2 Senior NOAA Staffers Placed On Leave: They Found Violations Of Scientific Integrity During Shitstain 1.0

Two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were placed on leave this week, including one official who said he had recently clashed with officials over the Trump administration’s proposals for the agency.

Former agency officials said both Steve Volz, assistant administrator in the agency’s satellite division, and Jeff Dillen, deputy NOAA general counsel, held positions that allowed them to push back against Trump’s NOAA appointees. While the pair had only occasionally worked together while at NOAA, they also led the investigation into the “Sharpiegate” scandal during the first Trump administration.

Volz was not given an explicit reason for being placed on administrative leave but said tensions between him and Trump’s appointees had been rising. Volz said he had recently pushed back during discussions of commercializing satellite operations. “The question that I would ask is, why now?” Volz said in an interview. “Maybe the desire here is to get anybody who might slow down their ability to execute their plan out of the way. I think I’m one of those people.”

During Trump’s first term, Volz and Dillen served as the senior executive and senior counsel during an investigation that found NOAA’s leadership violated its scientific integrity policy. The agency had released a statement backing Trump’s hand-drawn version of a forecast for 2019’s Hurricane Dorian, which showed the storm threatening Alabama.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/07/25/noaa-officials-administration-leave-sharpiegate/