Government is not bad.
Repeat that to yourself over and over. Say it out loud. Stand in front of the mirror and watch yourself say it until you believe it.
Because it’s true, and it’s way, way past time that people stop holding the thoroughly ignorant, self-harming belief that government, as a whole, is bad. Or wasteful. Or intrusive. Or incompetent.
Oh, to be certain, there are portions of government that are all of those things. But they exist at the micro level. Down where we’re talking about mismanaged departments within certain agencies or rude employees or incompetent agents or misguided policies.
Unfortunately, though, because we all deal with government on a near-daily basis, in one form or another, and because government stretches to all corners of life, it is somewhat common to run into one of those isolated “bad” parts of government. That has helped contribute to the impression that all government is bad.
Which then leads to idiotic, self-defeating scenes like a drug-fueled egomaniac arbitrarily cutting “government waste” by simply gutting various government programs — particularly those that the average person doesn’t really understand — and declaring massive savings.
Except, two things: First, the savings are nonsense. That whole DOGE experiment (disaster would be a better word) likely saved the country less than $100 billion in on-paper savings — all of which will be negated by the massive number of lawsuit settlements and legal fees that will be paid out. Not to mention, what little was cut was mostly cut from programs that served the neediest among us around the world.
And that brings us to the second thing: The other cuts came to programs that most Americans don’t really understand and don’t really appreciate … until they need them.
Like, say, the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Nerds! Right?
Sounds like we were wasting billions of dollars on paying a bunch of nerds to look at weather radars and tell us if it was going to rain next week. Surely a robot could do that by now.
Turns out, not so much.
Alabama’s most famous weatherman, James Spann, who makes a point of staying out of political discussions, began sounding the alarm over anticipated cuts at the NWS a couple of months ago. He warned that those cuts could have dire consequences in terms of meteorologists’ abilities to predict storms and catastrophic weather events.
He has not been alone.
For weeks now, weathermen across the country have warned that DOGE-initiated cuts to NWS and NOAA are going to quickly lead to very big problems.
It hasn’t made a dent.
The Trump administration has laid off thousands of workers at NOAA and NWS, and at the National Hurricane Center. The short staffing has resulted in less data collection by the agencies. It has hampered tracking abilities. It has limited the number of physical collections that can be conducted.
But who cares, right? So what if a bunch of weather nerds can’t send up their weather balloons and measure wind speeds and that “bahr-matric pressure?” Elon probably needs that money for a rocket contract or another yacht or something.
John Morales would like a word.
For more than three decades, Morales has served as South Florida’s version of Spann – a trusted, no-BS weather guy who Floridians have turned to when hurricanes were bearing down. And for all that time, Morales has been a straight shooter, telling people what to expect – and doing a damn fine job – based on what forecast guidance from the NWS and NOAA had provided him.
But earlier this week, Morales had another message for the folks he serves: Those forecasts he gives might not be so accurate anymore.
Morales went into significant detail explaining how the Trump cuts to NWS and NOAA are affecting the accuracy of forecasts — degrading them, he said. He used an example on air from a previous forecast he provided in 2019, airing a clip of him telling viewers that the Category 5 hurricane that was bearing down on Florida was going to turn and miss the state. With confidence, Morales told the viewers not to worry.
“I’m not sure I can do that this year, because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general,” he said.
Swell.
Guys like Morales and Spann, they don’t have a political agenda. They aren’t woke. They’re not pushing for government waste. They’re people who do a tough job, and who want to do a good job because people’s lives quite literally depend on them.
And providing a vital service that saves lives doesn’t meet the definition of government waste.
The fact is, every part of government was designed and implemented to serve a need in this country. If there is waste, fraud and abuse within certain agencies, those things exist separately from the goals of the agencies. And we should identify that waste, fraud and abuse and clean it all up.
But we have to stop this idiotic approach to government, where we simply declare we hate it all. Yes, doing that alleviates the responsibility we have as Americans to monitor our government and be active participants in it, but it doesn’t make our government at any level more efficient or less incompetent.
It just makes it easier for grifters and goobers to take advantage of us, and it puts us all in danger.
