Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

What the Heck Is Going to Happen to NOAA?

A former head of the American Meteorological Society on whether the weather agency will wither under Trump.

Locked information.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

There is a lot of uncertainty in the federal government right now. Some functions of critical agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers are paused, or maybe they’re not. Tariffs are on and then off again. Other government agencies are shutting down most of their operations at the direction of Elon Musk’s Efficiency Department, even if such moves are technically unconstitutional.

Amid all this uncertainty stands the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Musk’s team breached earlier this week and which Project 2025 has targeted for breakup. Per Thomas F. Gilman, who wrote the chapter on reforms for the Department of Commerce, NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and its National Weather Service ought to be “fully commercialize[d]” since “Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by … private companies.”

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.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

Tariffs Will Flatten the U.S. Bicycle Industry

Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.

An e-bike and money.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.

Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Economy

Tariffs Are Making Gas Cheaper — But Not Cheap Enough

Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.

A gas station.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.

But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Electric Vehicles

There Has Never Been a Better Time for EV Battery Swapping

With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.

A battery with wheels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.

That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.

Keep reading...Show less
Green