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Posted
On 4/29/2025 at 3:32 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yeah....but I've always found Kaley Cuoco to be just damned adorable.

cosmo-april-16-kaley-cuoco-today-160303-

 

On 4/29/2025 at 3:33 PM, Underdog said:

#TeamMelissaRausch 

 

img-0-h7h05xSrq8szRLcb.ca045df1.png

 

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Posted

Perspective. Great website putting our budget, deficit, and DOGE cuts in perspective. I tried copying and pasting but the pasting formatting fucked up the content. It's much better viewed in the website.

https://www.debtinperspective.com/

 

A Scaled Down Look at Spending, Revenue, and What's Being Cut

The national debt is being used to justify spending cuts - but do these cuts actually reduce it?

Current US National Debt

$36,214,714,517,960

Source: U.S. Treasury Debt to the Penny (updated daily)

 

 

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Posted
On 4/29/2025 at 3:32 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yeah....but I've always found Kaley Cuoco to be just damned adorable.

cosmo-april-16-kaley-cuoco-today-160303-

 

She's alright.  7/10

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Posted

So it begins.

 

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/united-airlines-cancels-newark-flights-after-faa-staff-walks-out-e794b071?mod=hp_lead_pos1

 

Quote

United Airlines is canceling 35 daily round-trip flights from Newark, N.J., starting this weekend after a group of air-traffic controllers took leave following equipment outages.

Chief Executive Scott Kirby said Friday the decision came after Federal Aviation Administration controllers who oversee airspace surrounding Newark Liberty International Airport left their posts Monday after problems with their radar and radios. Several controllers took trauma-related leave after a similar outage last fall.

 

Quote

“Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there in the weeks and months ahead,” Kirby said in a message posted on United’s website. 

Technology that controllers rely on to manage traffic has failed several times in the past few days. That resulted in dozens of diverted flights, hundreds of delays and cancellations, and thousands of customers with disrupted travel plans.

The FAA said it would continue to be transparent about the status of Newark and other airports on its website. 

 

Quote

On Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he visited the FAA facility in Philadelphia that oversees Newark airspace to “talk with our hard working air traffic controllers” as officials work to fix equipment outages.

“It’s unacceptable,” Duffy said on X. “We are working to harden the system. But this is why it’s critical that we build an all-new air traffic control system.”

The FAA has, at times, slowed traffic to Newark as a result of controller-staffing issues. 

A representative from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union that represents controllers, declined to comment.

 

Spoiler

United’s cuts announced Friday amount to just over 10% of its daily schedule at Newark, which had already been reduced to accommodate runway construction. The airline operates 328 daily round-trip flights on average at the airport.

Newark last year was the nation’s 14th-busiest airport by departing flight seats, according to OAG, an aviation-data provider.

United has been urging the government to limit the number of flights to what an airport can realistically manage based on staffing, Kirby said. The airline is asking the government to designate Newark as a slot-controlled Level 3 airport, which would add a coordinator to the staff to manage traffic flow.

The FAA previously doled out takeoff and landing rights at Newark as it does at LaGuardia Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport. That changed in 2016.

United accounts for about 75% of the New Jersey airport’s air traffic, and has plans to launch five new nonstop international flights from the hub this year. United’s Newark facilities connect travelers to 76 U.S. cities and 81 international locations.

The cancellations come after some airlines reported demand for air travel was falling toward the end of the first quarter. United offered two financial outlooks for the year, one that was the same as its prior guidance, and a lower one that accounted for a possible recession.

 

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Posted (edited)
On 4/29/2025 at 3:33 PM, Underdog said:

#TeamMelissaRausch 

Dammit. Francisco beat me to it. 
 

Edited by DDD Dad
Posted
On 5/1/2025 at 11:15 AM, crash_davis said:

Perspective. Great website putting our budget, deficit, and DOGE cuts in perspective. I tried copying and pasting but the pasting formatting fucked up the content. It's much better viewed in the website.

https://www.debtinperspective.com/

 

A Scaled Down Look at Spending, Revenue, and What's Being Cut

The national debt is being used to justify spending cuts - but do these cuts actually reduce it?

Current US National Debt

$36,214,714,517,960

Source: U.S. Treasury Debt to the Penny (updated daily)

 

 

This is really good

Posted

A startup founder told a Palantir alumni Slack group that AI agents could do the work of tens of thousands of government employees. He was met with emojis of clowns and a man licking a boot.

Quote

The post was not well received. Eight people reacted with clown face emojis, three reacted with a custom emoji of a man licking a boot, two reacted with custom emoji of Joaquin Phoenix giving a thumbs down in the movie Gladiator, and three reacted with a custom emoji with the word “Fascist.” Three responded with a heart emoji.

“DOGE does not seem interested in finding ‘higher impact work’ for federal employees,” one person said in a comment that received 11 heart reactions. “You’re complicit in firing 70k federal employees and replacing them with shitty autocorrect.”

“Tbf we’re all going to be replaced with shitty autocorrect (written by chatgpt),” another person commented, which received one “+1” reaction.

“How ‘DOGE orthogonal’ is it? Like, does it still require Kremlin oversight?” another person said in a comment that received five reactions with a fire emoji. “Or do they just use your credentials to log in later?”

When even people who worked for Palantir think you suck.

Posted
United Airlines is canceling 35 daily round-trip flights from Newark, N.J., starting this weekend after a group of air-traffic controllers took leave following equipment outages
 

Take 2 flights instead of 20. Why do you need to fly? Suck it up libtard and get back to pouring concrete and digging ditches.
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Posted

https://unherd.com/2025/05/doge-has-devoured-musk/

 

Quote

When I flew into Washington DC at the start of March, I didn’t expect much in the way of excitement. Yet by coincidence, my arrival to give a talk for the Elliott School of International Affairs, at the George Washington University, would coincide with the start of a DOGE purge of one of the government bureaucracies: the General Services Administration (GSA). As I went to bed in my hotel near the mall, the “DOGE boys” were moving in just across the street.

 

 

Quote

The world of federal employment in America is almost a separate society. It has its own culture, its own acronyms, rules and concepts that appear foreign and opaque to those outside it. At a time of massive demographic shifts, of illegal immigration and the importation of guest workers — which have conspired to radically alter the workplace for both American blue- and white-collar workers — the federal workforce appears almost as an anachronism. Outside this walled garden, to be a worker or an employee in the year 2025 is to be an economic unit, a cog in a machine, one that can be replaced or fired at will. When a company in the private sector lays off its workforce and replaces it with foreigners, that is simply shrewd business management: it is replacing one human widget with a cheaper one in Bangalore. But even as these crass economic forces ravaged much of America, the federal workforce has managed to (mostly) stand apart.

 

 

Quote

Partly, the good fortune of federal workers comes down to the sheer inertia of the system and all the rules that protect them. But another factor is a matter of a widely held and genuine belief: a worker in the private sector may only be measured in terms of economic value, but in the public service things are different. To work in public service is to be a civil servant: it is to maintain and fulfil the grand republican experiment America started some 250 years ago.

 

Spoiler

Replacing an American coder with one from Bangalore is one thing; replacing an American civil servant with a foreigner or a computer is quite another. Once you reduce a society to numbers and cents, you no longer have a society. Among federal workers, this is the common refrain: you might not get paid nearly as much as somebody in the private sector, but you will be a part of something else, something you can’t really put a dollar value on. Until, that is, DOGE entered the picture.

When DOGE fires people, it deploys at least two distinct methods. The first is by its nature both wide and sweeping, with very little distinction made between useful workers and the “dead weight”. Essentially, it is the mass firing of those on probationary status, meaning that the usual job protections do not apply to them. In theory, these workers seem like a pretty natural place to start if one wants to “cut the fat”, but in practice it’s both awkward and destructive. It’s not just new workers who are on probation, but others too for various reasons — those who have been recently promoted, for example.

It is these untargeted mass firings — done simply because of a quirk of the legal system that regulates federal employment — that have led to the many cases where DOGE has had to apologise and walk back their decisions. Air traffic controllers weren’t fired by DOGE because they were all “woke”, or because they were all “unproductive” or surplus to requirements. They were fired, rather, because someone on the other side of the country hit a few buttons on a keyboard. No human judgement is applied: the useless woke DEI hire is arguably much more likely to be spared from DOGE than the Trump-voting hard working conservative, simply because the latter might have recently been promoted.

There is, however, another kind of DOGE activity, one that does have the personal touch. This I witnessed first-hand during my stay in Washington, over at the GSA, when the DOGE boys moved into the top floor of the building and did the cull in person. The entrance was covered up in police tape, and employees had to pass through a security checkpoint manned by a dozen armed guards, emptying out their coffee cups and putting their coats in trays for the x-ray machine, all ostensibly to prove they weren’t carrying bombs or other weapons. This was billed as a measure to protect DOGE as they went about their work, clearing out a fairly obscure agency staffed by accountants and legal clerks.

To grasp what makes DOGE’s “on-site” activities so peculiar, it’s useful to understand the basic laws and norms regulating mass layoffs inside the federal government. These layoffs fall under what is called a “RIF”: short for “Reduction In Force”. Under normal circumstances, agencies that are hit by an order to reduce their headcount by a certain number — say 30% — are supposed to list all their employees in a spreadsheet, where each employee is “scored” according to veteran status, length of employment and performance reviews. Once personnel has been listed, the agency heads then work up from the bottom until they reach the so-called “cut line”. If that’s our hypothetical 30%, that means that the worst-performing third of all employees must go. There are some quirks and exceptions — in some cases employees might be able to accept a reduction in salary rank in exchange for staying on — and departments will always try to make sure that institutional experience is still retained, avoiding situations where everyone with a certain function gets fired all at once.

In theory, RIF can accommodate even extremely large government cuts: it is designed to preserve talent and make it easy for the show to go on. But what DOGE has done at the GSA, the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) and other specific agencies where Elon Musk has taken a personal interest is quite different. Instead of caring too much about the total force reduction, DOGE has been firing all workers within particular areas of different departments. This can be done pretty easily by arbitrarily redefining people doing a certain job as being part of a discrete “competitive area”, and then setting the cut line at 100%.

This assault has almost nothing to do with the story that was sold about DOGE: getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse, and fighting the woke deep state. Indeed, the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management both stand a decent shot of being the least woke agencies in Washington. They are both fairly obscure and concerned with boring, practical work; they also enjoy markedly low social status within the federal hierarc

So why pick the GSA rather than somewhere more “woke”, somewhere more traditionally associated with the so-called deep state? Well, because this is where one goes if one wants to asset-strip the federal government. Shortly after DOGE moved into the GSA, and started firing pretty much everyone, the GSA posted an extraordinary list of buildings they had supposedly identified as “non-critical”. This list (which was later revised, and then taken down entirely) actually included close to half of all properties owned by the federal government, including buildings like the FBI headquarters and the Department of Justice building. The GSA added that it was now open to “creative solutions” to go along with these sales, including the idea of leasing back these properties once they had been sold.

Of course, when DOGE itself wants to talk about its big accomplishments, this clumsy attempt at Yeltsin-style looting of public property is not even mentioned. Instead, its social media posts are filled with claims that it’s rationalising procurement.

The other departments that Musk has taken a personal interest in follow a similar pattern. Rather than homing in on targets that look “woke”, Musk and DOGE have been concerned with the most boring and least prestigious areas of the federal government, those that have to do with things like Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request processing and federal contracting. Musk’s interest in the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and his targeted firings of employees there coincided with a public attempt to try to get the Authority to assign a $2.7 billion contract — previously awarded to the telecom giant Verizon — to his own Starlink company. Similar controversies were reported involving federal contracts for Tesla-made cars, most bizarrely an attempt to get the State Department to spend some $400 million on bulletproof cybertrucks as consular vehicles. Given that the kinds of countries where bullet-proof consular cars are in demand tend to be located in the developing world, the idea of splurging on armoured electric vehicles is quite odd: Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are not known for having many charging stations.

In most cases where DOGE has arrived in person to try to cajole or strong-arm people into looking the other way, the end result has ultimately been failure. The GSA had to dump its initial attempt to sell off good federal property at fire-sale prices; the FAA couldn’t just give a preexisting contract to Starlink; and the cybertruck deal was abandoned when journalists started getting hold of the story. And therein lies the problem: while it might be relatively easy to cut federal benefits for the elderly or the disabled, messing with federal contracts is a whole different ball game. The armed guards at the GSA building weren’t there to protect the DOGE employees, so much as to prevent fired people from returning to the building in order to transmit any sort of institutional knowledge to those that were still left. It looks like, in these instances, DOGE has waged a coordinated and surgical campaign against the accountants and white-collar janitors employed at the various agencies who control who gets the money and the contracts.

Elon Musk, though the world’s richest man, presides over a commercial empire that is sick and ailing. In this sense, he is just like so many others in the tech oligarchy that has become so central to Trump’s second term in office. Had the fire sale of federal property at GSA gone through, these are the people who would have bought all those federal buildings for cents on the dollar, lending them back to the government for a reliable permanent source of revenue. Tesla, Musk’s flagship company, is now in very serious trouble, and it’s an open question whether it even has a future if subjected to the pressures of the market. Tesla sales inside the EU are collapsing: a result of the rapid geopolitical polarisation that the Trump administration has leaned into with its various attacks on traditional US allies. At the same time, competitors in China are eager to gobble up its market share. Musk’s other companies — Starlink, the Boring Company, SpaceX — either have relatively low revenues or are structurally dependent on money from the US government.

With DOGE, Musk had a tool that could potentially not just save America from the “woke mind virus” and the “deep state”, but also leverage his position in government to help his own companies. Alas, things haven’t worked out quite how he might have hoped.

What became obvious as I talked to federal employees was the genuine reason they felt bewildered, angry or depressed — and it wasn’t really to do with people being fired. Bill Clinton fired people, Obama fired people; many of those I talked to even admitted to having been cautiously optimistic or even welcoming of DOGE. The federal government had problems, there was waste and fraud; anyone who lifted a finger to address these issues was welcome in their book. What people expected, even hoped for, was a painful but necessary spring cleaning of the federal government, firing the unnecessary and getting rid of the dead wood. But what people actually got was something akin to China’s cultural revolution.

The advent of DOGE kicked off a period of chaos and uncertainty, the wilful destruction of old rules and norms. Emails would land in certain workplaces saying that everyone was fired; only to then say that nobody was fired; only for another email to arrive two hours later saying that everyone was fired after all. These emails usually wouldn’t even be signed; bosses would be just as ignorant as their workers. Orders would come, be countermanded, then counter-countermanded.

I interviewed one person who had, in his own words, “gotten out” — that is he had accepted the offer to quit in exchange for severance pay made in Musk’s “fork in the road email” sent to every federal employee. Working at the US Patent and Trademark Office, this person should have been the last person on the list to feel the wrath of DOGE: not only do USPTO workers in his position not get paid unless they do work (USPTO is funded entirely through user fees), the Office itself is often a net contributor to the federal budget. In other words, these people make money for the US government, so any “efficiency” initiative or “reducing the deficit” attempt shouldn’t have anything to do with them. Yet the mood among this person’s coworkers was the same as everyone else: fear and uncertainty, and a constant barrage of ominous, often anonymous messages, presumably from Washington, about how they were next on the chopping block and would possibly get fired in the near future as scroungers and traitors to the republic.

What this particular ex-employee found most galling, however, had very little to do with DOGE itself. Rather, it was the feeling that, on a dime, people who he thought were his friends and ideological compatriots on the American Right could just instantly turn on them as yet another “enemy”. Stories like this are now fairly common, with many posted daily to the r/fednews subreddit, a place that’s become an impromptu gathering place for bewildered civil servants. At first, the subreddit’s rhetoric involved people hoping that “fraud, waste and abuse” would be targeted. But as time went on, the radical project of slashing the government has escaped all such boundaries.

But if DOGE was once the focal point of these radical cuts to the federal government, today that is arguably no longer the case. More and more departments are now falling victim to “traditional” mass layoffs, handled by their department heads and supervisors rather than by the young men from DOGE. The US Department of Agriculture; the Department of Health and Human Services; the Department of Veterans Affairs — even the Internal Revenue Service is now threatened with mass layoffs. At the same time, the Republican Party is trying to fire the people who bring in tax revenue to the government, while also promoting massive tax cuts. All this is happening amid rising spending on the military. While destroying its own fiscal position at home, in other words, the Trump administration has also set out to destroy the entire postwar system abroad.

Like so many other revolutions before it, the one that is now happening in America is beginning to devour its own favourite children. Elon Musk may have thought he was saving both his country and his own business empire by throwing himself into these purges and mass firings. But these days, he too is on the way out. The revolution inside the federal bureaucracy that he helped to spark has been followed up with a total revolution in trade. Trump’s tariff war is likely to have huge consequences for the US economy. For Musk in particular, it might just spell doom for Tesla. Unsurprisingly, the billionaire has been out in public picking fights with members of the administration — especially Peter Navarro, the most hardline pro-tariff member of Trump’s team — and advocating for a tariff-free zone between the US and the EU. Trump, in turn, has gone from doing Tesla advertisements on the White House lawn to saying that he only keeps Musk around because he likes him; he certainly doesn’t need him. Navarro, for his part, has fired back at Musk, accusing him of being not a manufacturer of cars but a mere assembler. Tesla, because it still needs to import some components from outside America, is in danger of failing the purity test.

When I started interviewing federal workers back in March, my first impression was that Musk was a cynical thief, trying to loot the American state in order to shore up his own companies. But far from being some sort of mastermind, he increasingly looks like a naive, even tragic, victim of a social upheaval far bigger than anyone could have foreseen just six months ago. While Musk was useful for selling the idea of making the government more efficient, it’s increasingly clear that the firings inside the government have now abandoned that pretence. The amount of money DOGE hopes to save is now down to some $150 billion a year: barely enough to counter the announced boost to the Pentagon’s budget. At any rate, the fact that even the world’s richest man is not capable of shielding himself from the fallout of breakdown of the political order should be a warning to the rest of America.

 

 

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Posted

Yeah bootlickers in the private sector (including me) are fine with layoffs because it is part of the game, Musk the idiot went into government thinking the same and the pushback has been severe.

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Posted

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/16/weather-service-offices-overnight-cuts-map/

 

Screenshot2025-05-17at6_46_44AM.thumb.png.dcba6a002841260275ca63a63a159ed2.png

 

Quote

For at least half a century, the National Weather Service has been an around-the-clock operation. But after the U.S. DOGE Service led efforts to shrink the federal government, that is no longer possible in some parts of the country.

In four of the agency’s 122 weather forecasting offices around the country, there aren’t enough meteorologists to staff an overnight shift, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing agency workers. And at least several more forecast offices are expected to stop staffing an overnight shift as early as Sunday.

 

Quote

Each of the offices has local knowledge about weather hazards and geographic features that helps improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and warnings and inform local officials’ decisions to close schools for wintry weather or evacuate residents ahead of hurricanes. Without a meteorologist working overnight, those offices’ duties to monitor conditions and issue forecasts and warnings will temporarily pass to neighboring offices each night, said Tom Fahy, the union’s legislative director.

At an agency whose staff have a strong commitment to their lifesaving work, he said, the circumstances have stretched employees’ resilience “to the breaking point” and “hobbled the agency’s esprit de corps.”

 

 

Quote

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the Weather Service, “remains adequately staffed to ensure that critical research continues and that actionable data continues to be released to the public as regularly scheduled,” spokeswoman Kim Doster said in an email. “NOAA anticipates no loss of critical information to the American people.”

 

 

Spoiler

The agency is meanwhile seeking to transfer employees to the most critically understaffed offices to fill gaps. Doster said it is also seeking hiring authority — NOAA and the Weather Service remain subject to a hiring freeze imposed in January — while also pursuing “a reevaluation of resource allocation and priorities across all line offices within the bureau.”

Weather Service staffing numbered more than 4,200 employees before President Donald Trump took office for his second term. But so far this year, the workforce has contracted by nearly 600 people — the same number of departures the agency saw across the past decade and a half, Fahy said.

Here is where those departures are hitting hardest.

California and the West

Weather Service forecast offices in Hanford, California, and Sacramento, in the state’s agricultural and mostly rural Central Valley, are no longer able to operate an overnight shift, leaving coastal offices that oversee the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles to cover for them.

The cutback in operating hours comes just as the traditional wildfire season begins in California. The Weather Service plays a key role in forecasting when dry air and strong winds elevate risks of fires sparking and spreading rapidly.

It is also expected that a Weather Service office in Pendleton, Oregon, which oversees a wide swath of southern Washington and northwestern Oregon, will soon be unable to operate overnight, though it was not yet clear when that might happen, Fahy said.

The overnight closure of the forecast office in Fairbanks, Alaska, affects most of that state’s land area — all of northern Alaska, including towns all along its Arctic coastline and the Bering Strait.

The Plains

A forecast office in sparsely populated northwestern Kansas has been one of the hardest hit by retirements and firings and is no longer operating overnight, Fahy said.

It is one of the facilities Weather Service officials are asking employees to voluntarily transfer to, offering paid moving expenses. Positions for three senior meteorologists at the Kansas office are among 155 critical vacancies at Weather Service offices that the agency is seeking to fill by the end of the month, according to an email sent to agency employees that was obtained by The Washington Post.

A forecasting office that oversees conditions across southwestern Wyoming and eastern Nebraska is scheduled to stop staffing an overnight shift Sunday, Fahy said.

These offices lie in what is called “Tornado Alley,” and as peak tornado season continues, this area is at the heart of a swath that has faced relentless thunderstorms, twisters and flooding rains for weeks this year.

The Eastern U.S.

There are some critical vacancies at offices along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast — including offices in Texas and Louisiana that are facing the threat of tropical cyclones when hurricane season starts June 1. But so far, the densely populated eastern part of the country is not affected by overnight Weather Service closures.

Still, one office in eastern Kentucky — a region hit repeatedly by deadly and damaging floods in recent years — is already closing for the overnight hours. And a facility on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is expected to begin overnight closures Sunday.

 

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Posted
On 4/23/2025 at 12:21 AM, 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?

 

I don't come on Cloak Room often.  (I used to on Shaggy and whatever it was called on HornFans, though)

I was probably on the Food & Travel forum.

Why would anyone that isn't far left spend a lot of time visiting this forum?  It's an echo chamber that attacks anyone that has any type of conservative views.

I drop by every once in awhile to see what the latest outrage is.  Sometimes I make a comment.

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Posted
25 minutes ago, Ag with kids said:

I don't come on Cloak Room often.  (I used to on Shaggy and whatever it was called on HornFans, though)

I was probably on the Food & Travel forum.

Why would anyone that isn't far left spend a lot of time visiting this forum?  It's an echo chamber that attacks anyone that has any type of conservative views.

I drop by every once in awhile to see what the latest outrage is.  Sometimes I make a comment.

Please share a conservative viewpoint.  If it has merit and truth to it I'll happily have an open conversation on the subject.

However if you're parroting the latest fox news talking points you will get eviscerated.

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Posted (edited)
On 5/10/2025 at 10:09 AM, linux said:

Yeah bootlickers in the private sector (including me) are fine with layoffs because it is part of the game, Musk the idiot went into government thinking the same and the pushback has been severe.

I am a public sector employee and people get fired usually just for this kind of nonsense. It never has anything to do with anything beyond just political bullshit and purges. People rarely get fired because they are bad at their job. But people get fired all the time for literally anything besides that.

I think the Feds upset about how it is going are largely morons who actually believed the propaganda about DOGE as something interested in the function of government instead of just being a political purge machine on an unusually large and stupid scale. Also people who thought their work was really important and care about it which is sweet.

Edited by Valmy77
Posted (edited)
On 5/17/2025 at 7:48 AM, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/16/weather-service-offices-overnight-cuts-map/

 

Screenshot2025-05-17at6_46_44AM.thumb.png.dcba6a002841260275ca63a63a159ed2.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

The agency is meanwhile seeking to transfer employees to the most critically understaffed offices to fill gaps. Doster said it is also seeking hiring authority — NOAA and the Weather Service remain subject to a hiring freeze imposed in January — while also pursuing “a reevaluation of resource allocation and priorities across all line offices within the bureau.”

Weather Service staffing numbered more than 4,200 employees before President Donald Trump took office for his second term. But so far this year, the workforce has contracted by nearly 600 people — the same number of departures the agency saw across the past decade and a half, Fahy said.

Here is where those departures are hitting hardest.

California and the West

Weather Service forecast offices in Hanford, California, and Sacramento, in the state’s agricultural and mostly rural Central Valley, are no longer able to operate an overnight shift, leaving coastal offices that oversee the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles to cover for them.

The cutback in operating hours comes just as the traditional wildfire season begins in California. The Weather Service plays a key role in forecasting when dry air and strong winds elevate risks of fires sparking and spreading rapidly.

It is also expected that a Weather Service office in Pendleton, Oregon, which oversees a wide swath of southern Washington and northwestern Oregon, will soon be unable to operate overnight, though it was not yet clear when that might happen, Fahy said.

The overnight closure of the forecast office in Fairbanks, Alaska, affects most of that state’s land area — all of northern Alaska, including towns all along its Arctic coastline and the Bering Strait.

The Plains

A forecast office in sparsely populated northwestern Kansas has been one of the hardest hit by retirements and firings and is no longer operating overnight, Fahy said.

It is one of the facilities Weather Service officials are asking employees to voluntarily transfer to, offering paid moving expenses. Positions for three senior meteorologists at the Kansas office are among 155 critical vacancies at Weather Service offices that the agency is seeking to fill by the end of the month, according to an email sent to agency employees that was obtained by The Washington Post.

A forecasting office that oversees conditions across southwestern Wyoming and eastern Nebraska is scheduled to stop staffing an overnight shift Sunday, Fahy said.

These offices lie in what is called “Tornado Alley,” and as peak tornado season continues, this area is at the heart of a swath that has faced relentless thunderstorms, twisters and flooding rains for weeks this year.

The Eastern U.S.

There are some critical vacancies at offices along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast — including offices in Texas and Louisiana that are facing the threat of tropical cyclones when hurricane season starts June 1. But so far, the densely populated eastern part of the country is not affected by overnight Weather Service closures.

Still, one office in eastern Kentucky — a region hit repeatedly by deadly and damaging floods in recent years — is already closing for the overnight hours. And a facility on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is expected to begin overnight closures Sunday.

 

Closing an overnight office that tracks severe weather in Kanas and Kentucky?  Smart!  Think of the two or three million a year that will save.  Probably about what it costs Trump to play one hole of golf.

Also:

 

Edited by Bullneck
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Posted

Think of public sector workers as a foundation. In my current position i have a mentor and a protégé. The three of us cover the span of three generations: boomer, genx, millennial.  This is to ensure the transfer of knowledge which in turn creates stability over decades. Say doge cunts were to remove one or two of us. That would create a crack within the foundation causing far reaching effects destabilizing not just our department but the departments which depend on us to function. The destabilizing effect is exponential and it's impossible to reverse. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, MissingInAction said:

Think of public sector workers as a foundation. In my current position i have a mentor and a protégé. The three of us cover the span of three generations: boomer, genx, millennial.  This is to ensure the transfer of knowledge which in turn creates stability over decades. Say doge cunts were to remove one or two of us. That would create a crack within the foundation causing far reaching effects destabilizing not just our department but the departments which depend on us to function. The destabilizing effect is exponential and it's impossible to reverse. 

Last year somehow I got a LinkedIn notification from some woman promoting a political candidate for some office in a nearby county. There was a video, and I watched as she proclaimed the candidate to be a "disruptor."  

Just what we need.  More chaos.

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Posted
15 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

Last year somehow I got a LinkedIn notification from some woman promoting a political candidate for some office in a nearby county. There was a video, and I watched as she proclaimed the candidate to be a "disruptor."  

Just what we need.  More chaos.

I hope you reported it as hate speech or at least spam.

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Posted
Closing an overnight office that tracks severe weather in Kanas and Kentucky?  Smart!  Think of the two or three million a year that will save.  Probably about what it costs Trump to play one hole of golf.
Also:
 

Save who? Taxes are going up if you aren’t rich.
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