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Posted (edited)
On 4/15/2025 at 10:05 PM, Hmbre97 said:

I told my boss today that I needed access to all the payroll records for our employees in the company. When questioned why, I let him know that both IT and HR are part of the Administrative department of the company so it seems curious why one administrative dept shouldn't have access to all data from another administrative department. Why should they be segregated?

 

Seems inefficient...

 

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see how fucking stupid that sounds?

 

 

And that's before you figure in that you are some sort of consultant/1099 "employee," hired without the consent of the BoD and given extremely high-level executive functions with no vetting of your apparent conflicts of interest, no NDA or other employment agreement giving you any sort of fiduciary or contractual duty to the company.  And you employ as assistants a bunch of equally or more sketchy minions that are very young and have no training or experience in executive operation of a business.

Oh, and the bylaws of the corporation give the CEO no direct control over payroll and HR functions, only the ability to hire and fire the directors of those departments, with the consent of the BoD.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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Posted
34 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

1) Buy classified ads in the newspaper for my business 

2) ???

3) Profit!

i would’ve onboarded you after you interviewed had followed his advice and bought “tiny” classified ads instead of those trucks you bought.  

but you didn’t.

as one of the Cutco assistant regional sales manager over Tyler/Longview i have to trust you to do things the Cutco way instead of thinking you know better.    
 

i hope you’ve since learned your lesson   

 

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Posted (edited)
6 hours ago, Kyrie Eleison said:

as one of the Cutco assistant regional sales manager over Tyler/Longview i have to trust you to do things the Cutco way instead of thinking you know better

The leads are weak.

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted
16 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Outside of a crisis, the wrong way to resolve the tension is to prioritize one thing over the other, and the right way is to manage access around workflow and use cases on an ongoing basis. 

Some form of this statement is what I always look for when hiring someone to run a particular security group. It's a tight rope to walk and outside of DFIR (always in crisis mode) most infosec groups need to slightly lean towards the business mission while implementing security controls.

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Posted
On 4/21/2025 at 9:05 PM, Ag with kids said:

Even when EVERY SINGLE AGENCY has the same function - HR/Payroll?  So you need hundreds of HR/Payroll offices?  And they don't share any information?  That's extremely inefficient.

Why not have one central HR/Payroll office that handles those functions instead of hundreds of them - each with X number of VPs, Y number of Directors, Z number of managers?

 

No offense but you are a fool.

 

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Posted

Hey @Ag with kids, I know you've seen this response to your stupid fucking question last night, because of the screenshot below. I'll also note you haven't posted in any of the subs since.

image.thumb.png.6ceaa385d6c5ce3b521077b32f0ace26.png

 

 

 

What gives? Are you too much of a pussy to say, "Yeah, man, I was wrong." Are you just another troll?

 

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Posted
5 hours ago, bolverk said:

Hey @Ag with kids, I know you've seen this response to your stupid fucking question last night, because of the screenshot below. I'll also note you haven't posted in any of the subs since.

image.thumb.png.6ceaa385d6c5ce3b521077b32f0ace26.png

 

 

 

What gives? Are you too much of a pussy to say, "Yeah, man, I was wrong." Are you just another troll?

 

All magas are fucking cowards.  Every goddamned one of them. 

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Posted
34 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:
46 minutes ago, Bookman said:
I think they are beginning realize they are suckers. 

But they can never admit it. Just like their orange god, there's no place in their worlds to admit they were wrong, made a mistake, were duped, etc.

“Biden and the libruls pushed us to this point.”

”It’s the Dems fault for running Harris. Nobody was going to vote for her.”

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Posted (edited)
8 hours ago, F250 said:

Some form of this statement is what I always look for when hiring someone to run a particular security group. It's a tight rope to walk and outside of DFIR (always in crisis mode) most infosec groups need to slightly lean towards the business mission while implementing security controls.

Dude yes. It’s similar to compliance- weak leadership will default to “we can’t do _____.”  Strong leadership solves for how to do things in a compliant and secure way. In either case, good risk management isn’t inhibiting, but liberating. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted
1 hour ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:
1 hour ago, Bookman said:
I think they are beginning realize they are suckers. 

But they can never admit it. Just like their orange god, there's no place in their worlds to admit they were wrong, made a mistake, were duped, etc.

And they'll continue to back him.

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Posted

They'll never realize they were suckers much less admit it. The older Trumpers were mostly the people swilling Limbaugh and Fox News in the 9/11, Iraq War days. You can hardly find anybody lately that will admit they supported any of that, much less that they were duped by it. Some of the only people I've heard that'll own it are never Trump former Republicans, several of which we have on this board. I've talked with quite a few MAGA in real life who say they loved and still love O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Toby Keith but nah they were always against those wars, even Afghanistan from the very start. When this whole Trumpism thing crashes into the mountain like it did at the end of the 2nd Bush term, they'll quietly change their views retroactively rather than admit they were rubes. Above all else, they'll never admit that the left or Democrats were ever right about any of it. 

* The above is the best case scenario, as good as it's ever going to get for the end of Trumpism if we're lucky enough to see it. 

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Posted

Here's a story of local interest.  Also, FYI, the NWS office in Houston has none, as in zero, staffers in managerial capacity.  They all abandoned ship, and with a hiring freeze, well, you get the idea.  Good luck during hurricane season!

https://www.kxan.com/weather/weather-blog/head-of-local-weather-warnings-takes-early-retirement-as-noaa-cuts-continue/

 

Quote

Paul Yura, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio office, has announced he has taken the early retirement offer as part of NOAA’s recent cuts to personnel and budget.

Yura has over 32 years experience, spending more than half of his career at the NWS Austin/San Antonio office. In the process, he gained tremendous experience understanding local weather patterns while ensuring timely warnings get disseminated to the public in a multitude of ways.

 

Quote

The warning coordination meteorologist (WCM) is a senior role at a local NWS office. According to NOAA, “The WCM coordinates the warning function of the office with the outside world. This would include heading the Skywarn Program, conducting spotter training and being a voice to the local media for the office.”

Only the ‘meteorologist in charge’ (MIC) has a higher position within a local office.

Yura’s retirement is part of an early retirement package offered to National Weather Service employees as the Trump Administration works to slash the budget at NWS and the larger NOAA organization.

 

Quote

In an e-mailed message to media partners, Yura said, “I cannot have asked for a more rewarding career that has spanned over 32 years, with over half of that career right here in South Central Texas as the WCM for the NWS Austin-San Antonio office.  And while I am sad that it is ending a few years earlier than I had planned, the friendships and relationships that I have made while being your WCM cannot be replaced.”

As for a replacement to the WCM, the current hiring freeze, as mentioned by Yura in his message, may make filling that role more challenging.

 

Spoiler

This comes less than a week after several Regional Climate Center’s across the county had their funding “lapse” even though they were restarted again on Monday.

The importance of experience in the WCM role cannot be understated. Ensuring ample and timely warning to the Central Texas counties covered by NWS Austin/San Antonio is among the chief responsibilities.

Yura’s final date of employment, April 30, comes just before severe weather season in Central Texas typically peaks in the month of May.

Staffing at NWS Austin/San Antonio
According to the NWS Austin/San Antonio website, the office is already short two meteorologist positions currently listed as vacant. The positions of ‘lead meteorologist’ and ‘meteorologist’ remain open. Separately, NWS Austin/San Antonio have a vacant ‘electronics technician’ position.

Science Operations Officer also retiring
In addition to Yura, Science Operations Officer Jon Zeitler is also retiring on April 30, but it is not an early retirement as part of NOAA personnel cuts. Zeitler has worked at NWS Austin/San Antonio for the past two decades and across all types of impactful severe weather and winter weather events in this area.

 

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Posted

https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/04/trump-laid-nearly-all-federal-workers-who-investigate-firefighter-deaths/404751/?oref=govexec_today_nl&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GovExec Today: April 23%2C 2025&utm_term=newsletter_ge_today

 

Quote

When a firefighter dies in the line of duty, a small team of federal health workers is often called on to pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.

That’s what happened after two firefighters died in California in 2020 while searching for an elderly woman in a burning library. It happened in 2023 when a Navy firefighter died in Maryland after a floor collapsed in a burning home. And it happened last year in Georgia when a career battalion chief died after a semitrailer truck exploded.

 

Quote

But President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for conducting those reviews.

At least two-thirds of the employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within HHS, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or will be in June. These cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the team that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths, one of the laid-off investigators told ProPublica.

 

Quote

Most nonunionized NIOSH workers were given until the end of the day to clear out their desks. The layoffs were so abrupt, staff said, that lab animals were left without staff to care for them and had to be euthanized, and an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding and polluting the surrounding environment.

“It was pure chaos,” another NIOSH employee said.

 

Spoiler

The fatality investigation team was examining deaths at 20 fire departments when the layoff notices arrived. Those probes are now unlikely to be completed, the investigator said.

“The whole intent of this program was that people would learn through tragedy — what happened to one person — so we can prevent it from happening to others,” the investigator said.

The administration’s moves will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases and disrupt a program that provides health care to emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.

ProPublica spoke with five NIOSH employees who either led or contributed to firefighter health initiatives and received layoff notices. Most requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the administration.

“The existence of NIOSH is a hard-earned right by the people of America to have a healthy and safe working environment,” said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840, which represents agency employees. “This is an attack on NIOSH employees and federal employees, but it is also an attack on American workers generally.”

Neither the White House nor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has called the shots on many of the administration’s cuts, responded to a request for comment. A NIOSH spokesperson referred questions to HHS.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made some public indications that aspects of the World Trade Center program could be spared, but details remain sparse. The department’s spokesperson said in a statement that programs required by law — such as some of those focused on firefighter health — will continue to operate.

They did not respond to a follow-up question about how those programs will continue after their staffs were terminated.

“It Breaks My Heart”
The investigations performed by the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program are initiated at the request of the fire department that suffered the casualty. The findings are shared with the firefighter’s family in hopes of providing some closure. And the reports are then published, so the broader firefighting community can strengthen its procedures to avoid similar losses.

The Trump administration had already hamstrung the program shortly after the inauguration, initially barring the investigative team from traveling to conduct research, communicating with other agencies and publishing reports, according to the investigator. While the department eventually allowed several of the casualty reports to be published, the rest remain unfinished.

“It breaks my heart that we’re going to just destroy these programs that have made so much progress in protecting the health and safety of our firefighting community,” the investigator said.

The layoff notice the investigator received from HHS said that termination of much of the agency’s staff was “because your duties have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.”

“Leadership at HHS are appreciative of your service,” the notice stated.

The federal firefighting force faces a daunting year, with spending cuts canceling prescribed burns to reduce flammable vegetation and the termination of hundreds of firefighting support staff, even in the face of climate-change-lengthened wildfire seasons.

“At a time when we need to be bolstering these efforts and personnel, it’s pretty damn appalling that we’d be trying to diminish the health benefits for our firefighters and first responders,” a Forest Service firefighter said.

Dismantling the World’s Largest Firefighter Cancer Study
On April 1, the Trump administration also began laying off much of the staff working on the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer.

Its creation in 2018 was a landmark win in a yearslong fight to study why firefighters suffer from certain types of cancer at vastly higher rates than the general population. Both chambers of Congress unanimously passed the bill to create the registry. Trump signed it into law during his first term.

While HHS said in a statement that programs required by law would remain intact, it did not answer a question about whether it would bring back staff to keep the registry running.

Wildland firefighters don’t typically wear respirators while they’re exposed to high levels of smoke. And the protective clothing firefighters wear while battling active blazes contains high levels of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” that have been linked to various types of cancer. But the exact causes of some cancers that occur at high rates among firefighters are not well understood. Female-specific cancers such as ovarian and cervical, for example, have only recently been linked to firefighting.

More than 23,000 firefighters have signed up to participate since the registry launched in April 2023, and the research team recently began an outreach campaign to get to 200,000 participants. With this trove of data, NIOSH researchers planned to dig into numerous under-studied questions, such as what workplace exposures led to cancers that specifically harmed female firefighters, a NIOSH scientist who worked on the program told ProPublica.

Among the thousands who signed up was a federal wildland firefighter who was concerned about spending a career breathing wildfire smoke without a respirator. The decision to throw away such research is disturbing, the firefighter told ProPublica. “I was hoping that something would happen with all that research, that they would protect wildland firefighters.”

With a hollowed-out IT department, the registry’s portal to enroll firefighters quickly went offline.

“It’s devastating,” said Judith Graber, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and co-chair of the board that advises the registry research team. She said the study is “the largest effort ever taken anywhere to understand cancer in firefighters,” but it’s an effort that can’t simply be restarted after the researchers running it are laid off.

Diane Cotter became an activist when her husband, a career firefighter, developed prostate cancer, and she fought for funding of research such as the registry. While she’s a Kennedy supporter, Cotter said the administration went too far in cutting the program and other first responder health initiatives such as the World Trade Center program, which she called “sacred.”

“It’s very important we hold the line on these studies,” she said.

 

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Posted
4 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:
4 hours ago, Bookman said:
I think they are beginning realize they are suckers. 

But they can never admit it. Just like their orange god, there's no place in their worlds to admit they were wrong, made a mistake, were duped, etc.

image.thumb.png.10be125a8171651b550c82c7c6977e5f.png

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Posted
13 hours ago, F250 said:

No offense but you are a fool.

 

This guy’s thoughts are completely coherent and reasonable for someone who has given zero thought to the scope and diversity of government functions and missions. 
 

Honestly one of the biggest ways America is stupid is the proliferation of MBA-brained goobers who really and truly in their heart of hearts believe that being a regional VP of something gives them some sort of universally applicable special insight. 

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Posted

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-noaa-budget-cuts-climate-change-modeling-princeton-gfdl?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=propublica-bsky&utm_content=1

 

Quote

Over the past two months, the Trump administration has taken steps to eliminate regulations addressing climate change, pull back funding for climate programs and cancel methods used to evaluate how climate change is affecting American society and its economy. Now it is directly undermining the science and research of climate change itself, in ways that some of the nation’s most distinguished scientists say will have dangerous consequences.

 

Quote

Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life, are targeting a 57-year-old partnership between Princeton University and the U.S. government that produces what many consider the world’s most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems. NOAA’s work extends deep into the heart of the American economy — businesses use it to navigate risk and find opportunity — and it undergirds both American defense and geopolitical planning. The possible elimination of the lab, called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in concert with potential cuts to other NOAA operations, threatens irreparable harm not only to global understanding of climate change and long-range scenarios for the planet but to the country’s safety, competitiveness and national security.

 

Quote

The gutting of NOAA was outlined earlier this month in a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget that detailed steep reductions at the Department of Commerce, which houses the science agency. The memo, which was viewed by ProPublica, has been previously reported. But the full implications of those cuts for the nation’s ability to accurately interpret dynamic changes in the planet’s weather and to predict long-term warming scenarios through its modeling arm in Princeton have not.

 

Spoiler

According to the document, NOAA’s overall funding would be slashed by 27%, eliminating “functions of the Department that are misaligned with the President’s agenda and the expressed will of the American people” including almost all of those related to the study of climate change. The proposal would break up and significantly defund the agency across programs, curtailing everything from ocean research to coastal management while shifting one of NOAA’s robust satellite programs out of the agency and putting another up for commercial bidding. But its most significant target is the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research ⎯ a nerve center of global climate science, data collection and modeling, including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ⎯ which would be cut by 74%. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the memo stated.

The total loss of OAR and its crown jewel in Princeton represents a setback for climate preparedness that experts warn the nation may never recover from.

“If we don’t understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, you can’t be adapting, you can’t be resilient. You’re just going to suffer,” Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist who sits on NOAA’s scientific advisory board, told ProPublica. “We’re going to see huge impacts on infrastructure and lives lost in the U.S.”

There are other national climate models, but they also appear to be in jeopardy of losing funding. The National Science Foundation supports the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but the foundation announced it was freezing all research grants on April 18. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a model, but the institute could see cuts of up to 47%. And the Department of Energy, home to a fourth climate modeling system, is also under budget pressure.

Without the models, and all the sensor networks and supporting NOAA research programs that feed them, “We’ll go back to the technical and proficiency levels we had in the 1950s,” said Craig McLean, a 40-year veteran of NOAA who, until 2022, was the agency’s top administrator for research and its acting chief scientist. “We won’t have the tools we have today because we can’t populate them by people or by data.”

Neither the Department of Commerce nor NOAA responded to lists of emailed questions, including whether the agencies had appealed the OMB’s proposal before the April 12 deadline to do so or whether NOAA has prepared a plan to implement the changes, which is due by April 24. OMB also did not respond to a request for comment.

Princeton and NOAA together built America’s global supremacy in weather and climate science over generations. After World War II, the United States refocused its scientific superiority ⎯ and its early computing capabilities ⎯ on understanding how the weather and the planet works. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory was established in 1955 and moved to Princeton in 1968. Under NOAA, which was established by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the lab advanced early forecasting, using sensors in the oceans and the sky. It developed theories for how fluids and gases interact and came to understand that the oceans and the atmosphere drive weather ⎯ what today has become known as climate science.

The GFDL’s models, including the first hurricane model, became the basis for both short-term weather outlooks and longer-range forecasts, or climate prediction, which soon became one and the same. Those models now form the underlying modeling architecture of many of NOAA’s other departments, including the forecasts from the National Weather Service. The GFDL has trained many of the world’s best climate scientists, who are leading the most prestigious research in Japan, the U.K. and Germany, and in 2021 an alumnus of its staff won the Nobel Prize in physics. The U.S. agencies periodically run their models in competition, and last time they did, the GFDL’s models came out ahead. The lab is “the best that there is,” McLean said. “It’s really a stunningly impressive and accomplished place. It is a gem. It is the gem.”

Today the GFDL works in partnership with Princeton researchers to produce a series of models that have proven extraordinarily accurate in forecasting how the planet is changing when their past predictions are tested against past events. The GFDL models formed the basis of NOAA’s Hurricane Weather Research Forecast model that almost exactly foretold the extraordinary and unprecedented rainfall near Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 — the model predicted 45 inches of rain, the final total was 48 inches. The GFDL models are working to incorporate once-elusive factors, like large-scale methane emissions from melting permafrost, and are increasingly understanding the role of changing currents and warming ocean temperatures in driving rapid storm intensification of hurricanes like Milton and Helene. Every May the lab delivers an updated model to the National Hurricane Center, which uses it to produce the center’s annual forecast for the following season of storms.

It is not yet clear what the potential loss of the GFDL and the databases and sensors that support it might mean. Funding cuts could merely hobble the lab’s staff and prevent the model from ever being advanced, or its operations could be shut down entirely, the responsibility perhaps passed on to another agency’s models. What is clear, McLean and others point out, is that even the degradation of American climate prediction capabilities poses significant risks to the U.S. economy, to national security and to the country’s leverage in the world.

NOAA makes its data ⎯ from ocean buoy and satellite readings to the outputs from the GFDL models ⎯ free to the public, where it constitutes a certified base layer of information that is picked up not only by American policymakers, regulators and planners but also by scientists around the world and by industries, which use it to gain a competitive advantage. A 2024 study by the American Meteorological Society found that NOAA’s weather forecasts alone ⎯ which use parts of the GFDL models and represent just a tiny fraction of the agency’s data production ⎯ generate more than $73 in savings for every dollar invested in them.

The data that drives those forecasts informs the calculations for an untold number of property insurance policies in the country, helping to channel billions of dollars in aid to home and business owners in the aftermath of natural disasters. All three of the major U.S. insurance catastrophe modelers build their assessments at least in part using NOAA data. Munich Re, the global reinsurance giant backing many American property insurers, depends on it, and Swiss Re, a second reinsurance powerhouse, also routinely cites NOAA in its reports.

The shipping industry charts its courses, plans its fuel use and avoids disaster using NOAA climate and weather forecasts, while NOAA data on water levels and currents is relied on to manage the channels and ports used by those ships, which carry a sizeable portion of global trade, generating trillions of dollars in economic activity each year. The trucking industry, too, saves upward of $3 billion in fuel costs based on idling guidelines that apply NOAA temperature data. It is equally important for farmers and large agricultural corporations, which rely on NOAA’s seasonal and long-range precipitation forecasts to make strategic planting decisions. NOAA’s chief economists estimate that the agency’s El Nino outlooks alone boost the U.S. agricultural economy by $300 million a year, and that corn growers save as much as $4 billion in fertilizer and cleanup costs based on optimizing to NOAA forecasts.

Developers and homebuilders rely on NOAA data to determine coastal flooding risk and to schedule work. The Federal Aviation Administration is using new NOAA models to develop its next-generation air traffic management system. And the banks and financial corporations that depend on the healthy functioning of these other industries know this. Morgan Stanley uses NOAA climate data to assess risk to the economy across multiple sectors. As does J.P. Morgan, whose top science adviser is a former NOAA scientist who once worked directly with the climate modeling program at the GFDL.

The secretary of commerce himself, Howard Lutnick, endorsed the importance of climate science when he was the CEO and chair of the global Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which characterized climate change as “the defining issue of our time.” In the same report, the company wrote that “Scientific evidence indicates that if left unchecked, climate change will be disastrous and life threatening.” The report went on to state that those changes could offer “a unique investment opportunity” but also “presents a challenge to our investments.”

A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald did not respond to a question about whether the firm’s assessment was based on NOAA data, but McLean asserts that it likely was because NOAA and the GFDL’s data represents “the roots of every climate model in the world.”

Perhaps this is why Lutnick, when asked by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., during his confirmation hearing in January whether he believed in keeping NOAA and its core scientific responsibilities together, declared that he did. “I have no interest in separating it. That is not on my agenda,” Lutnick told her. When asked again, 30 minutes later, by Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, whether he agreed with the Project 2025 goal that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” Lutnick was again explicit: “No”

Yet after the NOAA budget documents were leaked and the threats to GFDL became clear, Lutnick’s office targeted even more climate-related programs, announcing the suspension of $4 million in grants to a separate but related program at Princeton that includes its Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, a research effort run in conjunction with the GFDL, and that provides some of the core staffing and research for the lab. “This cooperative agreement promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as climate anxiety,” his office wrote in an April 8 press release from the Department of Commerce. “Its focus on alarming climate scenarios fosters fear rather than rational, balanced discussion.”

Princeton University did not respond to emailed questions.

The potential loss of the world’s greatest climate forecasting tool has other ramifications for long-term safety and security. NOAA’s climate modeling systems ⎯ in combination with other national climate models at the National Science Foundation, NASA and elsewhere ⎯ help the Defense Department to run its operations and to anticipate and prepare for emerging threats.

NOAA models and data generate the actionable weather forecasts for operational planning in conflict theaters like the Middle East. Its measurements of ocean salinity and temperatures inform Navy operations, according to the Council on Strategic Risks, a nonpartisan security policy institute in Washington. It contributes to the forecast data for Air Force strike planning and Army troop movement. Its long-range climate forecasts are core to the Defense Department’s five-year planning for each of its global Geographic Combatant Commands that divide jurisdiction for U.S. forces around the world, according to a Rand report.

Without this information, warned Rod Schoonover, a former State Department analyst and director of environment and natural resources within the office of the director of national intelligence, the U.S. surrenders its superiority in projecting all kinds of security concerns, including not only threats to its own facilities and operations but also cascading power failures or extreme heatwaves and sudden food price spikes that can lead to destabilization and conflict around the world. “This is a foundational degradation in our intelligence capabilities,” said Schoonover, the founder and CEO of the Ecological Futures Group. “There is a profoundly changed and heightened threat if the U.S. can no longer rely on its own premier, ‘homegrown’ climate forecasts for strategic and operational decisions.

“Why would any U.S. administration choose to forfeit this vital strategic edge?”

 



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