Shot (CBS News):

Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were confused and dispirited on Monday after the acting head of the agency said during a daily briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season…

(I’m not surprised that the assclown who claimed not to know that Category 5 hurricanes exist hired this guy.)

Chaser (The Register):

Satellite data used for hurricane forecasting was to be abruptly cut off from the end of June due to “recent service changes,” but the department in charge has now put the date off another month.

[…]

It is unclear why the department is so abruptly terminating the service, particularly since there does not appear to be a replacement planned. […] Some observers have suggested that DoD security concerns are to blame. Others have pointed to a general antipathy toward climate science in the current US regime.

Either way, the data loss will blow a substantial hole in the hurricane forecasting capabilities of scientists.

…in other words, now we’ll be that much less able to predict the track of hurricanes, and people on the coast will therefore have less time to prepare or evacuate…

The Register’s story mentioned that those satellites had “far exceeded their original mission life” and that, though at least one replacement had been launched, its data “isn’t currently available to forecasters.”

The question is why? The feds are expending some effort to avoid saying anything:

The Defense Department referred questions to the Air Force, which referred them to the Navy, which did not immediately provide comment. NOAA did not immediately respond to a message.

Why, though? There are a few possible motives:

1. I can see this administration lying about there being some nebulous “security concerns.” I can also imagine some idiot in this administration believing that hackers can colony-drop a satellite into a city or something.

2. “General antipathy toward climate science” is more believable. Sure, accurate heavy-weather forecasting has little to do with “climate change” research, but again, these people are idiots.

3. General antipathy toward the ordinary people who’ll suffer from less-predictable hurricanes would also be believable.

4. The “smartest” possible motive here, and therefore the least believable, is that they’re trying to sucker us all into coomplaining about this, only to announce a couple weeks from now that there are actually three new satellites we didn’t know about, their data will be available to forecasters immediately, and we were all fools not to trust the Assclown Administration’s wisdom and benevolence.

The second smartest thing – and probably the best rresult we can hope for – would be for the Assclown Administration to walk this decision back, like they’ve done with some of DOGE’s fuckups, and try to pretend that #4 was the plan all along.

P.S. I wonder if Trump knows that the US government owns GPS. If #3 above is true and he’s looking for cheap ways to make ordinarry people’s lives worse…