Monica Medina

And I mean, he did something that had never been done before.

He politicized the weather.

He was doing it for his own political purposes.

And that put our whole weather enterprise kind of on its back foot.

A poor young meteorologist in charge in Alabama actually started getting calls and corrected that forecast that the president had proposed.

improperly changed.

And he was then the subject of retribution in the agency.

And the person who was the lead in the agency at the time is a very person that the Trump administration has nominated and who looks like he will be confirmed any minute now.

So the risk is that they will politicize the weather.

On top of that,

They are devastating the agency with personnel cuts, and those have already happened.

They've already cut hundreds of people.

The Weather Service was a kind of shorthanded, very, you know, really well-managed, efficient and effective, and oftentimes understaffed, even in good days when we had plenty of budget.

It's hard to find people to fill these jobs everywhere around the country where we needed them.

But then they...

willy-nilly cut people, and they cut away some of the key people in these agencies.

So meteorologists in charge are the people who kind of run the forecast offices in regions of the country.

And I don't mean big regions.

I mean sometimes within a state.

So take the state of Texas.