Winter Hangs On

Heat stored in the driveway concrete is doing its job. As I write, the snow is forecast to end in about an hour. After that, very high winds are expected: the kind that blow trees over and wreck buildings. It will be a day of staying indoors and wondering how the apparent demise of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will affect these small updates. Several hundred NOAA employees have been fired. National Public Radio reported staff cuts at NOAA could interrupt the weather forecasts many Americans rely on.

We finished our federal and state tax returns and neither owed anything nor expect a refund. In the meanwhile, Associated Press is reporting the Internal Revenue Service is drafting plans to lay off half of its 90,000-person workforce. “A reduction in force of tens of thousands of employees would render the IRS ‘dysfunctional,'” said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner.

Our Social Security pensions came on time in February. The Social Security Administration plans to lay off 7,000 workers, bringing its workforce headcount to about 50,000, according to a recent news release. Workforce cuts may delay benefits, shut down offices, and create problems for retirees who rely upon government assistance, according to a US News and World Report article. Our family bellwether is whether the payments arrive on time. We are waiting to see what happens.

There is the uncertainty at the National Institutes of Health which is the government mechanism to help fund research in so many diseases we seniors might get. The way cuts rolled out was the same way a group of kids dink around with a live turtle, seeing what it will do under stress conditions. Morale at the clinics and labs that rely on this government funding must be low. Low enough for employees to look elsewhere for a new, more stable job. I hope they get NIH funded so the research on infectious disease, cancer, and other common ailments continues before more people need life-saving treatments and die for the lack of them.

We don’t use Medicaid presently. We might as we age and perhaps need continuous care in a nursing home. It is best if a family can care for their aging members, yet not always possible. The Congress is playing a shell game about cuts to health care, yet it is no secret they are looking at $880 million or so in cuts to Medicaid in addition to other programs poor people and children rely upon. The prospects for such cuts loom like the forecast high winds later today.

The wind picked up since I began writing this post. After experiencing the 2020 derecho, high winds have been unsettling. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea for me to watch damage occur in our yard during the derecho, rather than take shelter in the lower level. What the experience gave me was a direct connection to the potential damage of high winds. If NOAA is dissolved, the uncertainty of from where we will get reliable weather forecasts can cause stress. With everything going on in the administration, more stress is something we don’t need.