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the Maryland Federation of the National Active and Retired Federal

Employees Association (NARFE).

I am Mary K. Shifflett and I served in the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration/Goddard Space Flight Center for 42 years. Most of my career
was spent in the business management and senior management of the Mission
to Planet Earth and the Earth Science Program Office. I served as the

Program Business Manager in the Earth Science Program Office and was
responsible for the business and programmatic development and launch of

many Earth Science satellites from the late 1990s through 2015, which
included the Landsat satellites. The yearly budget for these missions, from
pre-development through the operations of the spacecraft, was in the hundreds
of millions of dollars. My involvement included providing business
management advice to the senior-level management teams in the Earth

Science arena. These satellites provide our Nation with information on a daily
basis used in monitoring changes in the Earth’s environment as well as

forecasting the weather.

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE

I am Ken Putkovich and I served in the National Weather Service (NWS) for
over 40 years of Federal Service. I worked as an Engineering Manager for the

last 16 years, responsible for telecommunication systems designed to deliver
All Hazard Emergency Warnings to people immediately at risk as quickly as
possible. As Chief of Dissemination Systems for NWS, I was responsible for

numerous improvements to emergency warning technology, which impacted
the welfare and safety of millions of Americans. During this period, I
transitioned the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Weather Wire Service from a state-based teletype system to a state-of-the-art

National satellite system, which carries emergency warning messages from
anywhere in the country to media and emergency managers anywhere in the
country in less than three seconds. I grew the NOAA Weather Radio (NWR)

network from less than 500 stations in 1988 to nearly 1,000 in 2004,
providing critical, timely emergency warnings to an additional 70 million
people in the United States. During that same period, NWR was made more
reliable with state-of-the-art transmitters and upgrades to older broadcast

stations. I was instrumental in developing and deploying technology capable

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