We'll have fewer tornado warnings this season because of DOGE

John McGuire and the rest of his caucus are making us more vulnerable to severe weather.

DOGE is getting attention for killing federal projects outright—with full-throated support from VA-5 representative and DOGE Caucus member John McGuire—but even the projects that don’t get nixed are hitting bottlenecks. Last month, the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell wrote up several examples, including this one:

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration… no contracts may be initiated or extended without sign-off from the commerce secretary, creating a bottleneck. One NOAA contract that expires soon is for maintenance and repair of the all-hazards weather radio network, which broadcasts tornado warnings and watches, among other life-and-death alerts. The contract has been stuck in limbo, just as an already-deadly tornado season is getting underway.

As I write this, that contract seems to have expired. What’s that mean for VA-5? Are we tornado-prone enough to worry about this?

Thanks to Newsleader.com, you can search NOAA’s database of tornadoes, which goes back to 1950. The bottom line is that, although Hollywood probably won’t be shooting the next Twisters here, we do have our share of damaging windstorms. In 2024, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, three tornadoes hit VA-5. We were spared in 2023, but in 2022, several more touched down. News 8 / Richmond’s headlines that June: “It's like a nightmare”; “Goochland residents plead for help after tornado.”

As a resident of the 5th district, I certainly don’t feel safer knowing we might not hear when the next twister touches down because a contract is still sitting on the commerce secretary’s desk.

Of course, gumming up a deal for weather systems is hardly this administration’s most egregious offense. But I’m highlighting it because one of the things I’m trying to do with this blog is show how McGuire’s actions and words affect constituents throughout the 5th.

Clearly there are people in this district who don’t think our freedom of speech is under siege or our independent courts are being undermined. But they still have a dog in this fight. They or someone they love might live someplace that’s vulnerable to severe weather. They might rely on Medicaid, send their kids to a low-income school, work for the federal government, serve in the military, or care about the fate of sick children in other countries. My theory is that these things matter to them at least as much as whether a Confederate soldier gets reinstated in the National Ranger Memorial at Fort Benning—a cause John McGuire championed in a letter to Pete Hegseth just last week, while that tornado-warning contract lingered in someone’s inbox.