With regard to the controversy concerning the National Weather Service (NWS) being ordered to lie to back up the President, I see in yesterday’s WaPo that Neil Jacobs did in fact protest the order to inform the NWS to back up the President’s tweet and not contradict him in the future, and that now he’s trying to repair the damage:
Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sent an all-staff email Friday afternoon in an apparent effort to repair damage from an unusual Sept. 6 statement that sided with President Trump rather than agency weather forecasters. …
The Washington Post learned Jacobs and NOAA chief of staff Julie Kay Roberts were involved in crafting the statement, which admonished the Weather Service’s Birmingham office for speaking “in absolute terms.” However, Jacobs fought issuing such a statement and also tried to block the paragraph that called out the Birmingham Weather Service office but lost both those arguments, according to two people who spoke to The Post.
I’m not inclined to apologize for my suggestion that Jacobs resign in disgrace. Jacobs should have resigned in a public display of defiance, protecting the critical importance of the independence of NOAA and its devotion to integrity, and not the emotional and political fragilities of the President. He also may have laid the blame for that mistaken order at the feet of whoever gave it, reportedly Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
That said, I can and do acknowledge that he may see himself as a moral bulwark against the President’s unethical desires, and serves the Nation better quietly working to preserve the independence of those agencies in his purview, rather than making a splashy flame out in the atmosphere.
In the closing line of his email, Jacobs touched on that very topic: “Our team is committed to upholding scientific integrity.”
I disagree with that judgment, but I can see it.
