Latest news with #Dillen
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
NOAA Puts 2 Officials Who Investigated Trump For Changing A Forecast Map On Leave
Two top officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who investigated President Donald Trump's disinformation about a 2019 hurricane have been placed on administrative leave. Stephen Volz is an assistant administrator for NOAA's Satellite and Information Service. Jeff Dillen serves as NOAA deputy general counsel. Both were placed on leave Friday, CNN first reported. 'Mr. Dillen was placed on administrative leave by the department's senior career attorney pending a review of performance issues over the past several weeks,' NOAA communications director Kim Doster said in a statement to HuffPost. 'Separately, Dr. Volz was placed on administrative leave on an unrelated matter.' Both Dillen and Volz led an investigation into Trump using a Sharpie to draw on a map of a forecast for Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Trump did it to indicate the storm would go over Alabama. It didn't. Following Trump's false claim, the National Weather Service's Birmingham, Alabama, office tweeted out: 'Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.' NOAA then released a statement defending Trump's false claim and criticizing the Birmingham office for speaking 'in absolute terms.' 'The information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,' the statement said. 'The Birmingham National Weather Service's Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.' The storm never hit Alabama, and the investigation led by Dillen and Volz found that NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs and another official violated the agency's scientific integrity policy. Jacobs is now Trump's pick to head NOAA. If confirmed by the Senate, he has promised to make 'staffing the Weather Service offices a top priority' after the Trump administration slashed around 600 jobs at the critical agency this year. 'One office already does so much that having to help other offices is going to become so much more work,' a general forecaster at the NWS told HuffPost after cuts to the agency in March. 'I think everyone is worried about what this is leading to, and it's quite intimidating and scary.'
NBC News
5 days ago
- Politics
- NBC News
Two high-ranking NOAA employees connected to 'Sharpiegate' incident put on leave
Two top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials who both played a role in the high-profile 'Sharpiegate' investigation at the agency were placed on administrative leave this week. Steve Volz, the assistant administrator for NOAA's Satellite and Information Service, and Jeff Dillen, a deputy general counsel at NOAA, were placed on leave Thursday morning, Volz told NBC News. Volz and Dillen were figures in a controversy during the first Trump presidency that came to be known as ' Sharpiegate,' in which forecasters were rebuked for contradicting the president over a crude alteration to a hurricane map. NOAA confirmed Friday that the two men had been placed on leave. 'Mr. Dillen was placed on administrative leave by the department's senior career attorney pending a review of performance issues over the past several weeks,' NOAA Communications director Kim Doster said in an emailed statement. 'Separately, Dr. Volz was placed on administrative leave on an unrelated matter.' When reached by phone, Dillen declined to comment. The high-profile move comes at a tenuous time for NOAA, which is down hundreds of employees after staffing cuts and voluntary buyouts implemented by the Trump administration. The staffing and performance of the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA, have been under intense scrutiny after recent extreme weather events, including the central Texas flooding tragedy. The agency is without a leader as President Donald Trump's nominee, Neil Jacobs, awaits confirmation by the Senate. NOAA's spending is also under close review. The Trump administration has proposed deep cuts to the agency's budget, though Congress has signaled it won't implement such severe budget restrictions. The news that Volz and Dillen were placed on leave was first reported by CNN. It's not clear exactly why the two top NOAA leaders were placed on leave. In an interview, Volz said he received the news on Thursday morning in a letter from Laura Grimm, the acting administrator of NOAA. 'The letter itself gave no information about the cause. It said, 'You are on administrative leave pending an investigation into your recent public conduct,'' Volz said on Friday, adding that he had 'no idea' what was being investigated. He said part of his job is to speak at public events, and he recently took part in a press conference at a satellite launch in Japan, among other events. Volz, who has worked in public service for 36 years, said he had not changed his approach to media or public speaking since the new administration took over. 'I give public comments on a routine basis and I've done that my entire time at NOAA. I haven't adjusted that. I'm cautious about my personal opinions,' Volz said. 'I have not been reticent about communicating the work we do and the challenging circumstances we're under. That's probably more out front than many other people in similar positions at NOAA.' Both Volz and Dillen played roles in the aftermath of the 'Sharpiegate' incident in 2019. At the time, President Trump incorrectly said Hurricane Dorian could strike Alabama. But, the local weather forecasting office in Birmingham, Alabama, denied the state was at risk. Trump then showed reporters an altered hurricane path marked with a black Sharpie. Later, top NOAA officials rebuked the local forecasters amid perceived political pressure. After the event, NOAA hired the National Academy of Public Administration to perform an independent assessment into allegations of scientific misconduct during the incident. The investigation found that Jacobs violated NOAA's ethics policies. Volz authored a final decision about the report for NOAA, which agreed with NAPA's findings. He said Dillen worked on that document also. Volz said he did not know whether notices that they'd both been put on leave on the same day and their connection to the 'Sharpiegate' report was a coincidence. 'Jeff was the legal counsel. I was the senior official reading through the NAPA report and writing up our own determination memo, which found fault with two officials inside NOAA, including Neil Jacobs,' Volz said. 'It's not lost on me Jeff and I were both given admin leave on the same day and Neil Jacobs is going through hearings now and getting ready to be voted on by the Senate.' NOAA did not directly comment about whether the 'Sharpiegate' investigation played any role in its decisions. Volz said he remains a NOAA employee, but has no access to federal facilities and his email is 'locked.' He said he was not sure what his next steps would be. 'I love the work I do at NOAA,' Volz said. 'I'm not ready to walk quietly into the sunset, that's for sure.'
Politico
5 days ago
- Politics
- Politico
NOAA places two veteran officials on leave
CNN first reported the administration's move. Dillen and Volz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It comes less than a week before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee takes up the confirmation of Neil Jacobs, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead NOAA as its administrator. Jacobs served as NOAA's acting administrator during Trump's first term, where he found himself embroiled in the 'Sharpiegate' scandal, in which he and another NOAA official, Julie Roberts, were accused of pressuring scientists to alter the forecast of Hurricane Dorian in 2019, which killed dozens of people. Jacobs and Roberts were attempting to align the forecast with statements made by Trump, who said in the Oval Office that the hurricane would hit Alabama. In 2020, Volz led the investigation into Jacobs and Roberts, and found that the two officials violated the agency's 'scientific integrity policy.' Rick Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator under the Biden administration, said he worked closely with Volz and Dillen, and neither had expressed any opinions about the 'Sharpiegate' incident, 'I mean, these are just rock solid people,' Spinrad said. With respect to Dillen, Spinrad said: 'I relied on him heavily for his legal expertise and his acumen regarding case law.' Spinrad said he 'would characterize Steve Holz as one of the most dedicated, smartest and most savvy people I worked with.' 'This is going to be a big loss for the agency for these two people to be sent packing,' Spinrad said.
New York Times
25-03-2025
- Health
- New York Times
‘It Is Hard to Imagine a More Sweeping Agenda to Make Americans Less Healthy'
In his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, President Trump declared, 'Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.' But that does not appear to be Trump's primary goal. Philip J. Landrigan is a pediatrician and epidemiologist. He is the director of the program for global public health at Boston College and was the chairman of a National Academy of Sciences committee on pesticides and children that documented the extraordinary vulnerability of children to pesticides. Landrigan replied by email to my inquiries concerning the consequences of Trump's actual policies, as opposed to his soaring language: Scott Faber, an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center and senior vice-president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, was just as direct in his emailed reply: Asked about the discrepancy between Trump's speech on toxic chemicals and the actions taken by the administration, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, told The Hill: In a concrete example of Trump deregulatory policy, the Trump Justice Department announced on March 7 the dismissal of a 2023 lawsuit 'against Denka Performance Elastomer LLC concerning its neoprene manufacturing facility in LaPlace, Louisiana. The dismissal fulfills President Trump's day one executive order, 'Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing,' designed to eliminate ideological overreach and restore impartial enforcement of federal laws.' The Biden administration filed suit against Denka two years ago, charging that the factory presented an unacceptable cancer risk to the nearby majority-Black community. According to findings posted on the E.P.A. website: Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, emailed me in response to my queries. 'It is hard to imagine a more sweeping agenda to make Americans less healthy,' she wrote. I asked Dillen which policy concerned her the most. She replied: Dillen did point to specific Trump initiatives that are underway or on the near horizon: Turning to the issue of medical research, Duke University provides a case study of the problems facing higher education institutions that are struggling to maintain research budgets under the Trump administration. In 2024, Duke received $580 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health — about 61 percent of which went to the university for such indirect costs as utilities and buildings. In 2025, Duke suffered a drop in the number of grants, down to 64 compared with 166 in January and February of 2024, according to The Associated Press. Donald McDonnell, a professor of molecular cancer biology at Duke whose laboratory has received $40 million from N.I.H. over 30 years, told the A.P. that his lab is likely to go into the red because of the uncertainty of N.I.H. grants, forcing him to order layoffs: 'The bottom line is, I can't live, I can't think in this chaos,' McDonnell said. The threatened cuts, according to McDonnell, have endangered the next generation of researchers. Duke medical school has reduced the number of Ph.D. students it will admit from 130 this year to 100 or even fewer in the next academic year. Similarly, at Johns Hopkins University, Richard Huganir, director of the department of neuroscience at Hopkins, told the A.P.: 'If we can't do science and we can't support the science, we can't support the surrounding community either.' Huganir's N.I.H.-supported research has focused on the SynGap1gene, which, when mutated, according to Huganir, leads to intellectual disabilities: 'We have what we think is a really great therapeutic' almost ready to be tested in severely affected children, Huganir told the AP, adding that he applied for two new N.I.H. grants. 'The problem is for the kids, there's a window of time to treat them,' he said, and 'we're running out of time.' The uncertainty surrounding N.I.H. grant policy is causing havoc. Research into such issues as why Black and white people are more or less vulnerable to certain cancers faces additional hurdles because of the Trump administration's opposition to anything hinting of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 'Those studies are very much threatened right now. People don't know what the rules are,' Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology, at Hopkins, told the AP. 'We're actually going to kill people is what it amounts to, because we're not studying how to get appropriate care to all people.' At least 12 universities have ordered hiring freezes, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Notre Dame, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. Many of the Trump administration policies on environmental deregulation and reductions in federal research funding are now on hold as litigation proceeds in the courts, but the threat that the Trump policies will survive legal challenge continues to create both anxiety and uncertainty. One of the most significant actions is an across-the-board cut by the N.I.H. in the share of grants to universities and colleges to cover such indirect costs 'as depreciation on buildings, equipment and capital improvements, interest on debt associated with certain buildings, equipment and capital improvements, and operations and maintenance expenses.' The N.I.H. order of Feb. 7 declares that instead of a negotiated level of indirect costs, there will be 'a standard indirect rate of 15 percent across all N.I.H. grants for indirect costs in lieu of a separately negotiated rate for indirect costs in every grant.' My Times colleagues Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia, Irineo Cabreros, Eli Murray, Francesca Paris, Margot Sanger-Katz and Ethan Singer wrote in a Feb. 13 article, 'How Trump's Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State': The remaining $9 billion 'went to the institutions' overhead, or 'indirect costs.' ' If the cut proposed by the N.I.H. survives count challenge, Badger and her colleagues estimate 'that a 15 percent rate would have reduced funding for the grants that received N.I.H. support in 2024 by at least $5 billion.' One of the explicit goals of Trump's deregulatory agenda is the elimination or loosening of regulations designed to protect human health and safety in order to give free rein to the oil, gas, mining, chemical industries to, as Trump likes to put it, 'Drill, baby, drill.' One of the Trump administration's most significant actions in this sphere was to call on the E.P.A., in his Jan. 20 executive order 'Unleashing American Energy,' to begin the process of repealing its 2009 'endangerment finding.' The finding is not itself a regulation; it's a foundational document providing the legal justification for environmental regulation of six greenhouse gases and for policies to constrain climate change. In a reflection of its significance, the endangerment finding was challenged by such industry groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association, along with some Republican state attorneys general, but the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit rejected their claims in a 2012, decision. Lee Zeldin, appointed E.P.A. administrator by Trump, called the endangerment finding 'the holy grail of the climate change religion.' Studies have linked these emissions to cancer (methane, carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons), to hazards to immune system function, to thyroid cancer (PFCs), to asphyxia, to increased pulse rate, and to nausea (sulfur hexafluoride). Amid the near daily announcement of new initiatives, two documents stand out in the Trump deregulatory agenda: the unleashing of the American energy executive order and the March 12 Zeldin announcement, 'E.P.A. Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History.' The word 'health' appears only once in the 3464-word unleashing American energy order and that is in the title of a President Biden executive order that Trump revoked. The words 'safety' and 'toxic' do not appear at all. Safety and health are not mentioned in the Zeldin announcement, and the word toxic appears only once in a call to reconsider the regulation 'of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants.' In his announcement, Zeldin proudly said: In his email, Landrigan, the pediatrician and expert on pesticides and children, described the probable consequences of some of the specific proposals in the Trump-Zeldin agenda: Linda S. Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology Program at N.I.H., wrote by email that she finds Trump's claim 'to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong' hard to believe 'when he plans to cut the E.P.A. by 65 percent, including dismantling of their office of research and development.' Trump's policies, she wrote, will result in I asked Birnbaum whether Trump policies threaten lives. 'Absolutely,' Birnbaum replied by email: Liz Hitchcock, director of federal policy for Toxic-Free Future, a nonprofit organization, voiced particular concern over the administration's delay of a 'ban on a cancer-causing chemical called trichloroethylene (TCE).' For decades, Hitchcock wrote by email, 'releases of TCE have contaminated drinking water supplies across the United States: 18.4 million Americans are known to be exposed to TCE from 420-plus drinking water systems in 43 states.' Long-term exposure, Hitchcock continued, Given all the signals Trump and Zeldin are sending, the odds that the ban on TCE will see the light of day during the next four years are slim to none. It may take time for the results to come in, but the odds are that the second Trump term will bring us more cancer, more asthma and heart disease, more low-birthweight babies, more Parkinson's disease, more liver and kidney damage, more greenhouse gases, more fetal cardiac defects, along with fewer breakthroughs in cancer research, a smaller generation of new scientists and more children with diminished IQs. So much for getting the toxins out of our environment.
