In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasting is a free government facility. The National Weather Service issues warnings and forecasts, hurricanes, heat and rainfall warnings, all of which impose a total cost to U.S. taxpayers of about $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio or newspaper can know what the weather will be like tomorrow, whether a hurricane is heading for their town, or predict whether there will be a drought next season. Even if they get their news from private apps or TV stations, much of the underlying weather data is provided by meteorologists working for the federal government.
Charging for popular services that were previously free is generally not a successful political strategy. But far-right policymakers appear poised to try just that if Republicans gain power next term. The nearly 900-page Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, argued that the incoming administration should disband the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the National Weather Service. Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Plan 2025, but the document is widely seen as a blueprint for Trump's second term, given that it was written largely by veterans of his first administration.
Plan 2025 states that NOAA “should be disbanded, have many of its functions eliminated, transferred to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” These proposals roughly amount to two main attack vectors. First, it recommends that the National Weather Service should eliminate public-facing forecasts and focus on data collection or otherwise “fully commercialize its forecast operations,” which the plan's authors suggest would improvenot limited, a forecast for all Americans. Then, NOAA’s scientific research branch, which studies issues such as Arctic ice dynamics and greenhouse gas behavior (which the document calls “the source of NOAA’s climate alarmism”) departments, should be significantly reduced. “Their strengths in climate change research should be dismantled,” the document states. The report further states that scientific agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are “vulnerable to obstruction of government goals” and therefore should screen appointees, to ensure their views are “completely consistent” with the president’s.
There is no doubt that the United States is experiencing a summer of severe weather. Just this past week, a record-breaking hurricane brought severe flooding, power outages and extreme heat warnings to Texas. More than a dozen tornadoes ripped through several states. Catastrophic flash floods sweep across New Mexico's wildfire burn scars. Much of the West is in life-threatening heat. Facing any of this without NOAA would be chaos. Things are likely to get worse in the coming years.
The National Weather Service is the key point of contact in weather crises, alerting the public when forecasts become dangerous and advising emergency managers on the best plan of action. Through 2024, the National Weather Service has issued about 13,000 severe thunderstorm warnings, 2,000 tornado warnings, 1,800 flash flood warnings, and nearly Flood warnings for 3,000 rivers.
NOAA is also home to the National Hurricane Center, which tracks storms, and the Office of Ocean and Aviation Operations, whose pilots fly Hurricane Hunter aircraft directly into cyclones to measure wind speeds and refine the agency's forecasts. NOAA even predicts space weather. As recently as May this year, it predicted a severe geomagnetic storm that could threaten power grids and satellites. (The worst blackout never occurred, but the solar storm did temporarily render farmers' GPS-guided tractors temporarily unusable.)
Weather privatization is not a new goal for conservatives. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to make it more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then AccuWeather’s executive vice president, complained to the press: “We work very hard every day to We have to compete with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government. In 2005, after meeting with AccuWeather representatives, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill that would have required the NWS to stop competing with the private sector. The department competed and left its forecasts to commercial providers, but in 2017 Trump selected Myers to lead NOAA (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting for Senate confirmation for two years. )
Funding for many NOAA programs is likely to be significantly reduced in 2025, and the agency has experienced occasional telecommunications outages, including warning system outages caused by recent flooding in the Midwest. It also came under political pressure: In 2019, the agency backed then-President Trump's false claim (with a map that appeared to have been altered with a marker) that Hurricane Dorian was heading toward Alabama. Private companies may be better funded and, in theory, less subject to the whims of politics. They could also use supercomputing power to hone NOAA's data into hyperlocal forecasts, perhaps for areas as small as a football field. Some companies, including AccuWeather, use their own proprietary algorithms to interpret NWS data and produce forecasts they claim have extremely high accuracy. (But remember: without NWS data, none of this would happen.)
But this is not the vision described in Project 2025. It proposes deep funding cuts for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but its shell is overly sensitive to the administration's political response. Commercializing the agency's underlying data could create a tiered service system. One can imagine a future in which private institutions charge weather forecast subscription fees, with only some cities able to pay for the best weather forecasts. Private companies also face commercial conflicts of interest; do we want flood risk forecasts sponsored by a flood insurance company, or heat advice from an air conditioning group?
The National Weather Service also has advantages that are difficult to replicate with private systems, including a partnership with the World Meteorological Organization that gives the U.S. access to a range of other countries' weather models. In 2012, with Hurricane Sandy still raging in the Atlantic, international cooperation proved crucial. Initially, U.S. models incorrectly predicted that the storm would turn from the East Coast. But European models accurately predicted the collision course, buying U.S. emergency managers critical preparation time before Sandy made violent landfall in New Jersey.
Severe storms like Sandy make clear that America’s national security depends on our ability to accurately predict weather, especially as natural disasters and extreme weather increase in a warming climate. In fact, NOAA's existence is one of the reasons we know the climate is indeed warming. The agency hosts one of the most important climate data repositories on Earth, including information on changing atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, as well as hundreds of thousands of years of ice core and tree-ring data. Scientists around the world use all this information. Its collection is evidence of human-induced global warming. So it's fitting that the agency is being targeted by far-right activists and legacy foundations that receive 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 hoping voters will be shocked by proposals to eliminate the Department of Education and limit access to emergency contraceptive pills. But Plan 2025 also caught the attention of lawmakers with its powerful section on how the next administration would cut back on climate change research. “Every non-billionaire American should be afraid of this plan,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has warned of NOAA’s fate since Trump took office, told me in an email.
The politicization of weather angers Joann Becker. Most of her meteorological colleagues are living out their childhood dreams, which have nothing to do with politics, she said. When Becker was a little girl in 1976, Typhoon Pamela knocked out power for months in much of her hometown of Guam and reshaped her life. She hopes to be part of a team that gives people the opportunity to prepare for something like this. “We're not pushing an agenda. We're looking at overall climate change objectively,” Becker said.
The solution to weather-related polarization, though, is not to eliminate America’s understanding of climate. Now, more and more American lives depend on the country’s ability to quickly respond to weather emergencies. Eliminating or privatizing climate information will not eliminate the impacts of climate change. This only makes them more deadly.
