"They apparently just sort of walked past security and said 'Get out of my way.'"NOAAccessNew reporting from Wired reveals that a young member of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained IT access to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the nonpartisan climate and environmental science agency that tracks daily weather patterns, warns about fast-moving natural disasters like hurricanes, and provides science-based support for America's marine commerce, among other duties.According to reporting from theGuardianandAxios, members of Musk's DOGE, which isn't a real government agency, suddenly entered NOAA's buildings in Silver Spring, Maryland yesterday, pushing past staff and demanding access to the critical agency's information and technology systems."They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: 'Get out of my way,' and they're looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies," Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official and current fellow at the University of New Hampshire, told the Guardian. "They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information."Per Wired, such access appears to have been granted to an engineer named Nikhil Rajpal, whose work history shows stints at both Tesla and pre-Musk Twitter. He doesn't appear to have a government background or, as Wiredput it, "special expertise relevant to his new role."Even so, NOAA staffers were reportedly instructed to provide Rajpal with access to all NOAA Google sites by the end of the day on Wednesday.NOAA is an essential and deeply consequential government organization; Americans rely on it every day, from our most basic day-to-day weather updates and severe weather warnings to the protection of marine ecosystems and fisheries for future generations. According to further Axios reporting, DOGE has said that it's rummaging around for "DEI content" at the agency. That said, though, DOGE is seemingly operating with next to no oversight, and offering DEI as an excuse to gain general, sudden "IT access" to the critical, life-saving agency writ large is wildly flimsy.Science Who?The White House has yet to address DOGE's targeting of NOAA. But the agency was lambasted in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump Administration a document written largely by Russell Vought, president Donald Trump's pick to lead the Office of Budgetary Management as an obstacle to "US prosperity" for its role in studying climate change, and the authors argue that it "should be dismantled" and privatized.In other words, according to Project 2025, at least, NOAA's apparent transgression has been doing its job: science (with a degree of government oversight that privatizing its work and research would lack.)Share This Article