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The fallacy here is the assumption that in the counterfactual world where DOGE didn't cut these positions, the death toll would be (greatly?) reduced. The very blurb you quote suggests that in the best case a full time overnight forecaster provides a few minutes of heads-up via the emergency alert system. NOAA reports around 50-100 fatalities from tornados per year, with some outliers during extreme weather conditions. If we see an enduring spike in fatalities through 2025 and into 2026 and 2027, that would be evidence for your hypothesis. As of now, I'd say it's too early to tell.
How many deaths would there have been in Kentucky if there weren't Weather Service cuts? It seems impossible to know for sure. I couldn't find any information on whether an emergency alert was sent out in Kentucky (though I didn't look very hard) but if one wanted to make a case for these cut positions being important (rather than just accepting a statement from the Weather Service union) you'd want to dig up some data regarding how many tornados are "typically" caught -- and how quickly -- pre and post cuts to quantify the effectiveness of these local overnight forecaster positions.
I'm strongly anti-safetyist. The optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero. The government could obviously reduce tornado deaths to zero if this outcome was prioritized at all costs. We acknowledge that there are diminishing returns and don't invest the resources to drive tornado deaths to zero. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the current resource distribution is optimal, though plausibly it's in a local minimum and moving out of it will cause some amount of pain.
I'm in agreement with you here. That's why I brought up the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) calculations that the government uses. They're not beyond debate - I could certainly see arguments for raising or lowering the value from the $7.5 million it is set at, or using different statistics like Quality Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) that might come to different results. But they are a reasonable starting point for cost-benefit trade-off discussions, and they set a limit to how much money we're willing to throw at saving a life through government policies around things like disaster preparedness and response, healthcare, road safety, etc.
Even if the optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero - if we were successfully reducing tornado deaths with advanced warnings at a reasonable cost tradeoff, and we just stopped doing that earlier this year, then I think there is a fair case to make for us going back to the way things were on this particular front. I recognize that I have not yet conclusively made the case for this, and I'm trying to take a step back and do a more thorough investigation of the trends and causes in tornado deaths to get a better handle on what is going on here.
Your point about my pronouncements being somewhat premature is well taken. I certainly agree that an enduring spike in tornado deaths through to 2027 would be better evidence of the position I have staked out. Though I think setting up the "natural experiment" in a way that we can be sure it is due to staffing cuts and not something else is kind of tricky. Probably, you would look at all tornado prone areas of the United States, see which ones had staffing cuts and which ones did not over a relevant time period and then look at the long run trends going back well before and well after the DOGE cuts. Once the data was in, you could make suggestive correlational arguments that wouldn't be the end of the discussion, but might be enough to convince someone that it was indeed a mistake.
All good points, and I have started to do some digging into the data.
I'm sure more information will emerge on this particular disaster, and I'm certainly willing to eat crow if more information emerges and I jumped the gun too early here.
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