You’re contending that these paragraphs about GEOS-R are not about GEOS-R? Or are you just unhappy that the article didn’t have more to say about it? “I complained about the poor service at the restaurant, but the amount of complaining I did paled in comparison to the amount of time I talked about other things, so it couldn’t have been that bad.”
Taking care of some long-term but not urgent needs when you can is a not the same as buying a bunch of stuff you don’t need to protect your budget level (and in this case, for security and maintenance, you were approaching urgent I’d say).
I’ve got to run for now, but you seem to be genuinely interested in this question, so I’ll try to look over their budget and get you an answer later (probably tonight).
I agree that this administration is unlikely to make balancing the budget / fiscal responsibility a major point of emphasis, at least from what I’ve seen from the proposals. If they are at least seeking offsetting cuts, that’s even better than I thought they’d do, so it’s a small victory in my eyes. As for “why NOAA?”, it’s not any particular animus to the NOAA specifically, but a broader desire to see fiscal responsibility from Washington. That would necessitate budget reductions to a whole slew of government programs, including, but not exclusively, the NOAA.
By the way, do you see the fallacy with this thinking?
For example, what if I asked you to rank your limbs from most to least important? Just because your left arm may be the least important of your limbs, doesn’t mean that it is superfluous.
It always comes back to Syria:
(Wikipedia)
It’s amazing how consistently conservatives express their contentment with seeing the USA fall behind the rest of the world in technology.
Because conservatives hate America and want to destroy it.
The right wing is nothing more than a gigantic fifth column.
But such things might be a small fraction of the overall budget. I can see computers being among those items that would get bought at the end of the FY. It seems the myth is that most of the agency budget is spent that way.
I’m not a Trump supporter. I’m not even an American. I’m not entitled to vote in American elections. That’s why I voted for Hillary!
Joke.
All that I know about the American election is what I have failed to avoid in the media and on the internet. From that I know the aforementioned policies that Trump had, and that his catchphrases were all about things he wanted to do. Buildng the wall, and so forth. Clinton, on the other hand, I heard only about her, not her policies. Maybe she had some, but no-one talked about them so she must have failed to communicate them. I heard she was responsible and experienced, and not Donald Trump, that it was her turn, that people were with her, and that “one of my merits is that I’m a woman”.
So maybe people just voted for Trump because they’re idiots or monsters or because people who voted for Obama suddenly became racist. Or, alternatively, maybe they just thought that a man who looks like he enjoys the smell of his own farts was less self-obsessed than the “I’m with her” brigade,
To be fair, this is a place where shining a light on NOAA would be useful: according to this this (pre-election story), the National Weather Service may be overdue for reforms, as an example of savings, the air force is paying $100K to Britain’s forecasters (peanuts, but it’s the principle) to get better forecasts than the U.S. provides. Unfortunately, the small amount we know about the proposed Trump cuts seems to hit the researchers actually trying to improve things…
Though I am genuinely interested, don’t feel obliged to go through it in detail unless you would enjoy it :), it helps to understand that you’re coming from the general fiscal responsibility angle applied across the government - there are many places I would cut myself, but I’m a strong supporter of expanded science. For me then, it’s opposite of a small victory: I could grudgingly tolerate science cuts in the name of fiscal responsibility and knowing the debt burden would be lower, but knowing that we’re losing both the science and the savings to terrible projects that I would cut makes it that much worse.
Also: I think the offsetting is a specific political calculation; my understanding of the standing sequestration is that budget-neutral shifts only need 51 votes to pass the Senate, while actual increases (for military) would need to hit 60. Could be wrong about that.
I completely and totally agree.
Besides, even the most basic fiscal oversight would catch that an agency was expending large amounts in the last few weeks of a fiscal year. Generally obligational data (at least at the Federal level) can be tracked on an ongoing manner throughout the year, not just at the end of the year. If an agency CFO finds that, say, 15% of a bureau’s budget was spent in the last month of a fiscal year, the CFO will be inclined to ask questions, probably leading to that 15% of the bureau’s budget being moved elsewhere in the next year for things more important than stocking up on water and printer paper.
Once again, while individual departments like IT or Facilities Management might do something like this from time to time, it’s entirely unlikely that an entire agency like the State Dept would run out and spend millions of dollars on office supplies or redecorating the consulates. The money is almost always fully allocated to the various departments within the agency once the budget is approved for the FY.
My contention was that the portion of the article you quoted in #154 is not talking about GEOS-R or the GEOS constellation at all. That’s why my post said “the portion of the article you quoted”. You appear to have acknowledged I was correct by quoting a different section of the article in #161.
Thanks, I’ll probably skip the deep dive on the NOAA budget then, at least for now. And I don’t begrudge anyone having different budgetary priorities than me. There are probably some artists out there that feel like the NEA is a critical expense and should be protected from cuts, and some scientists out there that feel the same about NOAA, and some soldiers that feel the same about the DoD. Same with old folks and Social Security / Medicare and poor folks and Medicaid, etc. Everyone’s got their own priorities.
And you are probably right that the offsettings cuts are primarily a result of political calculations and not some deeply-held Trump belief in the importance of fiscal responsibility.
I’d like to make a general comment on this, if I may, which I hope can be viewed not as a digression but as placing the issue in an appropriately larger context.
The idea of reducing government “waste” sounds very laudable but it’s a lot like the objective of “reducing taxes”. Who wants higher taxes? No one. But in both cases it’s a question of how one allocates spending priorities and their results, and those priorities are dictated by the beliefs and values of any given administration and Congressional balance of power.
Here’s an illustrative quote from The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson, the author of the acclaimed Steve Jobs biography:
President Eisenhower liked scientists. Their culture and their mode of thinking, their ability to be nonideological and rational, appealed to him. “Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible—from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists,” he had proclaimed in his first inaugural address. He threw White House dinners for scientists, the way that the Kennedys would do for artists, and gathered many around him in advisory roles.
Sputnik gave Eisenhower the opportunity to formalize his embrace. Less than two weeks after it was launched, he gathered fifteen top science advisors who had worked with the Office of Defense Mobilization and asked them, his aide Sherman Adams recalled, “to tell him where scientific research belonged in the structure of the federal government.” He then met for breakfast with James Killian, the president of MIT, and appointed him to be his full-time science advisor. Together with the defense secretary, Killian worked out a plan, announced in January 1958, to put the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Pentagon.
This then appears a few pages later:
A network funded and imposed by ARPA could permit research centers to share computing resources, collaborate on projects, and allow Taylor to jettison two of his office terminals.
“Great idea,” Herzfeld said. “Get it going. How much money do you need?”
Taylor allowed that it might take a million dollars just to get the project organized.
“You got it,” Herzfeld said.
As he headed back to his office, Taylor looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured to himself. “That only took twenty minutes.”
The project they were talking about, of course, was the fledgling ARPAnet. Today we know it as the Internet.
The question we all need to ask ourselves is whether any shred of this forward-thinking science culture that we saw in the Eisenhower era (and in the Obama era, which doubled NSF science funding after Bush) exists either in the Trump White House, dominated apparently by xenophobes and white supremacists, or in the Republican Congress, dominated by tax-cutting plutocrats, climate change deniers, and sycophants to the wealthy.
I quoted the lede of the article in my first post.
Are you now acknowledging I am correct that GAO said that the GOES was in trouble, after you questioned whether anyone at all cared if GOES was in trouble?
I’ll kill two birds with one stone.
Since I introduced the “30%” figure, I’ll emphasize the context to fight this petty ignorance:
And this is a key point. Bannon and Ryan are telling NOAA which programs to cut.
So … you’re not on the same page as other Bannon-Ryanists?
Yes, it’s not the way I’d do it. It’s also not a top concern of mine.
:smack: The entire NOAA budget is about $5 billion; slashing that 30% is barely enough to buy each American a BigMac.
The whole point of slashing NOAA’s budget is for the anti-science agenda, specifically to suppress information about climate change. The fact that you want to slash the NOAA budget but don’t care what’s slashed makes me think your thinking is neither here nor there.
The financial savings is insignificant. You aren’t eager to follow the anti-science agenda. Why then are you so eager to cut the NOAA budget?
Because if today you let Big Government take over the weather, tomorrow it might be something important. Like guns. Connect the dot, people!