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.”
