The Fifth Risk

Kathy Sullivan was the top official within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees the National Weather Service (NWS). She was also one of three officials that DJ Patil wanted to meet with when he became the Chief Data Scientist of the United States. While completing his doctorate, Patil immersed himself in data from the NWS when he suggested a new statistic for looking at weather: how predictable the weather is at any given moment.

The Department of Commerce collects a lot of data as part of its mission, and the majority of it comes from the NWS. Much of that is critical to daily life within the country, and Lewis writes that “[w]ithout that data [from the NOAA], and the Weather Service that made sense of it, no plane would fly, no bridge would be built, and no war would be fought—at least not well” (163).

When Wilbur Ross was nominated to run the department at the end of November 2016, he met with a former Bush administration staffer who had worked within the Commerce department. That official explained that it was essentially geared toward science and technology, to which Ross replied, “Yeah, I don’t think I want to be focusing on that” (164).