Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman tore into what he called President Donald Trump’s “war on science” Tuesday in a column, ripping into the administration's cuts on weather research.
“Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money,” Krugman wrote. “They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting ‘La, la, la, we can’t hear you.’”
Krugman’s column comes in the wake of the deadly flood in central Texas on July 4 that claimed the lives of at least 134 people, with many critics casting blame on the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to federal agencies that conduct weather research.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Weather Service, is facing a 40% budget cut, with a Trump budget proposal calling for around $2.3 billion less in spending for the upcoming fiscal year.
While Trump administration officials have defended the cuts as part of Trump’s efforts to reduce federal spending, some experts say the cuts to NOAA and other weather research efforts will, in the long run, increase spending.
"Hurricane response costs become greater when you have a poorer forecast,” said James Franklin, former chief of the National Hurricane Center, speaking with Krugman. “That’s a lot of cost savings that we seem willing to give up here. We’re going to turn off all that potential savings by saying we don’t care if the forecasts don’t continue to get better.”
Krugman also took aim at the timing of the proposed cuts, being proposed just weeks after the deadly Texas flood, where allegations remain of a muted, inadequate government response to the tragedy.
“The Trump administration is getting ready to effectively zero out the research that underlies improvements in weather forecasting,” he wrote.
“This includes shuttering the lab that sends teams of hurricane hunters into storms to collect data and drastically cutting a program that maintains river gauges to help predict floods. In this case Trump and company aren’t shrinking government, they’re basically dismantling it.”