When I first moved to Massachusetts, there were a bunch of words and phrases I’d never heard and didn’t understand. Fortunately, there are famous Bay Staters highly skilled at explaining idioms.
One of my favorites is “banging a u-ey,” which I now know means “making a U-turn.” In his tenure as Commerce Secretary, when traveling between his words and his deeds, Howard Lutnick is banging u-eys.
Nominee Mr. Lutnick versus Secretary Lutnick
What Mr. Lutnick said: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should not be dismantled
In response to senators’ questions during his confirmation hearing in January, Mr. Lutnick testified that he disagreed with Project 2025’s call for disbanding NOAA and eliminating, privatizing or transferring many of its functions to other agencies. “I have no interest in separating it. That is not on my agenda.”
Secretary Lutnick’s u-ey:
He is enacting Project 2025’s plan to dismantle NOAA through deep cuts to staffing, budgets, resources and vital research programs. Federal agencies, like any other organization, are made up of people, and forcing or pressuring them out undermines capacity, history, camaraderie, efficiency: the core attributes that make a lean and highly effective agency like NOAA function so well.
Dismantling the staff attacks the mission. On Secretary Lutnick’s watch, NOAA laid off 800 people (twice!) while a further 1,000 left under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) early retirement and voluntary separation scheme. Former NOAA Assistant Administrator for Research Craig McLean has pointed out that the Trump administration-driven loss of NOAA staff already represents 27,000 years of agency experience.
What Mr. Lutnick said: The National Weather Service (NWS) should not be privatized
During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Lutnick committed to maintaining the National Weather Service (NWS), which Project 2025 plans to privatize. However, he added “we can deliver the product [weather forecasts, ed.] more efficiently and… dramatically less expensively, but the outcome of delivering those services should not be changed.”
Secretary Lutnick’s u-ey:
The NWS’s $1.3 billion annual budget costs each person in the US about $4 per year, for a return on investment (ROI) one study estimated to be 73 to one, or 7300%. ROI is a measure of efficiency—Tesla’s, for instance, was 7% last quarter. It’s hard to imagine improving upon the NWS’s ROI. AccuWeather, a private weather service which uses free NOAA data, “does not support… fully commercializing NWS operations.”
Nearly 600 people who helped deliver that astonishingly high ROI have left the NWS since Secretary Lutnick took office. Why, in the name of efficiency, would he fire them or pay them to leave? The simplest explanation is that privatization means profit.
Secretary Lutnick’s leadership team is made up of people who “have ties to companies that stand to benefit from privatizing forecasts,” including himself. While he awaits confirmation as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Taylor Jordan, a former NOAA employee, appears to be still working for a lobbying firm whose clients launch satellites and forecast weather. Former “special government employee” Elon Musk enjoyed “unfettered access to sensitive NOAA databases that can substantially benefit Space X, Starlink, and other Musk enterprises.” Given the self-dealing of Trump himself, it will be important to continue to monitor not just words vs. deeds, but compliance with ethics rules.
What he said: “We are fully staffed with forecasters and scientists. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.”
That is what Secretary Lutnick testified about NOAA during a June 2025 Senate hearing.
Secretary Lutnick’s u-ey:
This was not true in June and is not true today. The Trump administration’s proposed budget would slash NOAA’s budget by $1.8 billion and further reduce its staffing by 17%.
That’s not all. In its push to “systematically destroy federal scientific systems” and to enshrine fossil fuel disinformation as policy, the Trump administration wants to eliminate its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) altogether. OAR is nothing less than “the research foundation for understanding the complex systems that support our planet” and “the engine that drives the next-generation science and technology that NOAA depends upon in order to produce operational products, tools, and services.” Eliminating it is a blatant attempt to obscure the reality of climate change.
The OAR is the backbone of the NWS. Therefore, the idea that the administration can eliminate OAR without affecting public safety or forecasting is ludicrous. According to the American Meteorological Society, the OAR “continuously improves the two computer weather models used by the National Weather Service to generate hourly and daily weather forecasts.” For the moment, NOAA’s own website explains how it benefits any of us who farm or ranch, move goods, manage water, or decide whether to carry an umbrella. OAR is essential to hurricane response, tracking airborne hazards, delivering tsunami warnings, and yes, addressing climate change. If you like your reliable weather forecast, you love OAR.
The case of Elon Musk
Here’s an interesting case where Mr. Lutnick did something that Secretary Lutnick now says he disagrees with. In a February interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, the newly-confirmed secretary said that he “set up” Musk with the job, and they agreed that Musk as head of DOGE would cut $1 trillion in “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Secretary Lutnick was once such a Musk fan that when Tesla stock was falling precipitously last March, he violated ethics rules by encouraging Fox News viewers to buy it.
Now, he says that Musk got the DOGE cuts “backward” by focusing first on firing government agency staff—at least 200,000 of them are now missing from the federal workforce. Once it became apparent that public forecasting and public safety were indeed being touched by cuts to staffing and programs, the Trump administration banged a u-ey and is trying to rehire 450 staff at the NWS.
Wicked efficient.
Most people agree that Musk’s cuts were a mistake. A new survey shows that “voters in Alabama, Kansas, and North Carolina overwhelmingly oppose a proposal to eliminate federal funding for scientific research into the earth’s weather and climate.” Across the political spectrum in these three states, 85% of survey respondents agree that “America’s position as a global leader depends on continued scientific research and innovation,” and 81% think “it is important for the government to fund scientific research that helps us better predict extreme weather.” In response to questions about the proposal to cut all federal funding for scientific research into the earth’s weather and climate, two-thirds of people say “it would be a dumb way to try to save taxpayers money.”
Not too late to be smarter
At one point, Howard Lutnick was someone I thought well of. In 2001, I was living in New York and working in Manhattan. Mr. Lutnick was chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which suffered the deaths of 685 of its employees, the largest loss of any single organization, on 9/11. Mr. Lutnick grieved this appalling tragedy publicly and philanthropically and was a visible symbol of empathy.
That Mr. Lutnick seemed to appreciate that treating people well is important. That Mr. Lutnick was a businessman who knew what ROI can signal. That Mr. Lutnick appeared to have respect for public service and servants.
Now he is a leader within an administration that is swiftly dismantling the pillars of US democracy: arresting political opponents, chilling the speech of those they disagree with, seeking to hollow out civil society, and attacking scientists and facts. These are all moves straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
Mr. Secretary, it’s not too late to bang another u-ey. You could keep your word to the US Senate that confirmed you, and the US taxpayers that pay you. You could uphold your oath of office. You could work with Congress to preserve and restore NOAA as a crown jewel of world climate and weather research. Your legacy could be a NOAA that is intact, independent, and an icon of scientific integrity.