What The Hell America!

The secretary of commerce is personally reviewing all contracts with commitments above $100,000 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, causing backups and uncertainty in the agency that is responsible for the country’s weather forecasts, marine fisheries management and coastal management. NOAA is housed within the Department of Commerce.

Howard Lutnick is reviewing all NOAA contracts above $100,000, according to three agency employees who spoke anonymously out of fear of retribution at work.

There are hundreds of such contracts across the agency that need to be reviewed each year and several that have been paused or otherwise impacted by the secretary’s review, according to an agency employee familiar with the contracting process.

They include maintenance and service contracts for facilities like NOAA’s headquarters in Maryland, where the bathrooms are running out of toilet paper; a contract for translating emergency alerts into other languages, which lapsed last week; and web-hosting contracts for key agency websites that almost went dark last week.

It’s “just kind of a train wreck,” says a NOAA staffer who spoke with NPR anonymously out of fear of retribution at their job.

In the past, NOAA contracts would be reviewed when end dates neared, or during prescheduled interim reviews. Rarely did contracts lapse. It is out of the ordinary for the commerce secretary to personally review them, current and former NOAA officials told NPR.

“Decisions are being made with little or no regard for the technical merit of the value of the contracts,” says Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA during the Biden administration.

The Commerce Department did not return NPR’s request for comment.

NOAA studies Earth’s oceans and atmospheres, researches and manages the United States’ oceanic fisheries, and is home to the National Weather Service. If you get your weather from an app on your phone, the data that feeds that forecast is collected and processed by NOAA. The agency has shed hundreds of employees in recent weeks through firings and retirements, the outcome of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the size of the federal government. Further cuts to staff and programs are expected at the agency in the coming weeks.

Websites nearly went down

Some contracts have come under review because they are set to expire. Others, like a contract with Amazon Web Services, are being reviewed early.

The AWS contract served NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research branch, the main research arm of the organization. Science from OAR helps improve weather forecasts, understand Earth’s changing climate, and track hazards like tornadoes and hurricanes.

It runs sites that make NOAA data and information accessible to the general public, like the websites for the Climate Program Office, the Sea Grant program, and drought.gov. Those sites are hosted by Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud platform.

Cancellation of the contract would have led to those sites going dark overnight on April 4, a source inside the agency told NPR. It is unclear whether the sites and the data and information they host would be recoverable. But an internal analysis, viewed by NPR, suggests “100% unrecoverable data loss” was possible.

Staff members at OAR were informed that the contracts were under review and likely to be canceled on April 3, according to three staff members within the agency who spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution. The news set off an overnight scramble to figure out ways to back up the sites or find other ways to host them because there was no plan for how to preserve the sites or the critical information they contain.

Last-minute negotiations led to a reprieve — the AWS contract must be renegotiated by the end of July. But the near lapse sent NOAA staff into triage mode.

If the sites had gone down, or go down in the future, farmers looking for seasonal drought forecasts would encounter a dead link. Coastal managers looking for ways to protect their communities from high-tide flooding wouldn’t find mapping tools to help them figure out where to focus their efforts.

The dropout would also have affected work at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the group that works on severe weather research. NSSL uses Amazon Web Services to help ingest radar information that feeds into weather forecasting. Catastrophic rain, storms and tornadoes ripped across the U.S. last week.

Other projects under threat

NOAA relies heavily on contractors for both personnel and services. For some of its offices, contractors make up about half of all personnel.

That reliance on contracts has put much of the agency’s work in limbo.

Some 50% of the personnel who work with NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management are contractors, for example. OCM operates tools like the Digital Coast, which coastal managers use to help plan for coastal flooding or future infrastructure placement. Those staff members have been furloughed until later in the year, the state of their future contracts unclear, according to a NOAA staffer speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.

Other contracts under review are for services. Last week, Axios reported that another major contract that supported a key National Weather Service program came within hours of lapsing. The Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System is used to process meteorological data and communicate it across the agency and to the public.

Another contract that nearly lapsed last week could have resulted in communications failures during the extreme weather that swept across the Midwest and East in recent days, according to a NOAA staffer who was not authorized to speak publicly. And the contract with an AI company that provides translations of National Weather Service emergency alerts into other languages lapsed April 1.

Contracts for routine services to the National Marine Fisheries Service are also in play, jeopardizing the office’s ability to update fish catch limits.

NOAA staff members fear ongoing disruptions to their work if contracts continue to be canceled or allowed to lapse.

“Lots of stuff will break,” a NOAA staffer said. “It’s just a matter of time.”