By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
President Donald Trump’s executive-order Sharpies have done more work lately, but his most infamous Sharpie is still the one that drew a curve at the end of a hurricane forecast cone in September of 2019.
The ensuing controversy, known as Sharpiegate, was a harbinger of the fact-optional, seat-of-his-pants approach to disaster management Trump would later apply to the covid-19 pandemic, with catastrophic results. That he has now tapped a key player in the Sharpiegate drama to run the nation’s weather service suggests Trump has learned nothing from these debacles.
Trump last week nominated the scientist Neil Jacobs to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a vast organization within the Commerce Department that includes the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center. It also conducts climate research, compiling troves of data used by scientists worldwide.
On some levels, Jacobs is far from the worst person Trump could have picked. He is a bona fide atmospheric scientist, after all. He has recently been part of the Earth Prediction Innovation Center, an NOAA-affiliated research group doing important work on weather-forecasting models.
But Jacobs has one big anti-scientific stain on his resume: He was NOAA’s active head on that fateful day in 2019 when Sharpiegate erupted and was reprimanded for taking Trump’s side in the scandal. For the unfamiliar or forgetful, here are the main points:
• On Sept. 1, with Hurricane Dorian bearing down on the Southeastern U.S., Trump tweeted that “South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” He was mistaken about the Alabama part.
• Several Alabamans immediately contacted the Birmingham NWS branch in confusion about what the president had just tweeted. The Birmingham branch tweeted that no, in fact, Alabama would not be hit.
• That same day, the Jacobs-run NOAA warned other NWS meteorologists not to say anything else to contradict Trump, even though he was wrong, from the standpoint of meteorology.
• Rather than taking the L and getting down to serious hurricane preparation as most presidents would have done, Trump spent the next several days insisting that his tweet was correct and that fact-checkers were “phony.”
• At a Sept. 4 briefing, Trump displayed an NHC forecast cone for Dorian that was not only several days old but had been suspiciously expanded with a Sharpie to include Alabama. Bloomberg News reported the artwork was Trump’s. The Jacobs-led NOAA again warned the weather service to keep its collective mouth shut.
• Dorian turned north near the Bahamas and veered up the Eastern Seaboard; far, far away from Alabama, as the hurricane center had been predicting for days.
• On Sept. 6, at the urging of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the Jacobs-led NOAA issued an unsigned statement claiming Trump had been right about Alabama all along and slamming the Birmingham NWS for daring to contradict him.
• This betrayal made several scientists’ heads explode, inside and outside NOAA, and led to many investigations.
One of those probes found that Jacobs had violated NOAA’s scientific-integrity rules by caving to Ross’ demands, which had reportedly traveled down the chain of command from Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
In a speech during the controversy, Jacobs tried to reassure his forecasters they were under “no pressure to change the way you communicate or forecast risk in the future,” and he defended the Birmingham NWS for trying to calm public nerves. In an email released to BuzzFeed News in 2020, Jacobs told one critic, “You have no idea how hard I’m fighting to keep politics out of science.”
At the same time, Jacobs also claimed the whole scandal had been “blown way out of proportion and politicized.” More crucially, when the pressure was really on, Jacobs’ dedication to fighting for science ended with Ross. He feared that he and other people at NOAA would lose their jobs if they didn’t comply, a Commerce Department inspector general later found. And with good reason; Ross reportedly threatened to take heads over this ridiculous issue. But even before Ross’ threat, NOAA was shushing meteorologists who might contradict the president.
And as important as a few jobs might be, NOAA’s integrity and reputation are infinitely more important. People must have unquestioning faith in the reliability of NWS statements, which often save lives. This is especially key when a hotter planet is making natural disasters more dangerous and destructive. And NWS forecasters shouldn’t have to spend one second of their day questioning whether scientifically valid statements will get them fired.
That’s even more of an open question now, in the second Trump administration, than it was during the first. Science itself is under direct assault this time, with research funding squeezed and information disappearing from websites around the federal government, including critical climate data.
Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency minions of the unelected Elon Musk recently bulled their way into NOAA, seeking access to its IT systems and possibly workers to fire. Musk is a far more persistent and energetic menace than, say, Ross. Can Jacobs stand up to him?
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term, calls for dismantling NOAA and privatizing critical NWS services. Jacobs once worked for a private forecaster, Panasonic Weather Solution, and has suggested such companies have better models because they’re more nimble than creaky government agencies that require lots of tedious testing. That may be true, but the optimal solution for society is to fix the government’s models, not hide them behind a paywall.
Based on Trump’s track record, we can guess that Jacobs’ most important qualification for this job is probably not his sterling scientific chops or even possible sympathy for Project 2025 but the fact that he was loyal to Trump that one time. This is no way to run a government. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tim O’Brien wrote of Sharpiegate in 2019, “This is how good government decays when it’s compromised by a cult of personality.”
We got a far-grimmer example about that just months later, when covid hit an unprepared Trump administration, which tried to censor its scientists to burnish the image of Trump, who by then had moved on from amateur weather forecasting to suggesting people take horse dewormer and inject disinfectant. The message then, as now, is that when Trump tries to bend all of science to his will, there’s no limit to how far he’ll go or how much damage he can do.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
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