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.”
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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.
