Remember with NOAA and NWS you always have GOP pressure originating from Accuweather, which really wants to be a the gatekeeper for this data.
Over the years they have attacked the NWS web properties in particular (Rick Santorum was their attack dog a few years back) as their business of selling graphics to TV stations has declined along with traditional TV.
Errm, AccuWeather is one of the companies complaining about this proposal. From the article: "Jonathan Porter, a vice president and general manager at the private forecasting firm AccuWeather, warns that the agency’s proposed solution would harm the timeliness and accuracy of forecasts and severe weather warnings. He said the collection, processing and distribution of weather information are the agency’s “most important services.”"
Apparently not getting all that NWS weather data for free and then being abl to use it in their commercial weather forecasts would put a bit of a dent in their business model. Actually, I think commercial organisations like AccuWeather probably be the main ones affected; ordinary end users aren't going to be requesting large quantities of data.
So NOAA and the NWS are playing 3D Chess against AccuWeather whose been loddying against them for years? Now, unless AccuWeather wants to start paying for the data they'll need to start lobbying for them... I love it.
So basically, AccuWeather wants to have their cake and eat it too.
What's the nature of their lobbying?
Are they basically trying to defund any kind of front-end, consumer facing services from the NWS/NOAA, while keeping the back-end data sources available for them to feed their own consumer facing services?
That is the specific scenario. They've lobbied for the NWS to not run any public facing services, but still collect all of the data, run the models, and put the GRIB files up, but then stop there so that Accuweather can monetize it.
> The NWS was giving away forecasts on its website, radio stations, and elsewhere, when businesses such as AccuWeather charged its clients for theirs—never mind that AccuWeather relied on the service’s free data to formulate its own predictions. Santorum agreed that commercial weather companies deserved protection.
Well, not if you don't understand how hard accurate weather forecsts are to get, or why a private entity couldn't do better. After all, that's why the news shows have weathermen, right?!
And if the NOAA goes away, the government becomes smaller, and their taxes go down, right?
:/
EDIT: Dear downvoters - while this is not my opinion, this is how people think, what people believe. Dismiss it at your own risk.
NWS is an amazing resource for pre-trip planning for a variety of different people. I frequently consult it for weather forecasts prior to hiking. I'm not sure a company like Accuweather could provide me with access to such great forecasts or sensor data as NWS does given how reliant they are on NWS data themselves.
The other problem here is that Accuweather charges huge fees for access to their forecasts and I'm not sure that I, as a private citizen, could afford that. So my choices go from pay a little bit of tax to get access to high-quality, reliable weather forecasts and warnings, to being totally unable to get access to this information without paying exorbitant fee. Or alternatively just not knowing these things and having to pay higher insurance costs for my ignorance.
This is a really good example of how making government smaller makes a lot of peoples' lives much crappier.
Yes, you're right, I over-simplified. Many of them are (or have) meteorologists. To give the data itself a pretty face (interpretation). But that's not the primary reason that news stations hire "weather people". If it was, they would just contract out to some other company.
> I don't care who you voted for, this should make every American really, really mad.
There exists a certain group of people that think private sector and The Market™ should handle many/most/all things. Do you want to guess which political party those people tend to associate with?
Also, should we be more or less mad about this than someone trying to overturn fair elections like is happening now? Do you want to guess which political party is trying to do that? Do you want to guess if it's the same political party which believes in The Market™?
So you may not think it matters who people voted for, and that this should be a universal feeling… but that's not what reality is. Do you know what other things should have universal consensus?
First, there's no way to compare the election stuff with this weather thing. Sometimes different things happen at the same time for different reasons.
>There exists a certain group of people that think private sector and The Market™ should handle many/most/all things
I think the Accuweather problem is worse, much worse. What has happened is that NOAA & NWS had been happily supplying data to..whoever..when some people decided to create a commercial service with the same data. Then they hired disgraced Jesus-freak Santorum to play lobbyist and try to kill the NOAA/NWS public services. Note that Accuweather is not going to fly their own satelites, they just want you to be locked out.[1]
That's right: if a private company decides to commercialize something the government is already doing, using the same government services that that government function is using, then the government should stop doing the thing and let the private company have the market.[2][3] This is a continuation of the Republican principle of privatizing profits and socializing risk, as well as colonizing publicly-funded resources.
I'm not arguing with this view, but I want to emphasize, that as someone who once worked in the Federal sector in numerous different agencies, that they waste tremendous amounts of money on things that have nothing to do with their core mission. The Pentagon is obviously horrendous, but other agencies that I expected to be better stewards of their dollars (EPA, DoE, IRS, and yes, NOAA) were horrifically wasteful, on dozens of fronts.
The hiring is always a problem, even when there isn't a hiring freeze, but they don't fire enough lazy people, which demotivates hard workers who end up bailing for the private sector.
As taxpayers, we should be furious at the GOP for the Accuweather bullshit, but we also need to be furious at any government agency which tolerates the level of fraud, waste, and abuse that most of these agencies perpertrate.
As a person who happens to want universal healthcare like the NHS in Britain, it's infuriating to me that these agencies tolerate such constant mediocrity in their ranks (mixed in with the talented of course!!!) and are so bad with their spending efficiency.
Bezos had something to say about the Seattle city government last year:
"They don't have a revenue problem, they have a spending efficiency problem."
It seems like we always get political about this, with one side wanting to "starve the beast" (as if government is this evil beast), and the other side just always letting them get away with the excuse that they need more revenue.
Where are the people who BELIEVE in government that will demand that it be efficient?
Edit:
I love how people think that because corporations are inefficient, they assume that all organizations are equally ad inefficient as the US Federal Govt. The rate at which people are involuntarily terminated in the Fed Gov is far, far too low, because incompetence is routinely tolerated where it wouldn't otherwise be anywhere else. Why? Not because a person's supervisor in the Fed doesn't recognize the incompetence, but because the firing process is so difficult that they don't want to or can't expend the energy to do so. If you want government to have a bigger role in people's lives, but are so delusional as to not recognize how bad it is, then you aren't furthering your cause.
The FDA still hasn't approved the Pfizer vaccine, while the NHS already did. Pfizer is an American company. That's a national embarrassment.
None of those inefficiencies are unique to government agencies. They all happen in the private sector two but you don't hear about them because corporations are not subject to an open records act. And that "oh but the free market will ensure inefficient companies fail" response some are about the write is total bs. Companies fail for all kinds of reasons, inefficiency is just one of several things and not always deadly to a corporation.
I’ve worked in both. Companies are dumb in different ways than government.
Usually companies have better leadership and are more merciless with people. Unless they are unionized, problems get pushed out (unless they don’t). Big companies waste lots of money on other things.
Government agencies have by design a split between political/professional management. Sometimes that results in strange stuff. Also the programs in government are very meaningful — legislation limits how money is spent, one unit or function may be drowning in funds, another may be dumpster diving.
Companies waste money on things like exec compensation, marketing, etc.
I have. State government too. Also a couple BigCo orgs. I can confirm that all are absurdly wasteful. The incentives, culture, and flavor are different but the results are the same.
I've been a on several "tiger teams" (super cheesy, i know!) that were parachuted in from a consultancy to bail out Federal Gov projects that had gone bad. I've been tasked to state governments as well, and was always blown away by the huge variation between different states. Virginia, for example, at least around 2010, had a very well-run government. Illinois is a steaming pile of garbage as far as being a black hole for money. New Jersey is even worse. They recently, in the beginning of the COVID crisis, blamed their COBOL system for the unemployment check backups. The expert team that was brought in quickly determined that the system wasn't the issue, and the bottleneck was bad management.
I think that, like governments, companies are not all equal in their efficiency. I work with a several people who used to work on the factory robots at Ford, and the level of efficiency at Tesla dramatically exceeds that at Ford. As organizations age, they get more and more corrupted, unless reforms are periodically pursued. Think about what IBM used to be, vs what it is today.
I think the problem with the Federal Government agencies is that they started out very efficient, and filled with bad asses who were hungry. They are never actually reformed though. They just go through periods of politicians who starve them of money then to other politicians that give them plenty, and there's no consistency party wise of course. GOP throws money at their pet agencies, Dems at theirs.
But starving them of money and then throwing it at them again isn't any kind of reform. The result is they have remained stagnant, and filled with people who substitute meaningful work for work that generates great optics.
In late 2017, I was chosen to be on a team to go engage in a Hackathon for the Department of Health and Human Services that was focused on developing solutions to help combat the opioid crisis in the US. My company actually pushed to organize it, and therefore my team wasn't allowed to be considered for a prize, but we did participate.
The rules were that the teams would all get in the building, sign NDAs, and then be given data that wasn't available to the public, and have 24 hours to build a solution. We walk in, and they had changed the name to a "Codeathon", because high ups in HHS didn't like having the word "Hack" in the title. They had a massive room filled with suits, watching presentations about the opioid crisis and what HHS was doing to solve it, and pushed the actual competitors into side rooms that were incredibly uncomfortable, with card tables and folding metal chairs. We then ended up having to wait because they had delays in getting the USB drives with data out to the contestants. The person whose job it was to make the drives forgot to do it the week before. We waited for 5 hours for the drives to be distributed.
Eventually, we got the data, and started the work. Built some very cool solutions and presented them. The suits who had been sitting in the main room watching the presentations by HHS didn't show up to watch the presentations, because they were at 3PM on a Thursday, and we were told that the traffic in DC is bad, so most of them had bailed out back to Virginia and Maryland by then.
The hackathon (or codeathon) had no food provided. We had to periodically leave the building, buy food, and re-enter through the security checkpoints.
The sad part is that unlike me, the rest of my team had never seen the Federal Gov in action. They were all shocked at how incompetent everything seemed to be, and how many people in fancy suits seemed to do nothing. Hundreds of them, watching presentations. They had a long discussion on the flight back about how dismayed they were with the whole experience.
1. It sounds like you've mostly worked with government agencies, suggesting a selection bias in comparing public v private inefficiency.
2. The 2017 event you say was marred by incompetence occurred during the Trump administration, which was well known for being incompetent not at just governing, but at basic functions running an Easter egg hunt. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/us/politics/white-house-e...
When a company wastes their shareholders’ money, the shareholders have an easy path to sell their shares and stop being harmed by the waste. When a government wastes taxpayer money, there is not the same timeline nor precision in ability to stop directly supporting that waste so you reasonably see taxpayers seeking other avenues to attempt to curtail the waste.
Over the years they have attacked the NWS web properties in particular (Rick Santorum was their attack dog a few years back) as their business of selling graphics to TV stations has declined along with traditional TV.