We're Not Getting Any of This Money Back

The government is shrinking by the day and what will replace it is worse.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget for last year was $6.72 billion. That money, which is less than what the government is expected to spend on a single next-generation attack submarine, funds the National Weather Service, National Climactic Data Service, and millions of dollars in grants and funding to programs that cover basically everything that happens in the air and in the sea. It funds tsunami buoys and fish conservation projects, provides weather reports and vast repositories of data used by scientists all over the world. It also buys a not-insignificant number of submarines, although not ones capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

On Tuesday, staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency entered the NOAA headquarters outside of Washington D.C. and started poking around.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” one former NOAA official told the Guardian. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

DOGE, as Musk’s department is called, originated from what seemed like throwaway campaign bluster back in August of last year. In the past week, it has seemed more like a shadow cabinet directing most of the Trump administration’s actions — all in the name of “reducing government spending” in flashy ways, like gutting the entire USAID. The department has not, as yet, done anything with the Department of Defense, but that’s beside the point. Instead, as in the case of NOAA, it appears to be slashing the last refuges of actual government spending in the public interest and laying the ground for all of the services they provide to be sold by private companies.

It’s not chaos, anymore, as I wrote last week. The plan is pretty clear.