Former NOAA Leader Monica Medina Issues Major Warning

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1:00Ben Meiselas:I want you to watch. This is from August 27, 2024. Let's play it. You know, the fact is the Republicans have put out a plan. It's called Project 2025. And people like Bill McKibben have written about this in The Nation. And it is a very detailed plan for how to dismantle our federal infrastructure. Things like getting rid of the National Oceanic and atmospheric administration, which literally just keeps track of, you know, data around what is happening to our earth. You know, they want to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency. We saw what a first Trump administration would do, rolling back, you know, almost 100 environmental rules, pulling us out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

1:37And what does a well-organized second Trump administration look like? If you want to know what it looks like, look at that Project 2025 document. It's very scary. By contrast, what the Biden folks want to do is they want to keep delivering it.

1:53Ben Meiselas:And Donald Trump said, I know nothing about Project 2025, which of course he did. And then all of the reporting out there was trying to fact check people who said, no, here's what they're going to do. And then all the fact checkers and corporate news would say, but he's saying that he's not going to do those things. So we think that you're just being a fear mongerer. It's like, no, this is what he's saying he's going to do. Well, here we are right now. He's ripped apart the NOAA. He's ripping apart FEMA. He's ripping apart all of these critical agencies in addition to ripping apart defense apparatus, the government shutdown.

2:33Ben Meiselas:Let me show you this. This is a Russ vote right here. But talking about what Trump's real priorities are, which is changing the Rose Garden to a club, buying Qatari jets and things like that. Here, let's play this clip. The President is revamping the Rose Garden for a second time. He's overhauling a 747, spending billions of dollars when it's only going to use as Air Force One for possibly a year. Are you concerned about that spending too? We have a lot of administration priorities. And I hope what you've learned from our first term, this term. We need to spend in areas. We need ships. We need aircraft.

3:12Ben Meiselas:We need a new presidential plane that's been in the works and been delayed. Yeah, that's where their priorities are. One dollar commemorative Trump coins, 90 ,000 square foot ballrooms, UFC fights in front of the White House, taxpayers funding Donald Trump's golf outings, including during the government shutdown. Meanwhile, things like NOAA are getting gutted and dismantled. So I want to bring in Monica Medina, former Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. It was within the State Department. And then before that, during the Obama administration, the former principal deputy undersecretary at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is like the number two right there.

4:04Ben Meiselas:But the day to day kind of, you know, one of the day to day leaders of what was going on in NOAA. So it's great to see you. So why don't we start first with NOAA and weather services and what's being cut? And from what you saw as a leader in NOAA versus what's going on now, you know, it's one of those things that's every now and then when there's a storm, it'll get attention briefly. And then the media kind of stops talking about it. But it's one of the most critical things. We've seen so many natural disasters that have been taking place already that kind of get swept under the rug. I mean, we've heard so many situations across the country where dozens of people have died in the past six months.

4:49Ben Meiselas:And in normal times, we kind of talk about it. But now it's somehow like maybe half a day story. We still talk about it here. So first off, great to see you. Great to have you on. We'd love to hear from you on that. Thank you so much, Ben, for having me. And thanks for everything you do every day to bring all of this to light. What the Trump administration is doing is absolutely gutting. One of the nation's best little engines of progress and one of the government's most effective tools at keeping our country and Americans every day safe and efficient and effective and able to do their jobs and keeping them out of harm's way.

5:29And in that moment of sort of budget cutting, Project 2025, you know, absurd cuts to parts of the government that are not expensive and that provide services to people, everyday people, 24-7, every day, year in and year out, make your life better. It's just, it's tragic. A government agency like NOAA is about 10 ,000 people. They're spread around the country. They're not bureaucrats sitting in some tower in Washington, you know, shuffling papers. There are people in communities all over the country that are bringing accurate weather forecasts so that transportation can happen, so that we can, you know, have farm products that we need to keep our food on our table so that we have insurance that we can afford because we are predicting and preparing ourselves for the climate that we see is changing.

6:27So NOAA is a wonderful agency full of people who are dedicated to making Americans safer. It's part of our homeland security defenses. And they are just recklessly and chaotically cutting the agency. And it's just tragic because we will have a hard time putting it all back together again.

6:48Ben Meiselas:Talk about your work in the State Department. Again, it's one of these positions that's so critical, especially coordinating from an international perspective, which this current administration I call regime has pulled us away from all of these international links because weather doesn't just exist over the over the United States. And it is critical that America was a leader in this space when you were in charge. And now we've seeded that role. How does that talk to us about what you were doing and talk to us now about what it looks like today and why that's dangerous? What is happening today is that the cuts to our weather forecasting not only hurt us in communities and, you know, in local areas and states across our nation, but it also hurts us globally because we are part of a bigger weather enterprise.

7:47The weather systems that we experience are not localized at all. In fact, they're part of Earth's system. And without observations from all over the world, we can't make the best forecast for us, and we can't help others who need those forecasts. And so we will be more and more dependent on, say, the European satellites and their forecasts, but we aren't paying for them, and we're not cooperating, and we're not providing them data. So we're kind of letting down the rest of the world and we're creating the conditions where, you know, say our transportation systems, our airplanes, our ships need accurate forecasts.

8:28Our military defenses need accurate forecasts around the world. We'll be less and less capable of doing that the more we degrade our own weather service. And you know who's going to catch up to us? China. We have always had a better weather forecasting capability than the Chinese. But the minute we start to degrade ours, they're going to continue to invest just like they have in things like chips and in solar panels and batteries and everything else in the technology realm where they're trying to catch us or passing us. This is going to be just another place where we lose our edge. And we are an incredibly depend.

9:06We are incredibly dependent on our weather forecast because our country is so big and our weather is so dynamic. We really need these forecasts to be the best they can be in order for our economy to hum, for us to have the kind of efficiency and effectiveness that we've gotten used to. You know, we used to not be able to anticipate when a big storm would come and we'd have all kinds of flight cancellations and people would be stranded in all kinds of places. And now we can see those things coming and we can plan for them. The same thing happens, you know, if there's a storm and our ports need to shut down, we can plan for that.

9:41There are really important business needs that these weather forecasts rely on. And we've been a good partner globally in the World Meteorological Organization. And we partnered with lots of other countries. And now we're going to be letting them down and degrading our own forecasts at the same time.

10:00Ben Meiselas:Talk about the human toll this shutdown is having. And really before the shutdown, it feels to me that Trump likes this shutdown because it gives him an excuse to do what he was frankly doing already. I mean, to me, the government before was in a de facto shutdown with all of the terminations and reduction in forces. And you know these people well. I mean, you led huge teams of hundreds, thousands of people in these agencies. And I don't think the country knows who these like you like. These are human beings. These are people who are scientists, who have areas and expertise, who would quietly show up to work, wouldn't be on TV, every day doing the work, compiling data, working in teams to do a service for this country, not for fame or fortune, just to do it.

11:01Ben Meiselas:And they're suffering. I know you've been speaking to a lot of them since the beginning of this administration when they started implementing Project 2025. I know right now, too, during the government shutdown, the same talk to us. How has that changed? How has that progressed? Tell us about that. So let me talk to you about two things that I think tell the story. First is during the first Trump administration. Some of you probably remember that time when the President Trump took out a Sharpie and changed the hurricane forecast. And I mean, he did something that had never been done before. He politicized the weather.

11:38He was doing it for his own political purposes. And that put our whole weather enterprise kind of on its back foot. But a poor young meteorologist in charge in Alabama actually started getting calls and corrected that forecast that the president had improperly changed. And he was then the subject of retribution in the agency. And the person who was the lead in the agency at the time is the very person that the Trump administration has nominated and who looks like he will be confirmed any minute now. So the risk is that they will politicize the weather. On top of that, they are devastating the agency with personnel cuts, and those have already happened.

12:21They've already cut hundreds of people. The Weather Service was a kind of shorthanded, very, you know, really well-managed, efficient and effective, and oftentimes understaffed even in good days. When we had plenty of budget, it's hard to find people to build these jobs everywhere around the country where we needed them. But then they willy nilly cut people and they cut away some of the key people in these agencies. So meteorologists in charge are the people who kind of run the forecast offices in regions of the country. And I don't mean big regions. I mean, sometimes within a state. So take the state of Texas, the meteorologist in charge of the area where the devastating storm hit this summer and where so many people were tragically killed by the storm.

13:14The meteorologist in charge position was empty. And what does that mean? Well, yes, the forecast was issued because the people who were there still trying to hold the thing, the whole operation together, even though they were shorthanded, were able to issue the forecast. But what doesn't happen is the person who knows how to get in touch with the camp administrator at those camps isn't able to make the calls because that person's gone. And so we lose the connective tissue that is a key part of our social fabric, our safety net, the way that we respond to these disasters as a community. And those people, like I said, are not bureaucrats sitting in Washington behind some desk pushing paper, unlike the FEMA administrator at the time who was too busy to show up to work over that weekend.

14:07These are people who show up every day and they don't make their forecast based on how they voted in the last election. They do it in order to keep people safe. But when we have huge holes in the actual staffing of these agencies, things fall through the cracks. And that's just a good example of a place where, yes, the storm forecast was out and it was on time. But we lost some of the people who are crucial to keeping everyone safe when, you know, a storm happens in the middle of the night, which happens a lot. So it is crucial that we fully staff these positions. And the Trump administration then scrambled to try and replace people in them.

14:53But it's hard to do. And a lot of people didn't want to go back and risk being furloughed or fired again. And so we really are much less safe and protected against these disasters. And I wouldn't call them natural because they're climate driven. They're driven by the pollution that we put in the atmosphere every day by burning fossil fuels. These climate disasters are getting more and more intense. They're putting more people in harm's way. And so at just the very time when we should be increasing our investment and doing more to understand these bigger forces in the weather that are around us, we are cutting back and putting ourselves in a much more vulnerable position, having to depend on data from other countries and really, you know, leaving a lot of citizens at risk.

15:45And it's it's reckless. It's just not necessary because these agencies cost pennies a day for every American. They're a cup of coffee a year to have these weather forecasts. I can't imagine there's a single American who wouldn't pay five dollars to have those kind of weather forecasts. And the private weather services all depend on the government's forecast in order to make their beautiful forecast that you get on your phone every day. You wouldn't have those if it weren't for the people in those jobs 24-7 churning out forecasts and who are willing to make the most difficult forecasts, which are the ones about those extreme weather events.

16:28Private Weather Services won't be able to do that without the National Weather Service fully staffed and fully functioning.

16:34Ben Meiselas:You know, it's in our Constitution. I'll tell people when you look up the duties of Congress, it is to advance the sciences. It was put there literally, you know, 200 years ago. So, you know, this was recognized as how important it was then. And now it seems like we've taken a giant 250-year step backwards. So before we go, I want to ask you, you know, what keeps, you know, knowing what you know from inside the State Department and what it is now versus when you were there, inside NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, when you were there, and knowing what's happened to it now and with you talking, I want to know what keeps you up at night and what people should be most afraid about.

17:24Ben Meiselas:And I'm not saying this to fear monger people. I just want them to know what is really happening because this is, to me, a three alarm fire. And before just tossing it over to you, I'll note that it's not like we've been without deadly storms that have very, to me, suspicious weather forecast types of situations that the media barely is even covering. And it's like, why didn't we know that? Or, you know, whether it was tornadoes, horrible weather events, you know, that have taken place. And it's not like the loss of any life is horrible. But over this past nine months with Trump, you know, there's been real horrific weather events resulting in massive casualties and massive deaths that don't even get talked about, don't even get acknowledged as a thing that happened.

18:13Ben Meiselas:And, you know, it It reminds me a lot of kind of COVID where you'd see these numbers, 3 ,000 people died today, 2 ,000, and you don't even are able to deal with it. So anyway, let me toss it to you before we go. What are you most fearful about knowing these cuts to Noah? What worries me the most is actually the disinformation that comes out of the Trump administration, the fact that they say that climate change is a hoax, The fact that they actually some people on the right, for example, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, say things like the government was putting the disastrous weather into the places where they thought their political enemies were.

19:00that there was some kind of weather, you know, modification happening out there to put people in harm's way by Democrats. That's insane. That's just not true. And that's what worries me the most because it erodes the public's confidence in those very forecasts that have never been politicized before, that have always just been based on the science and our data. And the fact that this disinformation is happening and causing an erosion of trust in these very basic services that the government has always provided, as you said, since its founding. NOAA was one of the original parts of NOAA were the Weather Forecasting Bureau that went back all the way to Thomas Jefferson and to Ben Franklin.

19:49And so the idea that now people are putting out disinformation about our ability to modify the weather in order to make people afraid and to discount or ignore the good warnings that they get. I mean, you look at the at the videos from people in Texas who actually thought that the weather forecasts couldn't be trusted because the Biden administration had been in charge of them before. It's just crazy. And that's a shame because that is the essential function of government, which is to keep people safe from harm that they can't really deal with as individuals. That's the essence of government. And they're undermining every bit of what used to be sort of apolitical and there just to protect people.

20:44And I, you know, whether it's our military or our civil defenses, we see this erosion and confidence in science, in government, that to me is tragic and will take a long time to rebuild.

21:00Ben Meiselas:I really want to thank you for joining us. And by the way, you've got your own podcast, Scientista, that everybody should take a listen to. And I want to make sure that you and I do more work together. I think it's super important to promote science and to promote everything that you're doing. Monica Medina, thanks so much for joining us. Ben, thank you so much. Keep it up. Thank you, everybody. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, ad-free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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