WASHINGTON — The director of the National Weather Service has retired after an investigative report found senior staff members at the agency had misdirected millions of dollars and operated “outside the bounds of acceptable financial management.”
John L. “Jack” Hayes, assistant administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NWS director since 2007, retired Friday. That was the day after a departmental investigation said that for several years, the NWS has taken money Congress had provided for certain functions and reallocated the money to 122 weather offices around the country.
“The fact that the team did not find any evidence of fraud or personally (sic) financial gain does not lessen the severity of the misconduct,” said a memorandum from Deputy Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank.
The NWS chief financial officer was replaced last year and the department began investigating anonymous complaints about the misallocation of funds in 2010 and 2011.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, called the reports “deeply troubling.”
“I am further alarmed that the investigative report raises fundamental concerns that the core operations of the National Weather Service are underfunded, and that the current process in the Department of Commerce is broken, as it ‘did not encourage questioning or provide independent channels for reporting dubious budget decisions,’ ” Snowe, ranking member of the Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard subcommittee, said in a statement.
Hayes’s retirement, first reported by MSNBC, came in the last paragraph of a news release Friday announcing that Laura Furgione would take over NWS on an acting basis.
Hayes is a longtime NOAA official, a former Air Force colonel and often the public face of the National Weather Service in times of extreme weather events. He did not mention the investigative report in a farewell he wrote to employees.
“It’s been a great honor to serve with the men and women of the National Weather Service, but now it is time for me to move to the next chapter of my life and make room for the next generation of leaders,” Hayes wrote.
“Your successes are too numerous to count — most memorably, your victory in the ‘Super Bowl’ of extreme weather years in 2011, when you saved countless lives with advance warnings for Hurricane Irene, the Joplin tornado, the Alabama tornadoes, and historic floods.”
NOAA communications and external affairs deputy director Scott Smullen acknowledged in a statement that NWS “engaged in the reprogramming of funds without Congressional notification as required by the applicable Federal Appropriations Acts.”
But, he added: “The investigation also found that no funds were used on inappropriate items, they were simply used in different categories than originally budgeted. The investigation found no evidence of corruption or personal financial gain in these actions. We do not believe any money was moved out of the National Weather Service.”
Richard Hirn, general counsel and legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said as much as $30 million a year has been “reprogrammed” in the past to avoid furloughs and layoffs in weather stations.
“Robbing Peter to pay Paul is what has been going on,” he said.
He said the NWS is asking Congress for permission to repurpose $28 million for the rest of the fiscal year to avoid furloughs.
In other bad news for NOAA, a report from the Commerce Department’s inspector general said the agency did not provide proper justification in handing out $43.8 million in performance awards to private contractors.
“On some contracts, the performance monitors did not maintain documentation to support the ratings,” the report said, “and on other contracts, the examples and comments provided did not contain enough information to determine whether the ratings, award fees and award terms were warranted.”
Jason Samenow contributed to this report.
So he’s been doing exactly what Olympia and her cronies have been doing with the Social Security Trust Fund.
What they have been doing is legit and not hidden, his actions are culpable.
Phew! Good to know it’s “legit and not hidden”. Who cares if it’s right?!
If President Johnson had not put it where it is, would not be in their hands now would it.
Yup, just SOP.
When Congress reauthorizes the Act that funds an agency, Congress usually tells them where to spend it…this is a typical route for pork. This director, knowing where the NWS really needed resources, put the dollars someplace else. This kind of “reprogramming” is a big no-no.
Its funny that putting the money where it needs to be to keep an agency is a “no-no”
Isn’t it tho? Members of Congress will–with a straight face–tell you this is their job…that they “understand” these agencies better than the people who run them.
Maine “benefits” from this, too, of course. The Navy doesn’t exactly get to pick where it buys its ships.
That’s because there’s only two places in the USA that build theses ships
Patty Murray would tell you the same thing about tanker aircraft.
weather modification/chem spraying has to get it’s funds from somewhere.
Some members of Congress have been trying to destroy the National Weather Service for years because they have taken huge amounts of money from Accuweather and Weather.com who would like to take over weather services and make some tax dollars. I remember Rick Santorum saying that the NWS had no right to give out for free what his bankrollers were trying to sell.
Not to mention that all they do is take NOAA data and re-package it into weathertainment for profit.
Part of the GOP’s effort to privatize every agency it can and perish the thought that there should be oversight from the government
Because every politician and federal employee is as pure as the wind driven snow and would never do anything unethical, and every privately owned company is incompetent and crooked. Yeah, that’s it.
And Congress has been trying to do this since Contract on America in the mid-90’s where a vote was taken to elimiante the NWS that failed to pass by 40-some-odd votes. The compromise that slashed the NWS’s budget did pass resulting in 0ver 200 layoffs nationwide and making it impossible for new weather graduates, like myself, to find work in the weather field.
And like dudemeezahot points out all the private sector does is pretty-up/repackage the Fed data.
I highly doubt the private sector would be willing to take over for the NWS unless they could get an exemption from any possible law suites that would result from every time they blow a forecast and people are killed by the resulting severe weather.
So basically this fella operated with no supervision. Where was the secretary of Commerce? The golf course? A cocktail party? A political fundraiser?
I guess the bottom line is that the Director was allocating funds where they were needed, but the problem was that some in Congress and their buddies were not getting their cut.
That is what happens when we have the best politicians money can buy, they need to have “TAXPAYERS” money spent where they will get some back to pay for their $MILLIONS to get a job that pays a few $Hundreds Thousand.
Oh, big wooo….if the man or anyone else didn’t have any personal gain then I say get over it!!
So, you think it’s okay to spend Federal money any old way someone wants, with no accountability? Great.
I think it is time that the federal gov’t stopped having its hand in everything…..if you are so worried about accountability why not look to how the congressmen & women spend your tax dollars for their lodging, food, etc during their stays in Washington, D C on official business. That should give you something to talk about for a while.
How troubling is she about the $16 billion sent to Iraq that got lost on the way? Hmmmm…
oh SNAP!!!
$44M in unsubstantiated performance awards for contractors, and nothing was done that was illegal? Please, how stupid do you think we are?
Answer: VERY
The reality is that our government has always been corrupt – and it is not about to change in the near future. The masses who COULD make a change are far more interested in social pleasures than they are in making intellectual changes within the government. A revolution would only make a new bunch of thieves. I have so many books on my library shelves about goverment corruption that I will not live long enough to read them all.
Bet he gets a sweet severance pay and bonus.
I thought the only exciting thing about the weather was a good hurricane story. Whoever thought you could connect weather and embezzlement in the same sentence!
“deeply troubling” “outside the bounds of acceptable financial management”
You know what this means and what the consequences are? It’s an occasion for a politician to send out a press release expressing her shock, and that’s it.
End of story.
I’m hoping that like the GSA scandals, the Weather Service is called to account before Congress. It’s time the slush fund spending habits in DC went away for good.
Just another corrupt agency , helping to destroy America. No wonder former politicians want to get more of it. Elect no one with a politician background, and maybe we can find someone who wants to be honest before they turn.
The money was being filtered from things like technology and modernization to pay employee salaries at the 122 WFOs across the nation. This prevented unpaid furloughs of forecasters over the past 2-3 years. Nobody made any personal gains by this, but Congress should have been informed. It is “deeply troubling” that Congress can’t properly fund an organization that many people use on an everyday basis.