Hurricane of Chumph Failure

Anybody else notice that NOAA seems to have had an extraordinarily difficult time in predicting the path of Hurricanes this year? It seems in the case of Irma and Maria the hurricanes had already hit before there was an announcement of where the storms were going.

The reason is yet another Chumph fuck up.

Trump’s executive order caused major problems for National Weather Service before devastating hurricanes hit

One of President Donald Trump’s first acts after taking office was to institute a hiring freeze across the federal government. That has caused serious problems for essential staff needed to handle a number of major issues, namely the National Weather Service.

According to a Washington Post report, a recently released document released by the Sierra Club after a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Weather Service had 216 vacant positions that Trump’s order prevented them from filling as hurricanes approached.

As of today, there are 248 positions that remain unfilled, and they aren’t limited to low-level staffers either.

Some of the positions were in locations that were recently hit by major hurricanes. It also includes two meteorology positions at the National Hurricane Center in Miami and these posts remain unfilled until as of mid-August.

The freeze also prevented them from hiring two meteorology positions in Jacksonville, Florida, one in Tampa, Florida and an electronics technician in Key West, all of which were hit by Hurricane Irma. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told The Post that the positions have since been filled.

The federal government’s staffing problem at the weather bureau has been an ongoing problem since 2010. The agency once employed more than 3,800 nonmanagerial and nonsupervisory staffers. In December 2016 that had fallen to 3,425 and as of August staffing is at 3,368. In May, the Government Accountability Office wrote that the problem was so great that employees were challenged in their ability “to complete key tasks.”

“There’s no question that the hiring freeze had an effect,” NWSEO president Dan Sobien told The Post. “But really it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

He went on to say, “The camel was already weighed down to the ground.”

NOAA spokesman Christopher Vaccaro admitted that the staffing problem played a key role in the decline of the agency’s ranks.

“Yes, the hiring freeze was a contributing factor” for renewing that decline, he wrote via email. However, the forecasting ability was not a problem.

“As already demonstrated during Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria, NOAA is prepared for the hurricane season and is operating at full tempo,” Vaccaro said. “Our forecasters at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, local Weather Service offices, and river forecast centers and elsewhere in the agency are fulfilling the agency’s mission of protecting lives and property as they issue timely and accurate forecasts.”

Prior to the storms, the National Weather Service prepared backup offices that would navigate forecasting in the event the offices in the hurricanes’ paths were unable to communicate. Vaccaro explained that the San Antonio office took over for Key West when Hurricane Irma required people evacuate. Those in Miami stepped in to help those in San Juan, Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.

Trump has also failed to nominate, and the Senate has failed to confirm, an official to head NOAA. He has also waited longer than any other president to fill the role.

When the GAO report was released about the staffing problem in May, it was also revealed that those at NOAA “have experienced stress, fatigue, and reduced morale.” Higher NOAA staffers made “limited information” available on the hiring requests to those leading Weather Service filed offices. As a result, managers aren’t able to “effectively plan and distribute workloads,” according to the report.

“People were literally getting sick from the workload,” Sobien, the union president, maintained.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration budget has proposed cuts to the agency’s funding, including a loss of $62 million needed to update weather models and and help the agency be better able to predict changes to hurricanes or other severe weather further out in advance.

 

Chumph Disaster of the Day 1/22/17 – Federal Freeze

Second day in office… One of several stupid moves. Putin’s Bitch is trying the same thing George W Bush failed at. Moving the Federal workforce over to the private sector. The reason when the Bushit did this it was a spectacular failure, is the cost per “private” employee was triple the cost of ta Federal Government employee. The quite simply is no savings.

There are Federal Government workers in every one of the 3,000 counties in the US.

Now that the dictator has frozen hiring in the Federal workforce – some interesting things may begin to happen…Like what happens when those welfare, disability, and Social Security checks stop arriving in the Red Zone? The largest portion of said Democrat “giveaways” in the US.

Lot of ways pissed off Government employees can gum up the works. Let’s hope that if they do they take solid aim at the Chumph’s base.

Donald Trump’s hiring freeze angers federal workforce, unions

President Trump may wind up regretting his federal hiring freeze

In one of his first acts during Day Three of his presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order that put a hold on most federal hiring — thereby angered one of America’s most powerful unions.

On Monday Trump signed an executive order that will freeze federal hiring in every area of the government except for sectors involving the military, public safety and public health. Sources close to the Trump transition told Politico that the president’s personnel team — led by Bush administration alumni Kay Coles James and Linda Springer — plans to drastically reduce the size of domestic agencies while slightly increasing that of the defense workforce. The Trump administration is considering embarking on a “reduction in force” plan so as to circumvent civil service rules that safeguard government employees.

While these moves may please Trump’s right-wing base, they could also alienate the very people on whom he will depend for his administration to be successful. “The government is a place where it is easier to keep something from getting done, than it is to actually do something,” former Office of Management and Budget official Robert Shea told Politico. “All of the work that the new administration wants to get accomplished will depend on the speed and productivity of the federal workforce.”

These views were echoed by David Cox, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union.

“President Trump’s action will disrupt government programs and services that benefit everyone and actually increase taxpayer costs by forcing agencies to hire more expensive contractors to do work that civilian government employees are already doing for far less,” Cox told The Washington Post. “This hiring freeze will mean longer lines at Social Security offices, fewer workplace safety inspections, less oversight of environmental polluters, and greater risk to our nation’s food supply and clean water systems.”

Despite these criticisms, Sean Spicer, the White House’s press secretary, told reporters the hiring freeze is meant to show that “we’ve got to respect the American taxpayer.” He added seeing “money get wasted” on jobs that are “duplicative is insulting to the hard work that they do to pay their taxes.”

Trump’s federal hiring freeze arrives at a time when the president has already had a very divisive effect on the federal workforce.

“During more than eight years of writing this column, I have sought the views of federal employees through informal email surveys,” wrote Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson. “Never have I received comments filled with the kind of fright expressed by those who have written to me since Trump’s inauguration Friday,” he added, describing the climate fostered by Trump’s rhetoric and policies. “Post policy rightly discourages the use of anonymous comments, but it’s acceptable when the source has a valid reason, such as a fear of retaliation. Feds fear retribution now more than ever.”

Of particular concern, Davidson cited the rise of racist encounters by federal employees since Trump’s election, the apparent “nascent McCarthyism” within the new administration, and the president’s revival of a 19th-century law that allows the government to target individual federal employees for a pay reduction (to $1).