Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:
On September 8, 1900, a hurricane struck Galveston Texas, cutting off a major portion of the city’s residents on a barrier island, and took between 8000 and 12,000 lives.
It was by far the deadliest hurricane in American history, but not because it was a uniquely powerful storm, (a Category 4 by today’s standards).
What made it so devastating was the lack of the clear warning that we take for granted today.
Since then, the US has developed internationally respected agencies, the National Weather Service, (NWS), and the National Hurricane Center, (NHC) which have served us well, especially as severe storms have become more intense due to climate change.
The Atlantic reports that “So far in 2024, the NWS has issued some 13,000 severe-thunderstorm warnings, 2,000 tornado warnings, and 1,800 flash-flood warnings, plus almost 3,000 river-flood warnings..”, no doubt saving countless lives.
It is therefore bewildering to see the blueprint for a potential new Trump administration, Project 2025, propose that NWS’ parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “..should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated..”.
Project 2025 contends that NOAA has become “one of the main drivers behind the climate change alarm industry”.
During the first Trump administration, the Washington Post reported that scientists were being “forced out, sidelined or muted..”. Project 2025 seems to be a detailed and targeted blueprint for accelerating that process if Trump were to win again.
This should not be surprising, given the pedigree of Project 2025’s architect, Kevin Roberts, Director of the Heritage Foundation, which produced the massive document.
Roberts is former Chair of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right wing “think tank” and major nerve center in the service of Texas’ Oil and Gas industry, which regularly produces anti-science and climate denial materials as well as legislative templates for Texas and beyond.
Famously, Roberts ominously told an interviewer that Project 2025 was the game plan for a “new American Revolution” which “will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
Mr Robert’s cartoonish, Bond villain persona should not be taken lightly.
Agencies like NOAA are the crown jewels of America’s world -leading scientific community, but, because their findings conflict with the interests of Mr Robert’s powerful backers, we risk having a century of scientific leadership scattered to the winds, or spun off and sold back at a profit to the taxpayers who funded them.
In more recent American history, the worst hurricane disaster was without doubt Hurricane Katrina, which claimed, by various accounts, up to 1800 lives.
This occurred, of course, in the satellite era – and weather models gave plenty of warning that a major hurricane was about to strike.
What proved deadly for New Orleans was the bungled and mishandled response to the storm by the Federal Emergency Management Agency – FEMA.
In subsequent investigations, FEMA Director Michael Brown came in for considerable criticism.
Reporters found that, prior to his FEMA service, Brown’s primary professional qualification was as director of an Arabian Horse Association. He gained his FEMA position not due to qualifications or expertise, but rather because he had been a faithful Republican operative and had a close friend in President George “Dubya” Bush’s White House.
Bush himself came off as inadequate to the challenge with his flyover approach to emergency management, and his congratulatory “Heck of a job, Brownie” assessment of Brown’s performance.
One of the most frightening proposals in Project 2025 is to turbocharge the process that placed “Brownie” in a position to maximize a catastrophe.
The so-called “Schedule F” provision would remove Civil Service protections from hundreds of thousands of government employees – professionals with highly specialized skills and irreplaceable experience. Engineers, scientists, lawyers, researchers, physicians, military and intelligence professionals would no longer be evaluated on the basis of background or merit.
Instead, at least 50 thousand, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, could be summarily dismissed, and replaced with operatives qualified only for their loyalty, not to the Constitution of the American people, but to one man – Donald Trump.
That means professionals who keep track of the purity of our water and air, the safety of food, the spread of disease, the education of our children, whether a window might blow out of an airliner, even our very security as a nation, would be replaced by political hacks, rather than qualified experts.
The current iteration of the Republican party seems to believe, unfortunately, that there is no such thing as real “expertise” that can’t be gained in an afternoon on Facebook, and that, since, in their estimation, government really doesn’t do anything, why should actual knowledge and experience matter?
Imagine 50,000, or 100,000 “Brownies” in Federal Agencies.
Katrina showed us how badly things can go when ideology replaces expertise.
Less than 100 days to the election. Consider carefully.
The cycle: It usually takes about 4 years to change things. The Dems come in at the start of a recession, takes the heat for the bad economy, gets things back and running. Then comes the next election the GOP wins and then takes credit for the great economy , screws it up so a recession starts with the next president. Trump was the 1st president that didn’t have an economy in recession at the beginning of his term in the last 60 years. If they implement project 2025 it will be the next president that will have to deal with it and the consequences. In the mean time the public gets screwed.
Project 2025 wants to ‘return self-governance to the American people’? Democracy only works because the American people know who to blame when things go wrong: the people in charge of the government… that is… the people: the guy in the mirror. The people put people into Congress, Congress performs the will of the people by, say, encoding clean drinking water into Law, and then the ‘Administrative State’ executes those Laws.
Nobody should be under any illusion over how this works. The only ‘people’ Project 2025 wants to return ‘governance’ to, is the oligarchy that pays for the Heritage Foundation.
There is some logic in the madness. If you don’t want to pay taxes then you can’t have services either. But it is to mad for words not to use proven and working warning system just for political or ideological reason. It just dont make sense at all.