Nominating Neil Jacobs to be the Administrator of NOAA: In response to the ‘Sharpiegate’ incident, NOAA should be privatized
Neil Jacobs has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to be the administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Jacobs, an atmospheric scientist, was previously the agency’s acting leader during part of the first Trump administration, where he emphasized the agency’s focus on weather forecasting.
Jacobs was reprimanded for his actions during the ‘Sharpiegate’ incident, in which he and other Trump-appointed scientists had been found to have pressured them to change their forecast of Hurricane Dorian to align with misstatements made by President Trump. It wasn’t likely to, according to the weather modeling.
He was reprimanded and found to have interfered in the scientific integrity of the agency. I am very sad that he would be renominated because there is no consequence for ignoring the science.
The entire organization should be broken up, moving or dismantling a lot of current offices, and the National Weather Service should be privatized. The nominee of the Commerce department said he did not intend to move or close the agency.
Trump and many of his supporters have specifically criticized NOAA’s climate research efforts. Project 2025, a conservative agenda created by the Heritage Foundation, described the agency’s climate research wing as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” suggesting the wing should be “disbanded.”
Under Biden, NOAA expanded the ocean’s protected areas and invested in climate and weather research. Biden allocated billions to improve weather forecasting and boost resilience to climate change in coastal cities.
“If you care about the weather, the ocean, the climate, then you depend on the work of the NOAA to be very important to you,” he said. Whether you know it or not.
Rosenberg says a vast cross section of Americans benefit from the science that the agency provides – from weather forecasts to charts that recreational boaters use.
The agency’s priorities are expected to change under the second TRUMP administration, as they might have priorities that weren’t prioritized by the BLOOMBERG administration.
An Incommunicado Order from President Donald Trump to the NOAA and Elon Musk Task Forces: NMFS and WIRED
Government records show Rajpal now has working email addresses with both the NOAA and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficient (DOGE) task force. WIRED has also learned that Rajpal is listed as an “expert” on a roster at the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources department, where DOGE operatives have installed a server gathering information on federal employees that has been used to repeatedly communicate the administration’s deferred resignation program.
The power to modify documents regarding the agency’s work was ordered to be given to a former Twitter employee who appears to have no expertise in ocean and atmospheric science. The orders, sources said, came from acting commerce secretary Jeremy Pelter.
According to NESDIS’s website, it works closely with the European Space Agency, which provides access to data via a collection of Sentinel satellites maintained by EUMETSAT, an international weather-monitoring agency composed of more than 30 member states.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office designed to paralyze growth in wind energy. In his postinaugural speech, he told the crowd that he wouldn’t be doing the wind thing.
The agency had been thinking about hosting international fellows and interns associated with an offshore wind development working group formed by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.
An internal email obtained by WIRED shows that the NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) received orders to pause “ALL INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENTS.” (Emphasis theirs.) The message states that the orders extend to participation in international commissions and even emails “with foreign national colleagues.”
The NOAA and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The motive behind the incommunicado orders is not immediately clear, nor is it clear how long they will last.
An email sent to NMFS employees instructs them to submit details of any work they are doing with international partners if they want to work with the US Department of Commerce.