NOAA: A Case Study

Outage & In Danger – A Preliminary Investigation on Lack of Budget within NOAA Science, technology, engineering, & mathematics – alternatively STEM – is an evergrowing field in today’s society. Technology is increasing in popularity, and development of assistive tools in society are becoming more and more urgent for traditional use. Because of this, spending is required in the STEM field, but many feel that it is not needed. At first glance, one would think that the sectors of the government that keep us safe are the ones with the most funding, which is mainly true if you look at budgeting for the military. However, sectors within the Department of Commerce, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are lacking in budget due to focused spending elsewhere, which creates research and development – herein R&D – problems that may create outages and cost the lives of many Americans. This is
In the PDF file, it clearly shows the embodiment of wanting to pursue STEM growth. Major concentration is put into R&D areas such as “[Sustaining] a World-Leading Science and Research Enterprise” and “Spurs Innovation.” This concentration of R&D within STEM is just an overall look at how NOAA’s budgeting and spending for R&D within their sector is just a minimal facet to the overall STEM budgeting and spending for R&D. In 2014, federal R&D was $133.7 billion and went up by $1.7 billion, or 1.2%, for the 2015 budget (The White House 1). Another big aspect of this budget proposal is understanding global climate change and the response of it. It can be argued that performing R&D budget increases within NOAA would assist in designing greater infrastructure that could lead to better detection of hundred-year storms that are becoming monthly events due to climate change. This R&D would help agencies better respond and present information to the greater United