Federal cuts are bad for scientific research, which is bad for all of us.

Here’s a vision we can all agree on, whatever our political leanings. The mission of the U.S. Department of Commerce is “to create the conditions for economic growth and opportunity for all communities,” according to the agency’s website. “The Department works to drive U.S. economic competitiveness, strengthen domestic industry, and spur the growth of quality jobs in all communities across the country.”

Close your eyes and think about what that looks like – maybe you conjure infrastructure like good rail lines or sturdy bridges. Maybe it’s easy access for entrepreneurs to loans.

Or maybe it’s a group of scientists evaluating the potential risks of a fishery to a protected species like humpback whales.

Ok, that’s not what most of us think of when we envision “economic competitiveness.” But all of these functions are contained within the Department of Commerce’s umbrella, whose 13 bureaus include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

I’m thinking about how sound science matters to economic prosperity because NOAA was the latest federal agency to face slash-and-burn terminations, which came to Monterey County on Thursday, Feb. 27.

At least six employees of NOAA agencies – three at the National Weather Service’s Monterey office, and three at NOAA Fisheries – were unceremoniously fired.

Four days later, I met up with the former Fisheries employees to talk about their work; they describe themselves as cooperative links in a chain. One project they worked on was the Climate Ecosystems and Fisheries Initiative (CEFI). Allison Cluett is a physical scientist who worked on sophisticated ocean modeling with projections that go out as far as a century; Heather Welch is a marine biologist who’d been looking at what those models and ocean warming events could mean for species presence and interactions; and Matthew Koller is a communications pro, who converts that science into laypeople’s terms. (A disclosure: Koller is a former intern at the Weekly.)

Their work was in the science realm, not policy, but the science gets handed over to policymakers. One application of this research is regulating the types of fishing gear allowed, or changing fishery start/end dates (for example, delaying Dungeness crab season to avoid humpback whale entanglements).

At first glance, that might look like bad news for the economy, and that’s certainly what Elon Musk would have you believe – aren’t regulators making it too hard to earn money?

But we have to look only as far as Monterey Bay, where the sardine fishery collapsed in the 1950s, devastating the resource – and the jobs that it supported. What if NOAA Fisheries then had the modeling capabilities it had today? Would Monterey still be a fishing town?

I asked Matthew Savoca, a research scientist at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, about this. “If the biology and ecology of those species was understood – yeah, we could still have an operating sardine fishery today,” he offers.

Savoca funds his research, focused on microplastics, by applying to grants. He notes the nature of science that advances the public good – and that even in his funding stream of so-called “soft money,” the public has come to rely on government dollars. This is true not just of marine science research, but also cancer research, Alzheimer’s research, space exploration and so on.

“There is not anything you do that is not affected by American progress. The diagnosis you get from a doctor; the food that you eat; absolutely everything is going to be impacted in a grave way to save a few pennies,” Savoca says. “It’s just baffling. The biggest reason is just a misunderstanding, a scapegoating of scientists.

“Science isn’t something to be believed. It’s not like a religion that you have faith in or not, it’s just a way of thinking. Something has shifted.”

Not only does that shift mean the research and the researchers’ livelihoods are imperiled, it’s also bad for the economy. Imagine the brain drain on a place like Monterey County, that draws top-notch scientists to local institutions. Imagine that scaled up nationally – it doesn’t align with the mission of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.