Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

How’s the unrelenting tempest of President Donald Trump’s second term treating you?

As we witness everything we took for granted — from air traffic controllers to food inspectors to PBS to the national parks — swept away like barnyard animals in The Wizard of Oz tornado sequence, spare a thought for your local meteorologist.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration suspended weather balloon launches at several key locations around the continental United States, which could hurt the reliability of forecasts, experts warned in March.

“There’s no question it will lead to errors. It’s just a matter of how bad will it be,” Houston meteorologist Matt Lanza told NBC News.

Now we have proof.

“We are watching how DOGE cuts affect weather forecasting in real time,” Chris Zelman, weatherman for WALB out of Albany, Georgia, posted to Facebook last week. He shared a chart showing the U.S.’s weather model slipping substantially compared to those in Europe.

“Most people in this country receive their weather forecasts and warnings from a private sector source, whether it’s from a broadcast meteorologist on television, from a cell phone app from a private company like the Weather Channel or AccuWeather, or the ubiquitous icons on our computers like the one I can see in the left hand corner of my screen right now,” Alan Gerard, a veteran supervisor at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote on his Substack. “But here’s the kicker: none of that information would be available without the extensive federal scientific infrastructure that underpins it, primarily NOAA.”

The consequences are far more dire than leaving home without your umbrella.

“Thanks to federally funded research, forecasts of tropical cyclone tracks today are up to 75% more accurate than they were in 1990,” University of Wisconsin meteorologist Chris Vagasky wrote for media nonprofit The Conversation. “A National Hurricane Center forecast three days out today is about as accurate as a one-day forecast in 2002, giving people in the storm’s path more time to prepare and reducing the size of evacuations.”

Simply put, recklessly slashing these endeavors unnecessarily risks people’s safety. Understaffed offices in tornado-prone parts of the country could result in delayed warnings, for example.

On May 2, all living former directors of the National Weather Service published an open letter pleading with the public to take up NOAA’s cause as their own. The directors comprise three PhD scientists and three high-ranking retired Air Force officers who served under six presidents — three Democrat, three Republican.

“The proposed budget for fiscal year 2026, just released by the White House, cuts the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by more than 25%,” the former directors relayed. “These proposed cuts come just days after approximately 300 National Weather Service employees left the public service to which they had devoted their lives and careers. That’s on top of the approximately 250 NWS employees who were fired as a result of their probationary status … or took the initial buyout offered by the Trump Administration in early February. That leaves the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit — down more than 10% of its staffing — just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes.”

As they implicitly reminded the Very-Very-Large-Brain-In-Chief, “airplanes can’t fly without weather observations and forecasts; ships crossing the oceans rely on storm forecasts to avoid the high seas; farmers rely on seasonal forecasts to plant and harvest their crops which feed us.”

They also offered an even more ominous warning: ”Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

One signer of the missive, Elbert Friday, a self-described lifelong conservative who served as NWS director under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, even suggested to Newsweek that the administration’s actions are based on something other than mere incompetence.

“If I were a cynic, I would suspect that the [Trump] administration is deliberately doing this to make the organization work poorly, so that people would no longer support it,” Friday said.

Under Trump, beleaguered federal officials have stopped tracking the costs of extreme weather events, from wildfires to droughts to hurricanes, meaning voters won’t be able to judge the escalating scale of future disasters.

“It defies logic,” Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University told the New York Times, adding “the U.S. government’s flying blind as to the cost of extreme weather and climate change.”

The database draws on information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, insurance organizations, state agencies and more to come up with its estimates, according to a report in the Guardian. “The information is generally seen as standardized and unduplicable, given the agency’s access to non-public data.”

And now it’s gone.

If denying problems solved problems, America would already be great again, and we could objectively rank Trump as the most successful president in history.

Amidst his many manufactured crises, from bogus tales of a migrant crime wave to off-again-on-again scorched-earth tariffs, one aspect of Trump’s governing style is too often forgotten: just how horrible he is in an actual crisis.

Our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico found that out after Hurricane Maria struck in 2017. They received early insight into what the rest of us learned during the first year of the pandemic.

And when denial no longer works, Trump sets about blaming others, hardly ever empathizing with those suffering. Returning government to the 19th century would ensure disease-ridden produce, no GPS, bank failures galore and no severe weather warnings.

Now’s the time for both fleetingly lucid Republicans and non-corrupt Democrats to work together tossing sandbags against the oncoming flood.

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This article appears in May 14-27, 2025.