Rockefeller says the disaster in Japan is a 'cruel wake-up call' to anyone going after NOAA’s budget. Dems pounce on call for NOAA cuts

Hours after an earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal Japan, Republicans are taking flak for proposed budget cuts to the National Weather Service from two familiar critics: Senate Democrats and public employees’ unions.

House Republicans in February approved a continuing budget resolution that included a $410 million budget cut for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department agency that runs the National Weather Service. The service operates a nationwide network of weather monitoring stations intended to provide advance warning for natural disasters, including tsunami-monitoring sites in Alaska and Hawaii.


West Virginia Sen. John Rockefeller said Friday that the disaster in Japan was a “cruel wake-up call” to anyone going after NOAA’s budget.

Republicans are proposing “cuts to essential NOAA prediction programs that would endanger lives,” said Rockefeller, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Commerce panel.

The weather service employees’ union had warned in February that the NOAA cuts would come largely from its division and would hurt its ability to provide early warnings to people in the path of natural disasters. Employees of the service’s Pacific Ocean monitoring station in Hawaii led the charge, saying the cuts would diminish their ability to predict and prepare for tsunamis.

After Friday’s tsunami — which rocked Japan but also swept through Hawaii and reached the West Coast — the union has not hesitated to say: “I told you so.”

“I understand the tsunami is the disaster of the day — and it’s terrible — but the bigger issue for the U.S. is that we’re coming up on tornado season, we’re coming up on hurricane season,” said Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

“The No. 1 mission of the National Weather Service is to save lives,” Sobien said. “If you start deconstructing the early warning system, something is going to fall through the cracks.”

NOAA’s budget has become an annual target for Republicans, particularly as the agency’s focus has expanded into climate change research.

But Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the House Republicans’ Appropriations panel, said the continuing resolution was never intended to go after NOAA’s weather safety programs. Instead, Hing said, the Republicans proposed a 7 percent across-the-board cut that allowed NOAA to decide which programs should be scaled back.

Hing pledged that Republicans would work with the Obama administration to preserve NOAA’s “critical life-safety operations.”