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.”
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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.