Although Donald Trump's campaign has said it is not involved in Project 2025, the plan is still widely seen as a blueprint for a possible second Trump administration. Private weather companies have not yet embraced calls for the “commercialization” of weather service data. Still, as the odds rise for Trump to be re-elected as president, meteorologists and climate scientists have raised concerns about what the proposals would mean for the millions of people they are trying to inform and protect.
Environmental advocates say scientists say they have been marginalized, silenced or expelled by hundreds during Trump's term and worry the administration has distorted their research on the coronavirus and reproduction and hurricane forecasting.
'I do worry about what the future holds' For NOAA and Weather Service staff, said JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. The union represents 4,000 workers at these facilities.
“There are a lot of questions but no answers yet,” Becker said. “No matter who is president, we just want to do a good job of protecting life and property.”
Government agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency have been preparing for the possibility of Trump returning to the White House for months by strengthening safeguards on scientific integrity and job security.
In a 2019 incident known as Sharpiegate, Trump used markers to falsely suggest that Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama — a scandal that highlighted the potentially damaging impact of political interference. An investigation later found that political influence led NOAA to issue a statement inappropriately endorsing Trump and ultimately undermine its own forecasts. Some are looking to Trump's four years in the White House for clues as to what might happen in his second term.
Now, some scientists' concerns stem from Plan 2025, a 900-page document drafted by right-wing policy experts and former Trump officials. It calls for the disbandment of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, saying its climate research is “harmful to America's future prosperity.” It recommended that the Bureau of Meteorology should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations” as its data was already widely used by private companies.
The report based the proposal on the idea that “forecasts and warnings provided by private companies are more reliable than those provided by the National Weather Service.” The report cites a consultant's report that analyzed the accuracy of forecasts and found that the Bureau of Meteorology ranked behind private-sector meteorologists, who use government-funded observations to provide forecasts through television and radio stations, weather websites and Forecasts shared with smartphone apps provide information.
These include pipelines such as AccuWeather, Weather Channel and Weather Underground, which help the Bureau of Meteorology distribute severe weather watches and warnings to a wider audience.
But it's unclear what it means for the weather agency to operate more like a business. The agency tracks data on everything from land and ocean temperatures to precipitation and atmospheric conditions.
A Project 2025 spokesman declined to make Thomas Gilman, who wrote the report's recommendations for NOAA and the Weather Service, available for comment. Gilman served in the Trump administration as chief financial officer of the Commerce Department, the cabinet-level parent agency for NOAA and the Weather Service.
Bureau of Meteorology spokesperson Susan Buchanan said the agency would not comment on “speculation” about how future governments might change its operations.
So far, some in the weather industry have resisted the idea.
Steven R. Smith, AccuWeather's chief executive, said NOAA's “base data” helps inform AccuWeather's own forecast software, artificial intelligence and meteorologists and “takes over the reins of all weather information.” Providing has never been our goal.
Smith said the company “disagrees with … the view that the National Weather Service should fully commercialize its operations.”
It's unclear whether Trump agrees.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president “has nothing to do with Project 2025,” pointing to the Republican Party's official platform. The platform made no mention of weather or climate, and Zhang did not respond to further questions about the campaign's stance on NOAA or the Weather Service.
Some former Trump administration officials said they disagreed with Plan 2025's vision for federal weather agencies and did not expect Trump to embrace those visions during his second term.
“There is a 0% chance that anything related to NOAA or weather in the 2025 plan will be considered or implemented,” meteorologist Ryan Maue, who briefly served as NOAA's chief scientist under Trump, wrote on X.
Stuart Levenbach, NOAA's chief of staff under Trump, said the administration has made no effort to privatize the weather agency, although it does seek to increase funding to buy weather data generated by private-sector companies, including ocean surface winds, space data and more.
In a farewell letter to agency staff in 2021, Levinbach noted that under Trump, NOAA has also worked to combat overfishing and other harms caused by Chinese fishing operations, expedite permitting processes that consider the impacts of endangered species, and Simplify the licensing process for commercial satellites.
Trump's initial choice to lead NOAA was former AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers, although the Senate never confirmed his appointment and he withdrew his appointment two years later.
While Myers never joined the agency, Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy administrator of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, said the appointment suggested a more commercial approach may have been in Trump's playbook. Weather forecasting methods.
But Mauer and Levinbach pointed to alternative proposals advanced by Republicans in Congress and backed by former NOAA officials who served during Republican administrations. They want to separate NOAA from the Commerce Department and develop it into an independent agency within the executive branch.
The idea was the subject of House bills and hearings last year. For example, then-NOAA acting administrator Neil Jacobs told a House committee last year that such independence could have prevented Sharpiegate.
The “divergent goals” of Commerce and NOAA have “clearly adverse effects” on the science agency, Levinbach and another top NOAA official under Trump, retired Maj. Gen. Tim Gallaudet ”, wrote in a Capitol Hill opinion column last year.
“An independent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will ensure that the United States is better able to weather future storms,” they wrote.
But others expressed concern that while NOAA would benefit from more resources and may not fit within the Commerce Department's logic, making the agency independent could eliminate bureaucracy that ultimately insulates it from politics.
“You make NOAA independent, it's a very small agency, [it becomes] Subject to the political whims of Congress and any given administration,” Rosenberg said.
