NOAA's innovative climate website gets cutback in House
House lawmakers approved only a single cutback to the proposed Commerce and Justice department budgets this week, targeting a new climate website.
The new Climate.gov prototype website is an example of Gov 2.0 innovation—it has video interviews with federal climate scientists, government data sets and maps and robust sections on education and global climate news.
But its future is uncertain. House lawmakers on May 8 voted against $542,000 in funding for Climate.gov, according to a May 10 report in the Washington Post. The vote was 219-189.
Climate.gov is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the Commerce Department. Out of $1.4 billion in proposed cuts for the Commerce and Justice, it was the only cutback accepted by the House lawmakers.
Washington Post writer Jason Samenow, part of the Post's Capital Weather Gang, called the website a “rich set of climate information, tools, and data resources” that brings together hard-to-find climate data into a single location. The $542,000 would have been a 56 percent funding increase for the website for next year.
“With a little investment, it has the potential to provide tremendous benefits to decision makers. One wonders, then, why the 56 percent funding increase for this website proposed by the President was the low-hanging fruit snipped off the vine,” Samenow wrote.