Celeste Kenney, NCC, MS

ALT Statement begins: The mass firing of both new hires and recently promoted senior staff within NOAA, including mission-critical and life-saving roles at the National Weather Service (NWS), is profoundly alarming. It appears that NOAA staff fired today include meteorologists, data and computer scientists responsible for maintaining and upgrading weather predictive models, and technicians responsible for maintaining the nation’s weather instrumentation network (among many others). Housed within NOAA, the U.S. NWS is a truly world-class meteorological predictive service, perhaps singularly so. Its cost of operation is only ~$3-4/yr per taxpayer—equivalent to a single cup of coffee—and yields a truly remarkable return on investment (at least 10 to 1, and perhaps 100 to 1, depending on methods of estimation). NOAA and the NWS collectively offer tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year in net economic benefit through a combination of averted losses and efficiencies gained....