Created during the Nixon administration, NOAA was designed to bring together disparate scientific agencies to release coordinated emergency weather alerts and responses. Today, it employs almost 7,000 scientists and engineers, although Musk’s team reportedly wants to cut that by 50%. In addition to hosting a trove of valuable climate science, NOAA remains responsible for issuing emergency alerts through its divisions such as the NWS and the National Hurricane Center. If you’re among the 99% of the American population who experienced some form of extreme weather last summer, you’ve likely interacted with NOAA in some small way.
To make sense of the plan to break up NOAA and what it would mean to “privatize” weather forecasting in the United States, I spoke to Keith Seitter, the former executive director of the American Meteorological Society and a current professor at the College of the Holy Cross. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
What is the argument for privatizing weather reporting? Why do folks at places like the Heritage Foundation think this is a good idea?
That’s a really good question — because it’s not. Weather services are provided to the nation through a wonderful cooperative process in which the government and the private sector work collaboratively to provide the best possible services to the people. It is all well thought out, with the National Weather Service and other parts of the government getting observations, running the numerical models, and providing warning services. Then the private sector takes the output from those government projects or processes and creates tailored, value-added forecasts and information that can be provided to commercial organizations in different sectors of the economy.
All of this is done with each component knowing what the other is doing, supporting the other, and tailoring their processes to the maximum efficiency. That’s one of the reasons that the U.S. has the best provision of weather services to the nation — and to the nation’s economy — of any country.
So the National Weather Service and NOAA are the ones with the actual monitors out there gathering the data, and then they give that information to the people who, let’s say, make the apps on your phone. What would it mean to “privatize” weather forecasting, then? What would that entail?
It’s not exactly clear what it would look like. Project 2025 suggests that the government should keep taking all the observations and essentially do nothing else. But the government is also quality-controlling its observations and assimilating them into numerical models. This process requires vast resources and must be completed before you can make the best use of that data.
You’d have to do everything the National Weather Service is doing now before the private sector could take over and tailor it for others. It’s unclear how you could move that line between what the government does and what the private sector does any further toward the private sector without impeding its ability to actually do a good job.
What would privatizing weather mean on the business side? What challenges would the private sector face in trying to make up the gap left by NOAA?
It would be very hard for them to make up that gap. There may be a few large private sector companies like The Weather Company, which has a lot of resources, and maybe AccuWeather — they could probably invest more in computer resources and do some of that stuff themselves, but it’s not an efficient way to get it done. I think the people at those companies would say that’s not the direction they want to move in. [Privatizing weather forecasting is] a solution being proposed where there isn’t a problem because almost anything you do to change the current balance will make weather forecasting less efficient and provide less service to the country.
So it’s not like private weather companies are agitating for this change?
Oh, gosh, no. They’re looking to get even more of that data and content from the government. Part of what happens is the observations and the numerical models — all those things that the government does — are provided to the country for free. The more of that information that the private sector can pull into their systems at no cost, the more products they can create and disseminate in ways that make them more money than if they had to do any of that work themselves. That cost would now fall on them. They clearly don’t want to be in a position where they have to do a lot of the [collection and data processing] that is currently being given to them for free.
What would this mean for users? Is there a risk that people will no longer receive extreme weather warnings?
The warnings are a big issue. Right now, the government is responsible for protecting life and property. The warnings from the National Weather Service are only possible because it’s doing all of the other processes of gathering the data and processing it and running forecasts.
You don’t want 10 different private companies trying to offer warnings to people and deciding who’s going to evacuate and who isn’t — that puts those companies in a position of liability if they make the decision incorrectly. It is a fundamental government responsibility to protect the people, so warnings are intrinsically something that has to come from the government. There’s no other way to get that done without incurring a lot of legal liability.
What frightens you the most about the potential for privatization of weather forecasting in the U.S.?
The loss of the balance that we have now. Almost any aspect that you mess with will make things work less well. There is also the potential for serious problems with the warnings many people depend on in life-or-death situations. We need to ensure that those are preserved and that we are doing the things that protect people and businesses.
What may seem like a way to save a few bucks in the federal government’s budget could lead to the loss of life, property, and business capacity. These could have very large downstream impacts for a relatively small amount of financial savings in the budget.
Is there anything keeping you optimistic?
The Secretary of Commerce that was approved, Howard Lutnick, said in the Senate hearings that he has no intention of breaking up NOAA, and that he’s not going to implement some of those ideas that were part of the Project 2025 handbook. I’m optimistic that as long as he lives up to what he said in those hearings, that’s a better place for us to be.
The other thing is, the nominee for the new NOAA administrator, Neil Jacobs, was the acting administrator in the first Trump administration, and he’s a very good person. He’s very knowledgeable and understands these things well; he’s a well-qualified individual to be put in charge of NOAA. If the Senate confirms him, I feel that he understands these issues and will do everything he can to ensure that NOAA lives up to its mission requirements and fulfills its goals of protecting life and property for the country.
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