Two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were placed on administrative leave on Friday, fueling speculation that the Trump administration was retaliating against them for actions taken during the president’s first term.
Jeff Dillen, who was serving as deputy general counsel, and Stephen Volz, who heads the agency’s satellites division, led the investigation into whether agency administrators abdicated their scientific ethics when they altered the forecast of a deadly hurricane to match statements made by the president.
First reported by CNN, the two were placed on leave just days before Neil Jacobs – the former Noaa chief at the center of the scandal – returns for a confirmation hearing as Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency once again.
During the 2019 debacle known as “Sharpiegate”, named for erroneous marks added by marker on a National Hurricane Center map to justify incorrect claims made by the president that Hurricane Dorian would reach Alabama – a path not in line with what forecasters initially reported – left a blemish on the science-focused agency’s record. The investigation, it was announced in June 2020, found Jacobs and another official had violated the agency’s “scientific integrity policy”, when they succumbed to political pressure.
On Friday, the agency disputed the association between the officials being placed on leave and Jacobs’s nomination.
“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’s communications director, Kim Doster, said in an email responding to a request for more information about the incident. She added that Volz was placed on leave “on an unrelated matter”.
Doster did not answer questions about the specifics that led to these actions or about whether workers at Noaa were briefed about the decisions.
Noaa staffers, who asked for anonymity out of fear of reprisal for speaking out about the issue, told the Guardian they were not told about what happened and had to learn about it on the news. They also questioned the agency’s explanation.
“It is laughable that anyone could look at this and say that their situations are ‘separate’ when both were leads on the Sharpiegate investigation,” one staffer said. “Both of them are brilliant, dedicated civil servants.”
Former Noaa administrator Rick Spinrad, who worked closely with both Dillen and Volz, described their high integrity and dedication to the work that “kept the agency in great shape”.
“It may just be part of the effort on the administration’s part to rattle the cage,” he said, adding that before his departure from the agency there was widespread speculation about how the incoming Trump administration agenda might affect people in leadership positions. Volz, who heads a satellite division, may also have come up against the push for more private sector involvement.
“All that is speculative,” Spinrad said. “But based on knowing these two individuals as well as I did, I was stunned that they were called out for performance-related issues – that makes no sense at all.”
Noaa, long heralded as one of the most important climate research agencies, has become almost unrecognizable under the Trump administration, which hammered its anti-science agenda through a series of severe budget cuts, sharp reductions in staff, and moves to wipe data and resources on the climate crisis from public view.
Trump’s “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order, a plan that guts scientific independence and grants political appointees greater power over what reaches the public, has further eroded the agency’s mission, according to staffers familiar with the policy.
Earlier this month, a policy issued by the Department of Commerce, of which Noaa is a part, outlined plans to sever all remaining probationary employees and further reduce Noaa’s workforce. Probationary employees, a categorization that applies to new hires or those moved or promoted into new positions, can now only be converted to permanent hires if they are approved by political appointees.
“The Trump administration is essentially turning a vast swath of federal positions at Noaa into political positions,” one Noaa staffer with knowledge of the policy said.
Volz, who is among the highest-ranking civilians at the agency, has had to oversee many of the changes in policy, including those that affect scientific integrity, CNN reported.
“This is more bad news for Noaa,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director of Noaa’s National Marine Fisheries Service, of the dismissals, adding that both Volz and Dillen were “solid no-nonsense career professionals”.
“In other words just the sort of people this administration targets as they tear apart a science agency,” he said. “It will weaken Noaa even more and reinforce the Trump administration’s effort to ignore science and stop serving the American public while handing greater authority to political hacks.”
Spinrad echoed the concerns, pointing at the series of catastrophes that have already unfolded while Noaa was at reduced capacity – challenges to forecasting extreme weather, including the devastating floods in Texas that killed at least 135 people, hamstrung efforts to continue understanding and adapting to the climate crisis, and the slide toward commercialization and politicization of the work.
“All of these activities strike me as just an effort to determine what is the limit of pain that the American public is willing to tolerate,” commenting on the level of cuts.
