← Rick Wilson's The Enemies List
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Recently we asked some people about sharing their New York Times accounts. My name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't and it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in wordle or connections. Thank you, Dana. We heard you introducing the New York Times Family subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more@nytimes.com family hey everybody, it's Rick. Today's enemies list is a grim one, and the enemy on the list is an unsurprising one. It's the Trump administration and its doge. But the effects that led us here to this recording today on Sunday is simple. Right now In Texas, about 60 people that we know of so far are dead. 27 young girls from a summer camp are missing. Texas was hit yesterday by unbelievable storms, and the National Weather Service offices in Texas are understaffed and undermanned. They've been facing the effects of the rifts and the cuts and the early buyout offers driven by Dosh and the Trump administration. So they didn't have people on the ground to do the forecasting. Their budgets have been slashed, their headcounts have been slashed in these local and regional weather service offices. You proud of yourself, Elon? How about you, Donald? You proud of yourself? How about all you Republican congressmen who sat there lapping up the Doge bullshit like it was a milkshake? Here's the problem. First off, let's. Let's cover the National Weather Service for a second. It's a tiny agency. It's microscopic. It's trivial. Their budget's like a billion three a year. It's nothing. Burger money. It's zero. We will spend more than that. Fucking moving Donald Trump to play golf at Mar a Lago in the next two years. Also a vital agency for a whole host of reasons. One, agriculture depends on it every single day, folks. Whatever you think about ag being automated and modernized and all that, still has to play with the hand if it's dealt by the weather every single day. Aviation, big and small, commercial and military aviation at the top of that food chain, and general aviation where I fly there as well. We depend on safe, real weather forecasts, whether it's a passenger plane full of people or me puttering along in the Beechcraft. Okay, I don't put her. It's actually pretty fast. Commerce depends on it. Americans depend on it. Now, we could have this bullshit libertarian argument that weather is a service and it should be provided for a fee. And, and we, we could have that argument. The folks at accuweather, whether, I don't know, this is an inside baseball thing, but for as long as I can remember, 25 years, they've been lobbying to kill the National Weather Service. Are they donations in the Trump thing from the accuweather guys? I'd bet good money on it. I haven't bothered to look yet. Cause I would just get more angry. But what happened with the weather Service and a lot of other government agencies? The guys who said, oh, we have to go through every agency and if certain keywords appear, those jobs have to disappear. If certain keywords like climate or, or resiliency appear, those agencies have to be cut, they have to be slashed, they have to be destroyed. $1.3 billion is in the government, in government money. There are people who will get a bigger tax cut and individuals who will get a bigger tax cut because of the big bad bill. There will be people who get a tax cut worth $1.3 billion or much more. So this tiny agency that does an outsized job, that does a big important job, get slashed to the bone. They are told, you either quit or we're gonna fire you. If you quit, you get a buyout or we fire you. They've been doing both. They have slashed the National Weather Service down, and I think it's 4,000 employees. They've probably. I think they've. I think they cut 600 and they riffed about another 1300 who took the offer. So you tell me you're gonna operate at the same level of efficiency when you cut a quarter of your personnel out, or 20%, let's call it. You're not. You're just not. It's a small agency. They do a good job. They have done a great job over the years. But for whatever reason, this goes hand in glove with the Trump administration and Doge's idea that we have to kill off FEMA because natural disasters don't happen and states can cover all of it. You sure about that? You sure about that, Donald? They recently, the Pentagon cut off a data feed from some defense support satellites that provided super accurate microwave reflectivity information. I'm nerding here. That allowed us to predict where hurricanes were going more accurately. That's off now. That's gone. It's over. They've killed the forecasting ability. We've got one of the Bain forecasters down in Miami who said the other day goes, we're back to 1999. So back in 1999, you did not know where a hurricane was going to hit. You did not know where that path was going to go. This administration is putting the people across the country in danger. We with these decisions. California wildfires, National Weather Service helps predict when and how and where they're going to be. And go the Gulf Coast, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, up the Atlantic again. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina. We're in the middle of the gun. For every hurricane that crosses the Atlantic or comes up out of the Caribbean. Where they're going to land is a mystery. Now, the ability to forecast where they're going to go is a mystery. So far we have 57 lives lost in Texas that we know of. But I'll tell you something, folks, the enemies at Doge and in the Trump administration, they should be ready for that number to increase, to add some zeros to it, because what they're doing is putting lives in danger. What they're doing for the false belief that they were going to de wokeify the National Weather Service. And that is what this is about. They believe that the National Weather Service and all other aspects of government are a liberal hotbed of DEI and climate change activism and the. And that. That they must be burned to the ground. He's in Project 2025, guys. Privatize it. They want you to have weather as a service provided by a private company where you pay a fee to get a government weather forecast. There are things that the government should not do. There are significant things the government should not do. This isn't one of them. There is a utility to what the National Weather Service does that goes well beyond, vastly beyond what accuweather is going to provide us. And here's the great, great, great irony. These private companies that want to monetize your knowledge of the weather and of hurricanes and of floods and of storms and of tornadoes and of wildfires. They take their data from the government sources. Their data comes from the National Weather Service. They're not out there with their own satellites. They're not out there with their own forecasting stations. They get their data from the National Weather Service. They repackage it. Hey, summer's winding down. But you know what doesn't belong in your epic end of summer plans? Getting burned by your old wireless bill. If you're planning those final beach trips, barbecues and three day weekends, your wireless bill should be the last thing holding you back. That's why we made the switch to Mint Mobile. With Mint, you can get coverage and speed. You're used to but for way less money. For a limited time, Mint mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. So while your friends are sweating over data, overages and surprise charges, you'll be chilling, literally and financially. 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Get this new customer offer for your 3 month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month@mintmobile.com Wilson that's mintmobile.com Wilson upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time new customer offer for the first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gig on the unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. They shush it up. Whatever. We'll be right back. And now back to the show. So you should grasp the absurdity of this. Look, Americans have decided they want government to do some things. They want the government to run our national parks and not Sodexo or whomever. They want the National Weather Service to tell them when there's a hurricane or a storm coming that could kill them. They want the National Weather Service to say, hey, there's a chance that these floods could rise up in the Guadalupe river and kill people. There is an argument going on right now of did Texas get what it voted for? I'm gonna leave that on the table for right now because no one ever thinks the leopard's gonna eat their face. This tragedy will have taken the lives of people in red Texas and blue Texas alike. The harm will hurt Republicans and Democrats. Do I want Republicans to think hard about what they've done? Do I want members of Congress from Texas to lose their fucking minds with with the Trump administration? I do. But they won't. This is one of those things where it's a micro data point that Illustrates the macro problem. Donald Trump doesn't give a fuck about the National Weather Service. He doesn't think about it. He doesn't process it. He's a man who spent most of his life in air conditioning. Like I said, that stuff that they're cutting to the bone, that there's stuff that they're slashing like crazy, the stuff they're trying to turn into a compensated service from the private sector. So you have to pay to get weather alerts, pay to know when a hurricane is coming your way, pay to know when a tropical storm is going to hit, pay to know when a tornado is going to come through your neighborhood, pay to know when a river's going to flood. These are people who think Ayn Rand was a good writer. These are people who have a bizarro world. Cronyism is the best explanation. Cruelty is the second best explanation. Libertarian morons is the is the third best. And again, there are a lot of things government shouldn't do. A lot of things government shouldn't do. This is not one of them. Every day there are people out there in this world who wake up. Whether they're driving a truck, flying a cargo plane, going out to sea in a shrimp boat, working in a field, they depend on the National Weather Service. Donald Trump and Doge and Russell Vaught and Elon Musk cut the hell out of the National Weather Service. They're selling their building, folks. They want to destroy it. And this is the micro point again. It's a tiny agency, 4,000 people. They hired more people for ice this week than work at the national weather service. Okay? ICE's budget will now be roughly 1,000 times bigger than the National Weather Service. None of this makes sense unless you look at what they're trying to accomplish. They want to break your life. They don't care who gets hurt in the process. They do not care. 57 people so far, 27 missing. Missing young girls. This tragedy is not going to get better. It's going to get worse. And these are not the first lives to be lost. These are not the first people who will die for this absurdity. These are not the first people who the Trump administration will brush its hands off as a DEI agency. Guys, people in the National Weather Service, God love them, they are hardworking nerds. They're not out there trying to impose the woke agenda. They trying to tell you when there's a storm coming. They're trying to tell you this is a world. We don't control the weather. I wish we did. Marjorie Taylor Greene Thinks we control the weather. By the way, she's trying to put a bill out there, stop the chemtrails. We'll be right back. And now back to the show. This is a really important story, guys. This is a really important moment because I think that, that we have underestimated the degree of malice and of contempt and the, and the idea that these small services that our tax dollars cover, these small ball issues that, that make almost nothing of an impact on the federal budget. If you did a pie chart of the federal budget, you could not see the slice of the National Weather Service unless you zoomed way the hell in. It's essential. We've cut it to pieces. We've broken it. We sent home talented forecasters, we fired them, we furloughed them, we riffed them, we forced them out. They're going to keep going, you know, they're going to keep trying to cut this further and further because there is this insane belief it could all be replaced with AI maybe someday. But it still takes people right now to go out and check a meter, go out and put up a weather balloon, go out and do the work of trying to keep us safe. We're not doing that anymore. And there's a body count in Texas to prove it. And the enemy's list this week, Doge Vought, Musk and Trump, I know you will learn no lessons from this. I know you will take no, no responsibility for this. I know you will feel no guilt for this. But as families in Texas, God bless them, spend the next few days locating the remains of their loved ones and spend the next few weeks burying them and spend the rest of their lives mourning them. They could have known this could have been stopped. You chose not to. And for that, you son of a bitches are on the enemies list. Thank you for listening today to the enemies list. This is a hell of a week for the folks in Texas. And I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I know we're praying for them and I hope you are, too. And once again, if you're a legislator in Texas and sitting in Congress today or you're a U.S. senator from Texas and you're not kicking the living crap out of Donald Trump and Doge and Russ Vaught and asking for these cuts to National Weather Service that screwed Texas so badly to be reinstated, you're going to make it on the enemy's list too. Thanks again, everybody for listening. We will be back with you next week on with the enemies list. And do me a favor, go out and subscribe to Lincoln Square. Go out and follow me on substack. Wilson I'm also on all the social media platforms under the Sun. Thanks again. We'll talk to you soon. Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping. Oh come on. They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever. You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.