The Fifth Risk(43)
His memos were never read, DJ suspects. At any rate, he’s never heard a peep about them. And he came to see there was nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration’s attitude toward public data. Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company. “The NOAA webpage used to have a link to weather forecasts,” he said. “It was highly, highly popular. I saw it had been buried. And I asked: Now, why would they bury that?” Then he realized: the man Trump nominated to run NOAA thought that people who wanted a weather forecast should have to pay him for it. There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.
The first time DJ Patil met Kathy Sullivan, he’d gone to talk to her about how she might better use data. He wound up learning from her how he might better approach his new mission. “She said something very insightful. She said working for the government, you need to imagine you are tied down, Gulliver-style. And if you want to even wiggle your big toe, first you need to ask permission. And that if you can imagine that and still imagine getting things done, you’ll get things done.”
The single most important source of data for the weather models are the satellites. The geostationary satellites hover over the equator, taking pictures of whatever is happening beneath them. The polar satellites circle the globe from North Pole to South Pole and gather data from the entire planet. They take soundings of the temperature and moisture in the atmosphere; measure vegetation coverage; monitor ozone levels; detect hot spots and so are able to report fires before people on the ground even know they have been lit; and feed weather forecasting models not just in the United States but in Europe and Asia. Without the information supplied by the polar satellites, weather forecasts everywhere would be worse. You’d be more likely to turn up at the airport and find that your flight had been canceled, or to be surprised by a wildfire, or to be hit without warning by a storm. “We ran the no-satellite experiment in Galveston in 1900,” says Tim Schmit, a career NOAA researcher who has spent the last twenty-two years creating new and better satellite images of Earth. “Ten thousand people died.”
Kathy Sullivan’s life after her astronaut career had been one ambitious science project after another. She’d spent the first three years as NOAA’s chief scientist. From there she’d gone on to run the Center of Science and Industry, a 320,000-square-foot museum and research center in Columbus, Ohio. After a decade of running that, she was hired in 2006 by Ohio State University to be the first director of their new science and math education center. When she returned to NOAA, in 2011, a polar satellite launched in the 1990s was approaching the end of its useful life. Its replacement was late, mired in political controversy, and facing cuts to a budget it had already exceeded. “She walks in the door and finds that the decisions made by a lot of other people are about to screw us all,” said DJ Patil. “Now it’s a question of national security. Because you won’t be able to see the storms.” A storm that went unseen, to DJ’s way of thinking, belonged in the same category as a terrorist who went undetected.
The Clinton administration had asked three different agencies—the Department of Defense, NASA, and NOAA—to manage the polar satellites. The collaboration hadn’t gone well. “The dynamic was a typical Washington sociopathic thing mixed up with a lack of leadership,” said a former NOAA official. “Three agencies is hard. Because when you’re busy or something annoys you, you can just assume or pretend that someone else will handle it. It’s also hard because nobody wants to be responsible when things go badly. It’s hard to control headlines and explain complicated things. Congress sends agencies very mixed signals, changes budgets, moves on to new things, speaks with many voices. Administrations and Congress don’t often agree or even know about all the things the agencies are working on. Everybody blames someone else, and whoever is better at the blame game usually comes out on top. And the Department of Defense always comes out on top because it has the most resources and protective reflexes and friends.”
The Obama administration had broken up the marriage between NASA and the Department of Defense and handed the entire mess to NOAA. But the NOAA to which Kathy Sullivan returned had drifted further in the direction it had been heading when she’d left. While the weather forecasts from inside it had gotten better and better, the political climate outside it had gotten worse and worse. Working at NOAA—or anyplace else in the federal government—could not be more different from working at NASA. When you were an astronaut, everyone loved you. When you told people that you worked for NASA they were usually curious, and even a bit informed. There was a reason for this, over and above the drama of the work: NASA had been encouraged, right from the start, to promote itself. “NASA was allowed to tell its story to the world,” Kathy said. “There was a conscious need to publicize, because it was meant to restore confidence. NASA had heroes.” NOAA didn’t have heroes or drama. Or, rather, it had drama, and people who had done genuinely heroic things, but the American public never heard about any of it. It had people like Tim Schmit, the satellite guy, whose work had saved thousands of American lives. “NOAA has a hidden utility problem,” said Kathy. “You cannot market NOAA. You really cannot market NOAA. Over the last several decades they not only don’t get marketed. They are routinely slandered.”