The MAGA Plan to Defund the Weather
6 min read
In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has been forecast for the next season. Even if they get that news from a privately owned app or TV station, much of the underlying weather data are courtesy of meteorologists working for the federal government.
Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.
NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. The proposals roughly amount to two main avenues of attack. First, it suggests that the NWS should eliminate their public-facing forecasts, focus on data gathering, and otherwise “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which the authors of the plan imply will improve, not limit, forecasts for all Americans. Then, NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.
The U.S. is, without question, experiencing a summer of brutal weather. In just the past week, a record-breaking hurricane brought major flooding and power outages to Texas amid an extreme-heat advisory. More than a dozen tornadoes ripped through multiple states. Catastrophic flash flooding barreled through wildfire burn scars in New Mexico. Large parts of the West roasted in life-threatening temperatures. Facing any of this without the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be mayhem. And future years are likely to be worse.
The NWS serves as a crucial point of contact in a weather crisis, alerting the public when forecasts turn dangerous and advising emergency managers on the best plan of action. So far in 2024, the NWS has issued some 13,000 severe-thunderstorm warnings, 2,000 tornado warnings, and 1,800 flash-flood warnings, plus almost 3,000 river-flood warnings, according to JoAnn Becker, a meteorologist and the president of the union that represents NWS employees.
NOAA is also home to the National Hurricane Center, which tracks storms, and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, whose pilots fly “hurricane hunter” planes directly into cyclones to measure their wind speed and hone the agency’s predictions. NOAA even predicts space weather. Just this past May, it forecast a severe geomagnetic storm with the potential to threaten power grids and satellites. (The most consequential outages never came to pass, but the solar storm did throw off farmers’ GPS-guided tractors for a while.)
Privatizing the weather is not a new conservative aim. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to be more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then executive vice president of AccuWeather, complained to the press that “we work very hard every day competing with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government.” In 2005, after meeting with a representative from AccuWeather, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill calling for the NWS to cease competition with the private sector, and reserve its forecasts for commercial providers. The bill never made it out of committee. But in 2017, Trump picked Myers to lead NOAA. (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting two years for Senate confirmation.)
Funding for many of NOAA’s programs could plummet in 2025, and the agency already suffers from occasional telecommunications breakdowns, including a recent alert-system outage amid flooding in the Midwest. It is also subject to political pressures: In 2019, the agency backed then-President Trump’s false claim (accompanied by a seemingly Sharpie-altered map) that Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama. Private companies might be better funded and, theoretically, less subject to political whims. They can also use supercomputing power to hone NOAA’s data into hyperlocal predictions, perhaps for an area as small as a football stadium. Some, including AccuWeather, use their own proprietary algorithms to interpret NWS data and produce forecasts that they claim have superior accuracy. (Remember, though: Without NWS data, none of this would happen.)
But this is not the vision that Project 2025 lays out. It proposes a dramatically defunded NOAA whose husk is nonetheless hyper-responsive to the administration’s politics. And commercializing the agency’s underlying data risks creating a system of tiered services. One could imagine a future where private outfits charge subscriptions for their weather reports, and only some municipalities are able to pay for the best forecasts. Private companies are also subject to commercial conflicts of interest; do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?
The NWS also has perks that a private system would be hard-pressed to replicate, including a partnership with the World Meteorological Organization, which allows the U.S. access to a suite of other countries’ weather models. International collaboration proved crucial in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy was still churning in the Atlantic Ocean. Initially, the American model predicted, incorrectly, that the storm would turn away from the East Coast. But the European model accurately forecast a collision course, which bought emergency managers in the U.S. crucial time to prepare before Sandy made ferocious landfall in New Jersey.
Violent storms like Sandy make clear that America’s national security is only as strong as our ability to accurately predict the weather, especially as natural disasters and extreme weather rise in our warming climate. In fact, NOAA’s existence is one of the reasons we know that the climate really is warming. The agency is home to one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, which includes information on shifting atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, plus hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of ice-core and tree-ring data. Scientists around the globe use all of this information. Its collection is proof of human-induced global warming. It’s fitting, then, that the agency would be a target of hard-right activists and the Heritage Foundation, which has received fossil-fuel funding.
Democrats have seized on Project 2025 as an anti-Trump talking point. The Democratic National Convention is running ads urging voters to simply “Google it,” presumably in the hopes that voters will be alarmed by proposals to eliminate the Department of Education and limit access to emergency contraceptives. But Project 2025’s robust sections on how the next administration could whittle away climate-change research have also caught the attention of lawmakers. “Every non-billionaire American should dread this plan,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has been raising alarms about NOAA’s fate since Trump first took office, told me in an email.
The politicization of the weather exasperates JoAnn Becker. Most of her colleagues in meteorology, she said, are living their childhood dreams, which have nothing to do with politics. In 1976, when Becker was a little girl, Typhoon Pamela left much of her native Guam without power for months, and reshaped her life. She wanted to be part of a team that gave people a chance to prepare for something like that. “We’re not pushing an agenda. We’re looking objectively at the changes in our climate overall,” Becker said.
The solution to weather-related polarization, though, is not to eliminate the means by which the United States understands the climate. An ever-growing number of American lives now depend on the country’s ability to respond quickly to weather emergencies. Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.
