The U.S. Senate this week confirmed Neil Jacobs to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country’s forecasting and weather office. While being President Donald Trump’s pick to run the agency, Jacobs is perhaps best known as the meteorologist who was found to have violated NOAA’s code of ethics during 2019’s “Sharpiegate” scandal.
That, if memory doesn’t serve you, was when Trump, then in his first term, insisted that Hurricane Dorian posed a threat to Alabama (it was not), eventually producing a map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie pen to prove his point. Jacobs was the acting administrator at NOAA at the time.
Jacobs is a career atmospheric scientist with prior NOAA leadership experience. Still, critics argued that his confirmation signals the administration’s push to install agency heads who will bend to political pressure.
At his confirmation hearing, Jacobs said of “Sharpiegate” that “There’s probably some things I would do differently,” according to The Hill. Jacobs also said he would not sign off on inaccurate statements under political pressure. His confirmation, however, comes at a fraught moment for NOAA. The Trump administration is actively gutting the agency’s staff, funding, and research capabilities. As the agency that tracks potentially catastrophic weather events, like hurricanes, it can afford to take very few risks.
What exactly was Jacobs’ involvement in “Sharpiegate”?
With Hurricane Dorian poised to hit the southeastern U.S. on September 1, 2019, then President Trump tweeted that Alabama would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” Minutes later, the Birmingham, Alabama office for the National Weather Service (NWS) tweeted a correction: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian.”
On September 4, 2019, the White House released a video of Trump showing a map of Dorian’s projected path that appeared to have been altered with a thick, black pen to include the state of Alabama. Two days later, NOAA issued a statement, saying that the Birmingham NWS office’s tweet “spoke in absolutist terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”
Jacobs was serving as acting administrator for NOAA when this all went down. In March 2020, an internal investigation found that Jacobs and Julie Roberts, then-director of NOAA communications, had violated the agency’s code of ethics by intentionally failing to engage the Birmingham NWS office in the development of their statement. Neither Jacobs nor Roberts faced disciplinary action.
The report laid out a detailed timeline that suggested Jacobs and Roberts had acted under pressure from the White House to back Trump’s false assertion. In February 2020, NOAA released a batch of emails exchanged between Jacobs and other agency personnel during the fiasco. In one, he wrote: “You have no idea how hard I’m fighting to keep politics out of science.”
Critics decried the incident as negligence: “If Jacobs was fighting his hardest and that shameful statement still went out on his watch, I have little faith that he can make the necessary hard decisions the job requires every day to protect the science and scientists at NOAA,” Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote at the time.
Trump weakening science agencies from top down
Five years later, with Jacobs now confirmed, NOAA’s work has never been more at risk. The Trump administration has already cut nearly 2,000 employees from NOAA and aims to slash 40% as much as off the agency’s funding, and particularly funding for research. Some worry the administration could go further: the conservative manifesto Project 2025, which the administration has taken many cues from so far, calls for NOAA to be broken up and the NWS to be privatized.
In July, Jacobs vowed to restaff the country’s weather offices, roughly half of which have reached critical vacancy rates since Trump took office in January.
“It’s really important for the people to be there because they have relationships with people in the local community,” Jacobs said, according to Government Executive. “They’re a trusted source.”
The irony of that statement aside, it remains to be seen whether Jacobs will make good on his promise and be able to stand up to the current Trump White House.
Gizmodo reached out to NOAA for comment but did not receive an immediate response.