Employees at the National Weather Service no longer have to worry about agencywide furloughs, after House appropriators approved a reprogramming request yesterday that will ensure the agency has enough money to pay salaries.

The approval means the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration can take about $36 million from capital improvement accounts and use it to fund forecasting activities, employee salaries and a radar upgrade project.

NOAA officials asked for the reprogramming after an internal investigation revealed that the Weather Service had for years reallocated millions of dollars without required congressional approval (Greenwire, May 29). The potentially illegal practice ended once the investigation began, forcing NOAA to ask for congressional approval to make essentially the same reallocations.

The House's approval yesterday comes about a week after Senate appropriators gave the go-ahead to NOAA and its mother agency, the Department of Commerce. Without approval to move around funds, NOAA officials have said that it would fall about $26 million short for salaries, necessitating 13 furlough days for every Weather Service employee.

A spokesman for Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who heads the House Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees NOAA, said that the panel approved the reprogramming request to avoid those furloughs as well as "maintain ongoing operations for dissemination of data essential to warnings and forecasts." The Weather Service will also be able to complete deployment of technology upgrades to its weather radars.

But lawmakers still have plenty of questions over conflicting information. Officials at the Weather Service pointed to a "structural deficit" that caused the agency to routinely fall short on salaries, but NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said last week that the Weather Service had enough money on the whole. The problem, she indicated, was that some accounts were overfunded, while others, like salaries, were underfunded (Greenwire, June 21).

So far, Congress has asked the Government Accountability Office, the Commerce inspector general and Attorney General Eric Holder to review the issue.