Among the stakes in the upcoming U.S. elections: Weather forecasts, who delivers them and what they say about links between extreme conditions and climate change.
A conservative proposal drafted by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has ignited an intense debate this month by proposing that a Republican administration privatize weather forecasting now done by government agencies. The plan would break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency for the National Weather Service, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Meanwhile, a separate Republican proposal introduced in the House last year calls for transforming NOAA into an independent agency akin to NASA, a plan critics say could expose it to political influence.
Even as Donald Trump’s campaign has said it had no part in Project 2025, it’s widely seen as a blueprint for a possible second Trump administration. Private weather companies have not endorsed the calls for “commercializing” Weather Service data. Still, as the prospects of a second Trump presidency rise, meteorologists and climate scientists are voicing concern over what these proposals would mean for the millions of people they are working to inform and protect.
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During Trump’s term, scientists said they were sidelined, muted or forced out by the hundreds and raised concerns that the administration misrepresented their research on the coronavirus and reproduction — as well as on hurricane forecasting, environmental advocates said.
“It does worry me what the future will hold” for staff at NOAA and the Weather Service, said JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. The union represents 4,000 workers at those agencies.
“There’s a lot of questions and no answers yet,” Becker said. “We just want to do our work protecting lives and property no matter who is president.”
Government agencies, including NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency, have for months been preparing for the possibility that Trump will return to the White House by strengthening safeguards around scientific integrity and job security.
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In a 2019 incident that became known as Sharpiegate, Trump used a marker to incorrectly suggest Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama — a scandal that underscored the potential damaging impacts of political meddling. An investigation later found political influence led NOAA to release a statement improperly backing Trump, and ultimately undermining its own forecast. Some have looked to such clues from Trump’s four years in the White House to try to glean what may come in a second term.
Now, some scientists’ concerns stem from Project 2025, a 900-page document drafted by right-wing policy experts and former Trump officials. It calls for breaking up NOAA, whose climate research it calls “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” It suggests the Weather Service should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” because its data is already used widely by private companies.
The report bases that proposal on an assertion that “forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.” The report cites a consultant report that analyzed forecast accuracy and found the Weather Service ranked behind private-sector meteorologists, who use government-funded observations to inform predictions shared via TV and radio stations, weather websites and smartphone apps.
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That includes outlets such as AccuWeather, the Weather Channel and Weather Underground — channels that help the Weather Service distribute its severe weather watches and warnings to a wider audience.
But it was not immediately clear what it might mean for the Weather Service to run more like a business. The agency tracks data on everything from land and sea temperatures, precipitation and atmospheric conditions.
A Project 2025 spokeswoman 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, which is the cabinet-level parent agency of NOAA and the Weather Service.
Weather Service spokeswoman Susan Buchanan said the agency does not comment on “speculation” over how a future administration could change its operations.
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So far, some in the weather industry oppose the idea.
AccuWeather chief executive Steven R. Smith said NOAA’s “foundational data” helps inform AccuWeather’s own forecasting software, artificial intelligence and meteorologists, and that “it has never been our goal to take over the provision of all weather information.”
Smith said the company “does not agree with the view … that the National Weather Service should fully commercialize its operations.”
Whether Trump agrees is not clear.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president “has nothing to do with Project 2025” and pointed to the Republican Party’s official platform. The platform makes no mention of weather or climate, and Cheung did not respond to further questions about the campaign’s position on NOAA or the Weather Service.
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Some former Trump administration officials say they don’t share Project 2025’s visions for federal weather agencies, nor would they expect Trump to embrace them during a second term.
“There is 0% chance that anything in Project 2025 related to NOAA or weather will ever be considered or implemented,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist who briefly served as NOAA’s chief scientist under Trump, wrote on X.
Stuart Levenbach, who served as NOAA chief of staff under Trump, said the administration made no efforts to privatize the Weather Service, though it did pursue increased funding for buying weather data generated by private-sector companies, including data on ocean surface winds, space weather and Earth’s atmosphere.
Under Trump, NOAA also worked to combat overfishing and other harms caused by Chinese fishing operations, speed up permitting processes that consider endangered species impacts and streamline the licensing processes for commercial satellites, Levenbach noted in a 2021 farewell letter to agency staff that he shared with The Washington Post.
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Trump’s initial pick to lead NOAA was former AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers, though the Senate never confirmed his appointment and he withdrew it two years later.
While Myers never joined the agency, former NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service deputy director Andrew Rosenberg said the appointment suggests a more commercial approach to weather forecasting may have always been in the Trump playbook.
But Maue and Levenbach pointed to an alternate proposal floated by Republicans in Congress and supported 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 a House bill and hearing last year. Such independence could have prevented Sharpiegate, for example, Neil Jacobs, the acting NOAA administrator at the time, told a House committee last year.
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The “disparate goals” of the Commerce Department and NOAA “have had a demonstrably adverse impact” on the scientific agency, Levenbach and retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, another top NOAA official under Trump, wrote in an opinion column in the Hill last year.
“An independent NOAA will ensure that America will better weather the storms in our future,” they wrote.
But others have expressed concern that — though NOAA could benefit from more resources and may not be a logical fit within Commerce — making the agency stand alone could remove layers of bureaucracy that ultimately insulate it from politics.
“You make NOAA separate, it’s a tiny little agency and [it becomes] subject to political whims both on the Hill and in any given administration,” Rosenberg said.
