Summary

Elon Musk’s staffers entered NOAA and the Department of Commerce without clearance, raising concerns over budget cuts and downsizing.

Project 2025, a conservative plan linked to former Trump officials, calls for dismantling NOAA, citing its climate research as harmful to U.S. prosperity.

Critics warn such cuts could impact weather forecasting, ocean conservation, and fisheries.

NOAA declined to comment, while experts fear an aggressive strategy to weaken the agency before legal challenges can halt changes.

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    question.

    instead of protesting at the capitals of our states – why don’t we protest at the HQs of these departments to stop these assholes from getting inside?

    lots of benefits

    • heightened on-site security
    • lots of witnesses
    • impenetrable wall of pissed off Americans
    • angry mob to deport illegal South Africans

    I mean…has nobody thought of this yet?

    it would at least slow the fucker down, and it’s not like we don’t know what these shitheels look like.

    just 24 hour, round-the-clock, protests to keep the jackals at bay.

  • meowmeowbeanz@sh.itjust.works
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    19 hours ago

    Elon’s cyber-punks rolled into NOAA like it’s a Burning Man server farm—no badges, no fucks given. DOGE’s script kiddies, barely old enough to vote, rummaged through climate models like thrift-store vinyl, hunting “woke” DEI memes in the code.

    Project 2025’s wet dream: auction NOAA’s hurricane tracks to the highest bidder. 12,000 jobs? Slash ‘em. 50-year datasets? Oops, legacy system. Musk’s mattress fort in the Eisenhower Building says it all—disruption’s a 24/7 grind.

    Meanwhile, Florida retirees’ storm alerts get paywalled. But sure, privatize tornado warnings. What’s next, a Tesla-branded rain dance? The West Coast elite smirk; Middle America’s weather app glitches.

    Efficiency, my ass—this is a digital coup.

  • Xanza@lemm.ee
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    20 hours ago

    Imagine working for NOAA tracking weather patterns across the ocean or some crazy shit and a 23 old fucking virgin loser comes up to you and tells you you’re about to lose your job. Lol

  • x00z@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    God :')

    All this Idiocracy stuff must be an elaborate joke by the American people on the rest of the world right?

  • flicker@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    20 hours ago

    This is it. This is the one I most dreaded. I knew they were coming for NOAA and I knew they were going to destroy it and here we are, forced to watch it happen.

    Fuck. The department I admired most.

  • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    I’d like to remind everyone that NOAA is under the Department of Commerce because, as it turns out, understanding weather patterns, being able to accurately forecast weather changes, is kind of important to businesses.

    • evilcultist@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I think there have been businesses trying to get it shut down for years because they want to sell the data rather than giving it out for free. I forget which ones, but I’d swear I read about this years ago.

      Just did a quick search with no luck, but apparently it’s part of Project 2025 to commercialize it or get rid of it.

    • Tedesche@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Trump would just allocate all of FEMA’s funds to rebuild it out of solid gold while leaving everyone else affected by the hurricane in the dirt.

    • IzzyScissor@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Seriously. No clearance should mean no entrance. If they try to use force, the use of force to prevent their entry is both warranted and necessary.

  • Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Rejoice people! We will no longer be terrorized by weather alerts reporting possibly devastating weather events! Trump’s Redhats led by his South African immigrant billionaire henchman will make sure that Trump’s Sharpy of Truth will protect us!

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Nah, this isn’t even about data control. This is about selling off the data, the forecasting infrastructure, the hardware, models, and most important, SATELLITE NETWORK that allow accurate forecasting. Commercial launches of scientific instruments are very very expensive with very little immediate ROI. It’s much cheaper to simply buy an existing entity out that HAS THAT and then piggyback their data - which is effectively what this is. AccuWeather has been wanting this for almost 20 years.

  • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I remember when Musk bought Twitter and then immediately started trying to save money by literally just turning off services to see what breaks.

    That actually wouldn’t have been the stupidest idea if he had done it in a test environment rather than production, or even if Twitter was a small website that didn’t mind downtime. But he did it in production on a huge site that people relied on being up, so it actually was the stupidest idea.

    And now he’s bringing the same stupidest energy to government. No investigation. No calculation. Just a toddler who has been put in front of a lot of switches.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Unless twitter had a test system doing millions of varying actions a second, I’m not sure a test environment would find those problems, or at least not quickly. Sometimes those services get added to help spread loads that you might not encounter otherwise.

      Tbh I’m not sure what level of automated testing these sites have, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the services are tested in isolation at scale, but not against each other at scale, and that there’s some general understanding that the link between them at scale is okay if both individually are okay?

      Still absolutely terrible to do that to a live environment.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    They have already stated their intention of replacing the National Weather Service with the very ironically named, and privately-owned, AccuWeather, so I guess this is the start of that.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        For now, yes. Under the plan outlined in Project 2025, AccuWeather gets control of all of the NWS weather stations.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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          1 day ago

          Jesus.

          My empathy is all tied up with the marginalized groups, minorities, federal workers, and others already negatively affected by this administration. If some yokels in flyover states who voted for him get taken out by a tornado because they had to watch a 30 second ad before the weather alert would show up, I got nothing for them.

    • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
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      1 day ago

      um. so. do they know accuweather relies on the government to do their forecasts. almost all weather forecasts originate with the us or european agencies and then have some local radar and sensors to get local temps, windspeeds, and precipitate.

        • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          And then AccuWeather leases out the data to all those foreign and domestic weather agencies and makes heaps of cash saying “well if you want accurate forecasting data that’s gonna be $200k/yr.”

        • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
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          1 day ago

          The sattelites because I was under the impression most monitoring stations were owned locally but everyone shares with the government and in return gets access to the information?

          • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine.” I expect Musk just assumes he owns all of those and if he ever finds out he doesn’t then he will then assume ownership of it. And then probably try to sell you access to your own weather station.

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Maybe this is the inevitable endgame of a society that tries to harness greed the way capitalism does. Something can be working completely sustainably and for the general good, like NOAA does, and they still try to take parts of it away just so they can extract profits by selling to you what used to be free.

    Its why they hate work from home. Covid came along and necessitated that workers en masse be given a benefit, and capitalists werent able to extract any concessions in return because it was an emergency. So, they claw it back, but you might be able to get a special exception if you play ball.

    • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
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      14 hours ago

      You’re right, except it’s the only game, not the endgame. Since neoliberalism became consensus, public assets have been sold off and paid for again by the public, but privately. We bought the roads, railways, waterways, weather stations etc with our taxes, they were sold, and we didn’t see a penny of the profits, and then we have to buy them again with our wages. The endgame is where there’s nothing left to sell off, no more exponential growth to be had, that’s when it all collapses. Greed, it seems, allows you to see past the fact that this collapse is inevitable.