Two top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration violated the agency’s code of ethics by contradicting its meteorologists to support President Trump’s claims about Hurricane Dorian.
An independent panel commissioned by NOAA concluded on Monday that acting Administrator Dr. Neil Jacobs and NOAA deputy chief of staff and communications director Julie Kay Robert failed to abide by agency ethics during the 2019 incident, which became known as “Sharpiegate.”
At the time, Trump was discussing Hurricane Dorian with reporters in the Oval Office. He showed off a map of the storm’s trajectory that had been altered with a black Sharpie marker to coincide with the president’s claim that Dorian could hit the southern part of Alabama.
Weather agencies, however, had shown Alabama was in the storm’s path. After Trump said the hurricane would hit Alabama, the NOAA’s Birmingham office said that Dorian would not impact Alabama and that its focus was too far east. The agency later sent out an unsigned statement calling the Birmingham office’s claim “inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”
“The development of the statement was not based on science but appears to be largely driven by external influence from senior Commerce [Department] officials who drafted the Sept. 6 statement,” the National Academy of Public Administration concluded in its report
NOAA’s acting Chief Scientist Craig McLean said in September that he would investigate the incident, calling the NOAA’s response a “danger to public health and safety” after internal emails showed staff members expressing concern over a possible political intervention.
Both Roberts and Jacobs have contested the report’s conclusions.
