Doge staffers enter Noaa headquarters and incite reports of cuts and threats
www.theguardian.com
Members reportedly sought access to IT systems at agency that Project 2025 has called ‘harmful to US prosperity’

Summary

Elon Musk’s staffers entered NOAA and the Department of Commerce without clearance, raising concerns over budget cuts and downsizing.

Project 2025, a conservative plan linked to former Trump officials, calls for dismantling NOAA, citing its climate research as harmful to U.S. prosperity.

Critics warn such cuts could impact weather forecasting, ocean conservation, and fisheries.

NOAA declined to comment, while experts fear an aggressive strategy to weaken the agency before legal challenges can halt changes.

  • logicbomb@lemmy.world
    42·
    7 hours ago

    I remember when Musk bought Twitter and then immediately started trying to save money by literally just turning off services to see what breaks.

    That actually wouldn’t have been the stupidest idea if he had done it in a test environment rather than production, or even if Twitter was a small website that didn’t mind downtime. But he did it in production on a huge site that people relied on being up, so it actually was the stupidest idea.

    And now he’s bringing the same stupidest energy to government. No investigation. No calculation. Just a toddler who has been put in front of a lot of switches.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Unless twitter had a test system doing millions of varying actions a second, I’m not sure a test environment would find those problems, or at least not quickly. Sometimes those services get added to help spread loads that you might not encounter otherwise.

      Tbh I’m not sure what level of automated testing these sites have, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the services are tested in isolation at scale, but not against each other at scale, and that there’s some general understanding that the link between them at scale is okay if both individually are okay?

      Still absolutely terrible to do that to a live environment.