.

Specifically looking at an agency like NOAA, it’s about looking carefully at exactly how its core functions are being met, where they’re falling short, and where they can be augmented. So far, we really haven’t seen that level of exploration and interest in how these agencies function from the current administration.

Big picture, what do you think Americans should learn from the case of NOAA?

I think it’s easy to forget that the federal government is everywhere in our country — 80 percent of federal employees are not in DC.

NOAA is one of those agencies that has a very far-flung footprint, because it has to do a lot of the local research and data gathering on site, and because its mission is to protect the whole country.

And NOAA, like all agencies, is very closely linked to people’s lives in ways they may not expect. You may not have a NOAA app on your phone, but very likely the weather app you do have, and the forecast that you’re getting from your local TV meteorologist, are informed by NOAA’s satellites and data gathering.

While there may be layers in between the products you consume and the government, it does provide the foundation for things we take for granted. If agencies like NOAA go away, we would definitely lose things we might not expect.

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