Making headlines the last day, the story about how the Tea Party Republican's first budget (H.R.1) proposed cutting NOAA funding 21% from NOAA's appropriations request for FY2011, which would make it about 8% below 2010 levels. If Congress and the President had agreed to the Tea Party Republican's cuts, NOAA's weather satellite upgrade program would most certainly be stopped in its tracks.
More apropos however, is that it could have led to cuts in the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
Ultimately, it would have been up to NOAA to determine where the cuts were, and certainly the Tea Party Republican intention wasn't to cut the PTWC, but instead directed to prevent NOAA from documenting changes to the climate by preventing an upgrade to its satellites, IT infrastructure and ship fleet, while cutting research dollars for ongoing science projects.
If you group Homeland Security, Military Construction and Defense spending together, the Tea Party Republicans proposed to cut just 2.9%, while everything else would be cut 18.1%. Interestingly enough, the Tea Party Republicans proposed to cut the Legislative Branch spending 12.9%, while cutting Agriculture 21.7% -- shows where the Tea Party Republicans' priorities are.
No comments:
Post a Comment