Bill Nye: Elon Musk Wants to Replace NOAA Satellites with One of His, ‘This Is Just Good Old Corruption’

BOLDUAN: “Joining us right now for his take is Bill Nye, ‘The Science guy,’ joining us here. It’s good to see you. The entire federal government is getting hit by this, and you just heard that from that former now, former employee of NOAA. What impacts do you see coming from these cuts?”
NYE: “Well, first of all, everybody, let’s understand, I think, what happened. Elon Musk and his guys were revving up — and you know, I’m an engineer, we love engineering, I used to work on failure effects and modes analysis for airplanes. So these guys found what they thought was the vulnerable part of the U.S. government, which is this digital services office. So they got in there and changed all the passwords and messed everything up as fast as they could. And then along that line, people — the system was not set up for it. But understand what’s going on, by firing people at NOAA. NOAA has a lot of satellites, and that’s how these weather predictions are made. You know, when I was young, when I was a kid, if a hurricane path was predicted within 60, 70 nautical miles, everybody would, that was amazing. Well, now it’s within 5 or 6 nautical miles because of the efficacy or the quality of the software and the satellites that do the weather analysis and the people who work on it. Well, Mr. Musk has this company Starlink, and he’s proposing that NOAA be supplanted by a private company. And just to the young guys that have gone to work on this, that have gone into the digital services office to destroy or mess up our electronic systems, keep in mind that this is fundamental corruption. This is — it’s just corruption, when you’re trying to monopolize a government service. And say what you will about Woodrow Wilson back in the old days. He was a big anti-monopoly guy. This is trying to undo the robber barons. And so if you read the book about Elon Musk and so on, he — there’s a whole section on his unrealistic goal setting. So he found this weak part, this weakness in the U.S. government, exploited it as fast as he could, and now for — it’s one thing’s leading to another, and he’s trying to undo a public service and supplant it with one of his. And this is just good old corruption. So sooner or later, I believe the court system will catch up with these guys. And so it’s just going to be — it’s just — talk about efficiency, destroying a system that was working and then trying to replace it later is inefficient.”