Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Project 2025 would have 'catastrophic' impact on hurricane warnings

People wading in a river, in front of a destroyed house

Workers walk through the Rocky Broad River in Chimney Rock, N.C., near a home destoryed by Hurricane Helene.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Raj Ghanekar is a student at Northwestern University and a reporter for the school’s Medill News Service.

Residents in the southeastern United States are still recovering from devastating damage brought on by back-to-back hurricanes. As federal, state and local officials continue working to deliver aid, experts say the country would be less prepared for future hurricanes if proposals included the conservative plan known as Project 2025 were to be put in place.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration houses the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, which are vital to predicting these cyclones. But the 920-page proposal published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, argues NOAA “should be dismantled” and includes steps to undermine its authority and position leading the country’s planning for severe weather events, such as providing official emergency warnings.


“It would be potentially catastrophic if you had more than one authority agency … giving you opposite instructions on what to do or opposite warnings," said Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT.

Former President Donald Trump has denied any connection to the plan and his team is preparing a blacklist of people to keep out of a potential second Trump term, including some with ties to Project 2025, according to Politico. But at least 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration have contributed to it, according to a CNN review. Project 2025 Associate Director Spencer Chretien pitched it as a comprehensive overhaul of the executive branch in a 2023 commentary, “laying the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.”

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

In its current state, NOAA plays a critical role in collecting massive amounts of data, conducting its own forecasting models and making all of that information available to the public for free. It also possesses exclusive authority to issue official extreme weather warnings.

Emanuel said keeping that power with NOAA is necessary for ensuring emergency management before the storm is less rambunctious. Uniformity in warnings keeps people safe by ensuring the public does not get contradictory information.

But Project 2025 argues that NOAA’s bureaucracy is far too hefty and the government must “break up NOAA.” The document points to NOAA and its sub-organizations getting over half of the Department of Commerce budget.

“These form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” the document says. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

On the other hand, experts say NOAA’s budget and multifaceted organization are a huge aid to its work to develop accurate weather predictions, especially in the case of hurricanes. NOAA has several branches including the National Ocean Service and NOAA’s research wing that integrate all their research to produce more accurate hurricane and climate modeling.

According to its fiscal 2024 proposed budget, NOAA spends money on satellites, weather centers and more, all for the purpose of ensuring it has a well-rounded data collection method. This allows the federal government to predict storm paths up to five days out, according to NOAA’s website.

Project 2025’s pledge to separate and disconnect those branches and their functions would hinder the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center from doing their own jobs well, according to Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The weather that we see on any one day, it's not just a result of factors that day,” Cleetus said. “You have these long-term trends, multi-decadal factors, climate factors, all of these factors that come together to express in the form of any particular day's weather.”

Project 2025 advocates for the NWS to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which experts say could put a price on NOAA’s service to the general public.

A Project 2025 spokesperson said the proposal “does not call for the elimination of NOAA or the NWS,” adding that the use of “commercial products to provide a better result for taxpayers at a lower cost is nothing new.”

But doing so would take away a critical public good, according to Jeff Masters, a former meteorologist and current staff writer for Yale Climate Connections who started a private company of his own in 1995. He said that when a bill entered Congress in 2005 to restrict the NWS forecasting from being publicly shared, he declined to support it.

“That would have benefitted my company because now, [we] make more profit because we don't have that competition,” he said. “But we quickly saw that that was a societal loss, and we did the right thing by opposing it.”

Masters said charging for forecast information would disproportionately harm low-income populations as well, with localities or state governments with less money forced to spend money on cheaper, lower-quality options, and in turn, potentially not getting necessary weather information to save lives when a storm is on the way.

Cleetus has a similar view. She warns that commercialization could particularly harm those who cannot afford to pay for them.

“When you have data that people depend on for emergency purposes … and if that data is put behind a paywall, it will just become less accessible to people who need it, and that can have life threatening consequences,” Cleetus said.

The section on NOAA was part of the chapter dedicated to the Department of Commerce. It was authored by Thomas Gilman, who served as chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration of the Commerce Department during part of Trump’s term. Gilman currently serves as a director of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal organization.

Read More

U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order as (L-R) U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum look on in the Oval Office of the White House on April 09, 2025 in Washington, DC.

U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order as (L-R) U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum look on in the Oval Office of the White House on April 09, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker

President Trump Invokes Emergency Powers for New Tariffs

In his April 2 executive order on tariffs and previous orders announcing tariffs on Chinese, Canadian, and Mexican imports, President Trump used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977.

This raises two important questions: Do the National Emergencies Act and IEEPA allow the President to set tariffs, and is the current economic state actually an emergency? (We also covered some tariff history on our full post here, and here on the projected impact, Trump's rationale, and Congress's response.)

Keep ReadingShow less
Innovative Local Solutions Can Ease America’s Housing Crisis
aerial photography of rural
Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

Innovative Local Solutions Can Ease America’s Housing Crisis

Across the country, families are prevented from accessing safe, stable, affordable housing—not by accident, but by design. Decades of exclusionary zoning, racial discrimination, and disinvestment have created a housing system that works well for the wealthy but leaves others behind. Even as federal cuts to public housing programs continue nationwide, powerful, community-rooted efforts are pushing back and offering real, equity-driven solutions led by local voices.

Historically, states like New Jersey show what’s possible when legal advocacy and grassroots organizing come together. In 1975, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel ruling established that every municipality in the state has a constitutional obligation to provide its fair share of affordable housing. This landmark legal ruling reshaped housing policy and set a national precedent. Today, organizations like Fair Share Housing Center continue to defend and expand this right, ensuring that local governments are prohibited from using zoning laws to exclude working-class families or people of color.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump Welcomes Salvadoran President, Continuing To Collaborate With Far-Right World Leaders

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 14: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office of the White House April 14, 2025 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Trump Welcomes Salvadoran President, Continuing To Collaborate With Far-Right World Leaders

WASHINGTON D.C. - President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would try to deport “as many as possible” immigrants or criminals to El Salvador. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele met with Trump at the White House to discuss the ongoing deportations of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador’s notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement (CETOC).

Trump has now deported 238 individuals to El Salvador under the 1879 Alien Enemies Act without notice or due process of law. President Bukele has agreed to help Trump with his deportation goals and received $6 million from the White House to continue these efforts.

Keep ReadingShow less
Quiet Death of Dissent
woman in black hijab holding white and black printed board
Photo by Justin Essah on Unsplash

Quiet Death of Dissent

There is something particularly American about the way we're dismantling our democracy these days – we are doing it with paperwork. While the world watches our grand political theater, immigration agents are quietly canceling visas, filling out deportation orders, and reshaping the boundaries of acceptable speech without firing a single shot.

I think about Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and Columbia graduate who committed no crime beyond speaking his mind. I think about Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts whose academic career hangs by a thread. I think about the estimated 300 international students whose visas are under review or already revoked for daring to participate in First Amendment exercises on campus across the United States. These stories are not just about immigration status but about who is American enough to participate in its democracy and under what conditions.

Keep ReadingShow less