Before I rebut, I want to make very clear - I'm correcting the record because _in the future_ there could be serious threats to NOAA. Crying wolf today when things are tenuous but steady actively harms the community's preparation for when the knives _do_ come out for NOAA. As they have done so many times before, the slashers will point to these episodes of crying wolf as a smokescreen. It's literally their only play.

> This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall!

You do realize that the NWS was understaffed _before_ the administration and the DOGE cuts, right? We're also riding the crest of a retirement wave from the major restructuring that happened in the early 90's.

> They were, temporarily.

Because of funding lapses during the _government shutdown_. Like many _other_ agencies and offices. Geeze.

> This bumbling executive action is the Trump administration's attempt at restructuring...

It really isn't. Anyone who has been around the public-private nexus surrounding NOAA knows the folks who have been itching to overhaul NOAA, and they're not particularly subtle about it. Notably, none of them were brought into any administrative or leadership positions that could actually effect structural change at NOAA.

The reality is that despite its section in Project 2025, conservatives don't actually care about NOAA; they care about climate change and have used scalpels to excise key government programs relating to it. But NOAA has been shielded because of any executive agency, NOAA and the NWS have extremely favorable ratings from the public and are actively and vigorously defended by a bipartisan coalition in Congress.

> This is probably untrue. They've publicly announced more spending in 2025 than what they spent total in 2024 and that's just in big headline contracts. They haven't bothered reporting actuals in the 2025 CDP spend like they have for the previous decade. Huh I wonder why.

Everyone expected the CDP to grow following the success of EPIC and the maturation and adoption of JEDI has the next-generation data assimilation framework for our modeling ecosystem. Hell - part of NOAA's last major action plans in the early 2020's explicitly called for it to grow in scope!

The reason you don't see actuals from CDP spend is because (a) the government is dysfunctional and Congress is ignoring its oversight to actual make sure these numbers are published in a timely manner, and (b) very few awards have actually been given out. It took what, 4 years for the first microwave sounding data purchase to happen, and it was only a 1-year award to Tomorrow and OMS?

> So go read their budget proposals. Go see AMS' own worries about what the administration will do. Go see them talking about staffing shortages. See the fact the NWS isn't launching as many balloons. See the lack of staffing in Oklahoma during tornado season. See the elimination of public datasets at climate.gov, see those staffers who were laid off and never had those positions backfilled.

I do read the proposals. I spend time on Capitol Hill working through these budgets with offices in both chambers and from both political parties. I also spend time with the House Science and the Senate SST committee staff.

Yes, there are real issues that NOAA and the NWS face. And I would absolutely fault the federal government for not being _as aggressive_ at remediating these issues.

But you're cherry-picking issues to paint a significantly more sinister story than what is actually happening.