Money Mismanagement Storm at the National Weather Service
Congress this week delved into a money mismanagement cyclone at the National Weather Service that could leave Americans more vulnerable to severe weather events.
Over the past several years, Congress has mostly exceeded the administration’s funding request for the NWS, but for the past several years the NWS has been reporting a budget shortfall.
Rep. Sandy Adams (R-Fla.), vice chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, noted at Wednesday’s hearing that the panel had been informed that no NWS employees gained financially through the funds mismanagement. Instead, money designated for critical projects like the advanced weather interactive processing system and weather radio improvement was shuffled toward newer expenses.
“Yes, I’m glad that no one stole money for personal gain, but make no mistake, Congress’s trust — my trust, has been violated,” Adams said.
The hearing painted a picture of a Weather Service with hazy transparency and lack of oversight, as well as an agency with “significant problems with budget and financial controls.”
Despite concerns over the money troubles, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration didn’t provide a requested witness — the former CFO — to help reconstruct the financial mess, Adams said.
“The committee was willing to work with NOAA, even going as far as allowing the agency to only submit one piece of written testimony, but NOAA still refused,” she said.
“It also makes it difficult for us to not ask, what are you hiding?” Adams added.
Ranking Member Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) said the problem goes much deeper than one agency. “While there is no question that wrongdoing occurred at NOAA, just as troubling to me is the failure by the inspector general’s office at the Department of Commerce to take aggressive steps to investigate this matter. The IG is the cop on the beat, so to speak, at federal agencies.”
“After receiving multiple tips, the IG’s office recognized the potential problem, but the response to allegations of high level financial shenanigans seems to have been to send those allegations back to the agency to ask them to check on their own misconduct,” Tonko said. “It seems counterintuitive to me that the best way to ferret out problems is to ask a potential wrongdoers to investigate their own wrongdoing.”
The misconduct came to NOAA’s and DOC’s attention much earlier than they testified. I sent letters to NOAA and DOC leadership as early as May 2010 advising them of them problem. The letters went to the Chief Financial Officers of both NOAA and DOC and also to the Deputy Undersecretary of NOAA. We know they received them because they provided copies to the NWS and the Director told his own CFO about the letters.
Can you please tell us precisely what you think the misconduct is, in detail? This article uses lots of words, but tells us essentially nothing at all. I am asking because I genuinely want to know.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am told that NOAA/NESDIS has done a similar misallocation of funds to the tune of $2B. But without someone coming forward I guess the NWS fiasco will be the sacrifice that diverts attention from the real problem.
I noticed that while there is a great deal of talk about funds being “repurposed to new expenses”, there’s no actual explanation of exactly what those “new expenses” are.
Would I be amiss in suspecting that they had something to do with “proving man-made Global Warming”? That seems to be the Holy Grail at NOAA and NWS these days, to say nothing of NASA.
Knowing what money has been misappropriated for is far more important than just knowing that it has, in fact, been “misappropriated”.
clear ether
eon
eon, you hit the nail on the head.
Many of NWS’ EEO recipient manager’s are of the man-bear-pig ‘brain trust’.
As you know they’re not alone. The DoC, PNNL, NASA, NCAR and many campuses (Michael Mann is STILL employed at Penn State AND taken seriously!) the tentacle-like branches of these have a HUGE stake in AGW.
These are but a few of the U.S. players..
Yes, that’s a rather obvious inference. We don’t have a department of climate, but there are significant chunks of other agencies, conspicuously including NASA, that are funding this crap that congress doesn’t want funded.
Having worked for NOAA out of the military/ college for 3 years.. this ‘mismanagement of money’ is a LONG TIME COMING.
Per the NWSEO union stooge Richard Hirn’s assertion that ‘restructuring manpower’ and ‘..responsible for nearly 3 million people on average..’ shtick – what a crock!
‘Restructuring’ would mean LESS union dues, Hirn and his minion’s frown upon such reasoning.. err ‘nonsense’.
As per the ‘..nearly 3 million lives..’ comment – the FWO’s roles are minimal when compared to the duties, assignments of military weather forecasters, respectively.
There are SO MANY better private/ military sector weather companies/ presence that NWS’ presence is most times overkill.
NWS forecasters briefing aircrews is non-existent due to airlines and/ or pilot’s using online weather brief options and aviation meteorology is a very select field and the NWS doesn’t involve itself in that realm.
EVERY forecast weather office or ‘FWO’ has a duty Weather Observer(s) on-duty who does current weather operations, upper-air/ weather balloon operations, pack ice/ river movement/ measuring operations, analyzes raw data/ charts for the duty forecaster in many instances being an intern or assisting the forecaster, usually does the plain language short term forecasts or ‘STF’ and provides information via radio, sometimes t.v. and answers most phones.
Tbh a NWS forecaster’s job is VERY limited, tunnel vision-like in their assigned duties and boring to the extreme.
I’d also mentioned before on PJM that NOAA allows their weather personnel to receive an online B S with NO lab/ classroom participation!
I guess that’s ‘alright’ for government work/ employees but in the REAL weather providing world these types of ‘degrees’ and ‘experience’ in the private sector is an ongoing, frightening joke. Nearly as bad as those ‘t.v. weather people’ and their pointless ‘AMS’ or ‘NWS’ symbols by their name for whom they pay dues to..
We have any recent NOAA employee motivation conferences in Bali or Tokyo? How about employee recognition awards of $5,000 or more?
Back in the 60s and 70s the US Wx Svc was used as a cover for massive CIA data processing funding. That allowed the Service to become sloppy in their own accounting which led inevitably to sloppy, perhaps criminal, mismanagement at all levels. IMO it’s riddled with nepotism, cronyism, favoitism and downright lazy don’t-do-your-job-ism.
What took a generation to do takes several to undo.
Short answer, then, you blame Bush?
NOAA (along with the IRS and DHS) recently made a big purchase of hollow point handgun ammunition.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/17/agencies-tamp-down-speculation-over-hollow-point-ammo-purchases/
Clearly, since according to Hirn the primary job of weather forecasters is to protect each and every American, they need this ammo. I guess the urban bear problem is very serious.
We shouldn’t be looking at these things so closely. I for one thank non-god that these selfless activist government employees are willing to put their lives on the line to protect me from bears and pumas and armadillos and other forms of weather-maddened viscous animals. Give ‘em more free and unaccountable money I say.
I recognize your posting is at least part in jest, so in that manner I’ll point out NOAA’s purchase was really for the “fish police” at I like to refer to them, 135 or so officers in a law enforcement unit that’s responsible for crimes in the salt water domain. Illegal fishing, mislabeling of imports, one officer was even detailed to a BP oil spill payment fraud, presumably because this unit knows professional salt water fishing and fishermen.
I don’t begrudge these guys a roughly 700 round per year training budget (that’s not much over the minimum), and after thinking about it, all these agencies need their own armed officers if for no other reason than that there’s no one else to do the policing of their areas. In theory the FBI might help them, but for historical cultural reasons they’re almost entirely useless for these sorts of things. As it is the agencies have to work with the DoJ to prosecute, adding yet another agency would make the coordination even more of a nightmare.
In the context of the above story, one must wonder whether the quantities and purposes stated can be believed. I’m afraid that I have serious doubts. To paraphrase the NOAA/NWS party line, “Yeah, well it was just some tens of millions of dollars, and we’re pretty sure no one stole it.” Indeed?
Well, the NOAA and SSA purchases are entirely reasonable for the stated purposes, or so I say based on my experience in shooting and teaching marksmanship. They certainly fit the pattern of standard law enforcement procurements; what else might they be for? They’re certainly not appropriate for e.g. putting down insurrections.
DHS is another story, but since it’s an Indefinite Quantity/Indefinite Delivery (IDIQ) order we simply can’t say how much they’re going to buy over the next 5 years, only minimums (1,000 rounds per type and company that gets a contract) and maximums, with the headline grabbing maximum of 44 million rounds. I skimmed the solicitation and it resembles the NOAA and SSA procurements in that the vast majority of rounds that can be ordered are of the law enforcement service handgun type.
Those of us who actually know something about the world in which we live can do just fine with the AccuWeather Window, a barometer, and a weathervane. Even the most minimal knowledge of meterology, say, what was Sixth Grade science level in my day, and a little observation is enough to NEVER be surprised by the weather. Man has been looking at the sky for as long as he’s been man, and there is a lot of commonsense knowledge that doesn’t require a degree in meterology; Hell, it doesn’t even require literacy or even technology. “Mare’s tails and mackerel scales” foretell a storm coming, or at least a significant weather change anywhere in the World. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning only works on east-facing coasts, but even here in the far Northwest, dramatic red skies tell you there is a lot of moisture in the air and the wind direction will tell you if it is coming towards you. In this part of the World, when the atmosphere is dry and stable the mountains look much farther away and appear larger and larger as moisture builds up in the atmosphere. A lenticular cloud over a mountain, a mountain range or an island tells you there is moisture building up in the atmosphere and as the moving air strikes that feature, rises, and cools, it forms a cloud above the feature which tells you the weather is changing and if it is changing quickly enough, a storm is coming. If the barometer is falling, a low pressure system is coming with wind and rain usually, if it is falling fast, it is coming fast and the winds are strong. If you live on the coast, even if it is a beautiful almost totally clear day with no wind, the first appearance of mares tails and mackerel scales and the slightest downward movement of the barometer tells you a storm is coming. There, I just saved the taxpayers billions and we can eliminate most of the NWS.
Well, a lot of us want to outsource this sort of thing, the principle of division of labor says that makes economic sense, albeit nothing about who should be doing it.
I think your model breaks down for really severe thunderstorms (80+ mph winds), tornadoes and most especially hurricanes. As a resident of Joplin, MO, I can assure you that a much more organized and formal effort (traditional Civil Defense at the end, but prompted and informed by the NWS) saved many lives and saved me from personal injury on May 22nd, 2011, when the tornado trashed my apartment (the edge of the “zone of total destruction” was about 500 feet to the south of me).
Well, I was born and raised in The South and I’ve experienced a LOT of thunderstorms, many of them severe and some with tornados. Don’t think I’ve ever been surprised by one; they’re noisy and you can feel and hear them coming for quite awhile. I think I knew by the time I was four or five that they were dangerous and sometimes had tornados in them. The ritual in my house was second nature; dark clouds to the southwest, prepare for a thunderstorm, and if it is really violent, open the sheltered windows to equalize the pressure (old houses had porches that allowed you to open the windows and not have the rain come in; houses “explode” in tornados because of the pressure differences)
I don’t know how anyone could be surprised by a hurricane. The cloud formations and wind patterns predict them days in advance. The problem is few people other than farmers and mariners pay the slightest attention. It’s pitch black outside now and I can’t really see the sky and haven’t been outside, but I know the barometer is rising so the wind and rain we’ve been having is ending. The wind is backing towards the north but both the barometer rising and the wind backing are happening slowly, so the weather will improve slowly and unless another storm starts to move in, it should be clear and cool, cold to most of you, by the end of the week. Those two pieces of information, barometric pressure trends and wind speed and direction trends are all you really need to know if you know what to do with the information; the rest is just statistics for entertainment. Fundamentally, the weather forecast if for the stupid and unaware, but since the stupid will always be with us, I guess we need the weather service.
Whatever the truth of the old “explode due to pressure difference”, your posture could get you killed for a tornado beyond an EF1 and starting around EF3 would stand a good chance of that. I gather only the strange wind dynamics allow survival for those above ground in the stronger ones, and I’ve observed the survivors of those tended to have sheltered in bathtubs or in some inner portion of the house or apartment that didn’t quite get wiped off the face of the earth along with the rest of the building.
When you’re talking EF4 to EF5 only luck or getting below ground level or in a shelter of some sort will save you. That plus often prompt medical care; our two hospitals were only 1/2 mile apart and we’re still shuddering about how close we came to losing both, in which case the death toll would have been several times as great (well over 1,000 needed prompt medical care).
As for hurricanes, as long as “the stupid” includes the Mayor of New Orleans (who for Issac should have pulled the evacuation trigger), we do indeed need the NWS and specifically its Hurricane Center. Hurricanes are also a special case in that collecting good data from them and developing and running computer models to predict landfall and intensity probabilities is inherently expensive, you need satellites to look from above and planes to go into them.
Evacuations are expensive and by themselves will kill people, so you need harder data than, say, “there’s a hurricane in my part of the Gulf” to know what to do if you’re near enough to the shore (storm surge) or in a special case like New Orleans (below sea level). Further inland the sorts of measures you describe work just fine, my mother grew up in the very north of Vermilion Parish and hurricanes were a lot more than a nuisance but not particularly life threatening.
didn’t they just stock up on hollow point ammo?
“Yes, I’m glad that no one stole money for personal gain, but make no mistake, Congress’s trust — my trust, has been violated,” Adams said.
In other words, it’s probably alright that someone used the money to grow government – but if they had stolen it for personal gain, then heads would roll! Stealing money for personal gain – that’s Congress’ job!
“Had the incoming administration relied on our advice or had at least taken us seriously with the information we provided them, this whole reprogramming problem, unauthorized reprogramming problem that we’ve had over the past two years would never have happened . . . ”
If she would have just done what the note I gave her told her to do, and not hit the silent alarm button as she was handing me the money, I never woulda’ had to shoot her . . .
“Had the incoming administration relied on our advice or had at least taken us seriously with the information we provided them, this whole…problem…would never have happened…” Sounds like the Clintonites after 9-11!
Walter E. Williams Social Security as a wealth redistribution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU5o_X-GMRo&feature=g-all-u