Interview: Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan

Kathryn D. Sullivan was under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 2014 to 2017. She had previously served as NOAA’s chief scientist, and as deputy administrator and acting administrator. A graduate of the University of California and Dalhousie University, she holds a B.S. in earth science and Ph.D. in geology. She joined NASA in 1978, was a crewmember on three space shuttle missions, and was the first American woman to walk in space on Oct. 11, 1984. She was also a member of the Naval Reserve beginning in 1988, retiring as a captain in 2006. Following completion of her service at NOAA, she was designated as the 2017 Charles A. Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, and has also served as a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. On June 7, 2020, she became the first woman to dive to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Earth’s oceans.

Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan: It’s probably no exaggeration to say that NOAA is the one federal agency that touches almost every American’s life almost every day, and almost always in a way that helps them get through their day. I mean, you need only look at the value and importance of weather forecasts to the pleasure of our day, the safety of our day, the safety of our businesses, efficient operation of businesses – that alone would make my statement valid. So why does the nation need NOAA? You know we live on this extraordinarily dynamic planet. And the United States of America in particular, with the size of its territory, the bounding by oceans – again our livelihoods, our public safety, our economies, our businesses are very, very strongly influenced by the conditions of the atmosphere and the ocean and the climate and weather and ecosystems that make our planet work. What NOAA does for citizens, elected officials, or businesses is stay very aware of the kind of issues and questions and hazards that the natural environment poses towards society. And then, as a richly scientific agency, NOAA musters the measurements and analyses and the information processes that can transform scientific understanding of our planet and how it works into useful, actionable information that we can use in our everyday lives.

So, I call NOAA America’s environmental intelligence agency.

I think of the value to a president or a military commander of having good intel, a good picture, a good understanding of the situation that you’re confronting, and the dynamics of that situation and which way it might go. That rich picture, that rich painting of intelligence – reliable, worthwhile information – can help you understand where you are, what’s happening, what’s coming at you, and to think ahead and plan ahead to decide what course of action to take. In an advanced society like the United States in this day and age, and with the complexity and dynamics of our planet and our economy and our lives, environmental intelligence is actually vital to safety and success every single day. NOAA is certainly one of the country’s top environmental agencies, but I would argue it is the sole environmental intelligence agency.

It informed my later service in two key ways. My stint as chief scientist in the early nineties was my “first rodeo” at the national policy level and with the interfaces between the White House, Cabinet secretaries, Congress, and the agencies. So, it was a great learning curve – a steep learning curve at times – but a great learning curve about the full range of NOAA’s work. As chief scientist, I focused mainly on guiding and shaping the scientific research and technology development investments and programs. I didn’t have to get directly involved in very much of either the White House dynamics or Hill politics. But the chief scientist position was an excellent one from which to watch and listen and observe and build a solid understanding of how those dynamics work – what the roles and responsibilities and motivations and tensions are between agencies and the Congress, between agencies and their departments and the White House, and how to navigate through those effectively to advance an administration’s agenda and the agency’s legally chartered mission. So, with four years of that sort of seasoning and background, I then went into other executive positions from 1996 to 2010. Those positions helped me hone my skills as an executive at different levels. So, when I came back in 2010 as the No.2 and then the No.1 chief executive at NOAA, I had a solid grasp of both pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. I had a well-formed and sophisticated understanding of the interagency, executive branch and legislative branch dynamics and processes, and I had more than a decade’s experience as a senior executive responsible for directing and steering organizations.

Several come to mind. No.1 would be climate science. It’s often an overlooked little detail that I was actually first nominated to the position of NOAA chief scientist by President George Herbert Walker Bush, around April of 1992. And of course, he subsequently lost the November election. But it was his administration – a Republican administration – that issued the first substantive national policy on climate change, which stated clearly that the climate was changing – the scientific evidence was clear – and that the consequences for the country were potentially quite substantial. This made it important to support research to refine the future outlooks and reduce the uncertainties so that policymakers could better understand how to mitigate the risks or prepare the country to adapt to the consequences. So, “climate change” – in air quotes – was not a weaponized issue back then. And interestingly – and ironic amid today’s politics – that the teeing up of climate change as a potentially significant systemic threat the country needed to be ready for came from a Republication president. That dynamic had of course changed radically by the time I came back in 2010.

Second, the hyper-partisanship and stridency generally of the country and in particular within the Congress, was also very different. I think I saw the starting steps of that evolution during my time as chief scientist, when the 104th Congress came along with Newt Gingrich as the speaker. Having paid an interested citizen’s attention to national policymaking since about sixth grade, I remember being struck by how notable a change of tone suddenly seemed to be getting into the equation. Now maybe it was not quite as notable and stark as it struck me. Maybe it was partly that I was standing closer to the scene than I ever had done before. But nonetheless, it really was rather striking to me. So that trend, unfortunately, has continued and become even more hyper-partisan. There’s much more denigration of science, dismissal of credentials and expertise now than back then. But those two factors – the weaponization of climate as a political wedge issue and the erosion of trust in science and expertise more generally – would be the ones that had the greatest influence on my second stint at NOAA. They not only affected what challenges came my way as deputy administrator and administrator, but also influenced substantially how I could respond effectively to those challenges.

I really had a singular priority as administrator, and that was to really raise NOAA’s game in terms of how effectively it operated, how highly it was regarded, supported, and rewarded both from the executive branch and the legislative branch. When I came aboard in 2011, the satellite programs of NOAA were in rather a mess. I came in after the big divorce between the Defense Department and NASA and NOAA over what had been an abortive attempt to produce just a single national weather satellite program instead of a defense one and civilian one. That effort began actually when I was chief scientist, and I was given the assignment of being part of setting up that experiment. But it failed badly, and it had unraveled completely by the time I came back. NOAA had not come out looking good. It had lost a lot of capability and talent as brain drain went towards the Defense Department, where the money was, and NASA, where the prestige was. As one of my colleagues put it, NOAA was basically in receivership. It was not very highly regarded on the Hill because it was sort of blamed for the debacle of the satellite program. So actually the job Jane Lubchenco hired me for was to pull the satellite program out of the ditch and get it back on its feet so we wouldn’t have a break in weather services. So, there was that. I needed to fix a bunch of technical and programmatic issues with the satellite program. That’s a couple billion-dollar program, by the way. So, it’s not chump change.

Also, when I first got there in 2011, it was clear there was quite a schism between the political appointee leadership and the career ranks. It is my view that that is always damaging to both the policy agenda of a White House and to the agency in terms of its performance capability. Once I became the acting administrator, my first goal was to move the agency beyond that schism, and then to improve NOAA’s standing with the Office of Management and Budget and with the Hill, so that we could start to get stronger support for the key thrust of the agency’s programs. So, I did not have a long laundry list of high priorities. My long-term priority was to make the White House, Congress, the public, and various other audiences understand NOAA not as a hodgepodge of pet projects that all want some money, but as “America’s environmental intelligence agency,” and identify a small set of high-level strategic thrusts. I believed that focusing on the four strategic thrusts we identified would give us the bounce that lets us strengthen and improve many of our program elements. I don’t think you advance by telling the world you’re doing 300 important things. You help the world outside of your walls understand the essence of what you are and what you do, and inspire or persuade them to support that. That’s how you lift the entire boat.

Well, we got the satellite programs out of the ditch. The NOAA/NASA relationship, which is vital to those programs, was really fraught, in a mess – we made that better. That was a combination of both high-level work that I did with my NASA counterparts and senior members of the agency, and strengthening the bench at NOAA. We got the budget support and approval needed for the specific satellite that was being built at the time I came aboard, and that one got into orbit. Then we convinced Congress that continuity in that program was essential, and persuaded them to authorize the entire series instead of extending permission one satellite at a time. We managed slowly, but bit by bit, to get budget increases. Let me set one bit of context here. When budgets are tight, as they were throughout my tenure, both the White House and the Congress tend to see in NOAA just a couple of things that really have to get done. There has to be a weather service, and that requires satellite data, so those two are essential. And the fisheries stuff NOAA does is vital to coastal economies, so you probably have to do that. And although everything else that NOAA does, like all of its research, underpins those three activities, budgeters tend to regard those as optional, as programs that can be trimmed or even cut out altogether. So, we had to move these three strategic thrusts forward in order to shore up the strength of the research programs and the ocean science programs. I’m pleased that we actually made some good progress on those fronts as well.

I’m also very proud of how the internal executive team, both the political staff and the senior career leaders, worked together. I had never seen NOAA function that effectively across the different operating divisions and across the political appointee to career staff. I think we really did manage to make the agency hum and hit its stride in a very productive and positive way. That takes a combination of program strategy and a lot of work on culture and people. I’m probably most proud of the progress we made in that area.

I think of this on several different levels. One is the acute. In the short-term, the reality that the social and economic toll of severe weather is rising, due in part to the changing frequency and severity of events, but more so to population growth and the expansion of our cities and infrastructure. This is already problematic on lots of fronts, from tornado and hurricane damage to increased nuisance flooding in coastal zones, notably in Florida and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. The second level is systemic, and here the biggest worry is systems failure. It’s the depletion of biological resources in the ocean through industrial scale fishing up and down the food chain – finning, killing tens of thousands of sharks per year just for their fins; taking out highly-evolved slow-growth species like tuna or, further down the food chain, taking masses of krill out of the ocean to make fish oil for pet foods, nutritional supplements, and the like. That’s kind of like cutting down all the grasses where you used to graze your cows and then wondering why your cows aren’t growing. On top of the general depletion of the ocean, there are the increasing pollution levels, ranging from the carbon dioxide that makes the ocean more acidic to physical pollution, like the now famous great garbage patches.

Beyond that is the potential of, if not system failure, certainly major regime change in the Earth’s climate system. I’m fond of saying that the issue with the Earth’s climate changing is not that the Earth is going to be in trouble. The Earth, this planet, will be just fine; no need to worry about it. The issue is the human societies and economies are going to be wildly disrupted. The fish stock you used to feed off has just migrated north as waters warm, and it’s now in my waters, not yours. Where do you go to replace that protein supply? Where the wheat belts used to be, where the breadbaskets used to be now can’t produce crops, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those dislocations are likely to be severe, and also to creep up on us like the water slowly heating up around the frog in the pan. But they will occasionally smack us hard, because, as basic physics tells us, one of the consequences of the kind of change that is happening in the climate is that extreme events happen more frequently and they are more intense than what we’ve grown accustomed to over the past decades. So more shocks, more frequently and more intensely than your insurance models had ever anticipated, that your social fabric has ever had to withstand. The planet itself physically and chemically? It may become like Venus or Mars at some point, but there will be a planet. It may not be anything like the planet as humankind has known it. It’s the fate of the biological species living on this little orb that’s in question.