Weather alerts are among the Iran War’s casualties

The Trump administration has announced it intends to carve $1.6 billion out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That is the agency that tells you if a hurricane is coming to eat your house. The folks who watch the oceans where those storms get their boots on. The folks who, before they got fired or defunded or sent packing, used to keep farmers from watching their topsoil float to the Gulf of Mexico.

This $1.6 billion will be taken from climate research, from flood prediction, from the very buoys that bob in the sea and whisper, “Heads up, Charleston.” And the administration will tell you this is necessary. Frugal. Tough choices for tough times.

But here is the punch line, and you might want to sit down for it.

That $1.6 billion—the entire price of gutting the agency that keeps Americans alive through tornado season—would not even cover two full days of the war against Iran.

Let that sink in and roll around your gizzard like a bad oyster.

Two days. Not two weeks. Not two months.

Two days of a war that didn’t need to happen, against a country whose militants have killed fewer Americans over the last forty years than lightning strikes.

Meanwhile, hurricanes—which NOAA tracks, predicts, and warns us about—have killed Americans by the bushel basket. 

We cannot afford weather balloons, but we can afford $1.2 billion a day to drop smart bombs in somebody else’s backyard.

Now, the Pentagon will tell you the war costs $25 billion so far. Then they cough and say, well, maybe $50 billion. But the independent number crunchers at Popular Information have done the math the honest way—counting what it actually costs to replace the missiles, not the fairy tale price from 2010.

Their figure for the first sixty days? Seventy-two billion dollars. That is $1.2 billion a day.

That is more money than Trump’s chicken hawks have feathers, and we are told they cannot find $1.6 billion to keep an eye on the ocean so that a family in Mobile doesn’t get washed to kingdom come.

They fired 880 people from NOAA last year. Another 400 from the fisheries division this year.

Weather offices in some states have been so thin on meteorologists they cannot cover the overnight shift, when the bad weather likes to sneak up on you like a thief.

But do not worry. The Pentagon has a $1.5 trillion budget request. They need to replace the two dozen Reaper drones Iran shot down at $30 million a pop.

Trump has his priorities, you see.

You can look this up yourself if you have the stomach for it. Janine Jackson over at FAIR—the media watchdog that actually watches the watchmen—laid it out plain as a shovel.

The Trump administration’s cut to NOAA is a penny ante amount compared to what this war burns before breakfast. But that penny ante amount will cost American lives when the next hurricane rolls in and nobody rang the bell.

And here is the real kick in the pants. Harvard’s Linda Bilmes says once you add up the lifetime disability for wounded troops, the interest on the debt, the economic chaos from closing the Strait of Hormuz—this war will cost a trillion dollars. A trillion. With a T. And we are haggling over $1.6 billion for flood gauges.

You do not need a degree in economics to see the swindle. They are taking the pocket change from the people who save your life to pay for the yacht fuel of the people who start wars for a living. And then they look you in the eye and tell you there is no money for a weather satellite.

The difference between the right word and the almost-right word was the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Well, the difference between a $1.6 billion cut to hurricane research and two days of an unnecessary war is the difference between a warning and a grave. And right now, Washington is spending all its money on the grave and calling the warning an unaffordable luxury.

That is the truth. It is not complicated. It is just shameful. And you can take that to the bank—assuming the bank hasn’t been flooded, assuming the bank hasn’t been bombed, and assuming the bank hasn’t been bankrupted by cryptocrooks.

None of which is a sure bet anymore.