It’s not just the essay questions or the loyalty tests. Whether or not you are hired, and whether or not you get to keep your job is wholesale based on if a Trump Admin stooge thinks you pass the admins vibe check.

And, if you don’t pass the vibe check for your probation you get an adverse action on your personnel file which basically precludes you from working in the civil service again. (Page 7)

It’s shit all the way down ngl, and the civil service will take decades to recover from all this.

Yeah, thats the part the news outlets seem to forget. The hiring paradigms this time around favor cronyism and nepotism over actual merit and skill, and direct hire just augments that 10 fold

There is a (effectively permanent) hiring freeze government wide so no one will likely replace them. The duties however were already spread amongst the existing staff which is why the flood warnings managed to get out to in advance and most counties were able to react in advance.

The county official in charge of actually evacuating people largely dropped the ball here by, in the past refusing to consider flood mititgation strategies the Weather Service reccomended years ago, and choosing to just not engage with the Weather Service when they were loudly screaming about incoming floods.

To contextualize this, County, State, and municipal emergency managers get access to a direct communication line with their local forecast office(s). They chose to not respond to the weather service issuing these warnings via that direct line.

It’s honestly exhausting that our media apparatus simultaneously tries to spin the Weather Service as both victims of this admins incompetence but also are historically the ones made out to have dropped the ball whenever a local emergency manager decides not to do their job.