The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its embattled head Dr. Jane Lubchenco are again the target of criticism after the director of the National Weather Service, Jack Hayes, resigned abruptly on Memorial Day weekend.
An environmental watchdog group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), informed the Washington Post when it learned that Hayes had been replaced and the story has since been widely reported.
An internal investigation has uncovered ongoing financial irregularities at the weather service, according to a NOAA memo. In fiscal 2012 alone, up to $35 million may have been "reprogrammed," the term employed by NOAA to describe what has taken place, the memo said.
"This is a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, a national organization of federal, state and local employees who work in the environmental field. Structural deficits were built into the National Weather Service budget according to Ruch. "They were using appropriated funds to backfill general operations in a sort of budgetary Ponzi scheme," he said.
A 60-page report produced by NOAA found that, for at least the past two years, the agency has been shifting appropriated funds from a number of its designated programs and using them to cover other expenses and to help avoid employee furloughs, according to Ruch.
Using appropriated funds for any purpose other than what is intended is a violation of the Anti Deficiency Act and that is a crime, he said.
'Hide the pickle' is a game played among German Americans, where a Christmas ornament in the form of a pickle is hidden on the This kind of behavior has long been a criticism of NOAA (2011 budget $5.6 billion). When times are bad, they find ways to retract their external programs to protect their staff, and when times are good, they expand their staff as much as possible in anticipation of lean times to come.
IMHO, the weather service is one of the more critical branches of NOAA, and I find it hard to fault protecting it. But the law is the law...
"The investigation found no evidence of corruption or personal financial gain," said Scott Smullen, NOAA's deputy director of communications, in an email. Expenses were transferred improperly, he acknowledged. "But those expenses were used for legitimate NWS services and functions. We do not believe any money was moved out of the National Weather Service."
National Weather Service employees were attempting to protect parts of the budget that, in their mind, were chronically underfunded, he said. NOAA is citing privacy issues for its failure to make the report public. "It is now being redacted and will be released later," Smullen said.
Ruch speculated that NOAA's fiscal woes stem from the cost of operating a new generation of weather satellites. "It sounds like they have a hungry cannibal in their fiscal closet," he said. "NOAA has been having a disastrous budgetary season and with this on top of it, their credibility on the Hill is less than zero."
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