Neil Jacobs, who was acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2019 when President Trump altered an expected hurricane impact map — an incident known as “Sharpie-gate” — has again been picked by Mr. Trump to lead the agency.
Jacobs, an atmospheric scientist who has worked in both the public and private sectors over the last two decades, and other leaders of the agency were criticized in a Department of Commerce inspector general’s report about the incident.
On Sept. 1, 2019, as the National Weather Service was forecasting that Hurricane Dorian would move up the Atlantic coast, Mr. Trump incorrectly tweeted that Alabama was in the storm’s path.
Later that day, the National Weather Service in Alabama tweeted, “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”
Three days later, on Sept. 4, Mr. Trump insisted that the storm had previously been on a course for the state. He displayed a week-old map of the storm path, altered with a black marker to portray the hurricane as potentially heading for Alabama.
“That was the original chart,” Mr. Trump said. “It was going to hit not only Georgia but Florida. It was going toward the Gulf.”
Evan Vucci / AP
The hurricane ultimately didn’t make landfall in the United States, or come close to Alabama.
Soon after, the NOAA’s leadership released a statement that backed Mr. Trump and criticized the work of its weather forecasters.
The inspector general’s report said the statement “unnecessarily rebuked NWS forecasters…for doing their jobs.”
According to a report by a panel of the National Academy of Public Administration for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the inspector general report, the investigations concluded that the statement backing Mr. Trump was “driven by external political pressure,” through a “request from the White House then-Acting Chief of Staff,” and that Jacobs, the head of NOAA who has been nominated again, “violated the Code of Ethics for Science Supervision and Management set forth in Section 7.01 of NOAA’s Scientific Integrity Policy when they failed to engage the Birmingham WFO in the development of the September 6 Statement.”
The National Academy report said: “Further, the Panel finds that they engaged in misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or in reckless disregard of the Code of Scientific Conduct or Code of Ethics for Science Supervision and Management in NOAA’s Scientific Integrity Policy.”
According to the inspector general report, Jacobs felt pressured.
“In Dr. Jacobs’s view, he could make the statement more accurate, but the Department would issue, or would cause NOAA to issue, a statement one way or another,” the report said. “If he resigned or were fired, he reasoned, the final statement likely would have been worse and more inflammatory.”
Despite the incident, some weather professionals at the American Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans last month supported Jacobs, telling The Associated Press that they hoped Trump would pick Jacobs to again lead NOAA.
“I think the Neil Jacobs appointment is a strong pick,” Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told the AP.
Laura Geller and
David Schechter
contributed to this report.
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