Jacob Soboroff

Hundreds of JPL and Caltech employees lost their homes in the Eaton fire.

Yet they are still working every day to try to figure out how to fight, you know, the fires of the future.

That's happening at the same time as the NASA Earth Sciences Program is happening.

on the potential chopping block under this administration.

The same can be said of NIOSH, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

I went to Morgantown, West Virginia, and stood on a street corner as workers there protested the cuts from Doge at the beginning of this administration, some of which were gonna eliminate

workers that dealt with firefighter health and safety in the aftermath of fires just like this.

What happens if a firefighter dies?

How do we study that?

What do we do?

The National Weather Service, where Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dave Gomberg predicted the outcome of this fire, has lost employees and meteorologists at offices around the country.

Within health and human services, there have been changes to the operational structure of how responses happen to disasters like this.

So I think that it's such a dynamic situation because it's not just the people on the ground, but it's the way in which we understand the fires, we predict them, and then we respond to them in the aftermath.

The billion-dollar disaster registry at NOAA...

was effectively eliminated by this administration.

We may never officially know the toll, the cost of this fire because Adam Smith, the lead project researcher on that project left his job and is no longer there.

And for decades, we have tracked natural disasters that have been fueled largely by climate change through the federal government.

We're no longer doing that and there will no longer be an official estimate.

It's been essentially picked up by the private sector, nongovernmental organizations.

That's sort of the landscape of where we are at as it relates especially to the federal government under this administration to respond to and mitigate natural disasters.