Almost everyone has heard of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its offshoot, the National Weather Service. Meteorologists depend upon it to offer accurate local forecasts, and its alerts and advisories warn millions of people about dangerous conditions. But they may not know it is part of the Department of Commerce, and, more surprising, that its mission has specifically included “protecting life and property.”
Without the agency, known as NOAA, weather forecasts wouldn’t be as reliable, and the impacts of extreme weather on a less prepared public could be devastating. “Everyone would be shocked about the negative things that could happen,” said Alan Sealls, president-elect of the American Meteorological Society and former chief meteorologist at WKRG-TV in Mobile, Alabama. “Those compromises will be not just unpleasant, and not just uncomfortable, but truly dangerous.”
It remains unclear just what President Donald Trump has in mind for NOAA. His nominee for commerce secretary, financier Howard Lutnick, has vowed to keep it intact. But Project 2025, the conservative roadmap to a second Trump term, calls for it to be “broken up and downsized,” and Russell Vought, an architect of that blueprint, now leads the federal Office of Management and Budget. In late January, employees at NOAA’s Asheville, North Carolina, office were told to remove internal web pages and cancel events and meetings. Last week, Elon Musk sent a Department of Government Efficiency team to the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in what has for other agencies been the start of radical downsizing.
“I’m in fear of losing my job every day,” said a National Weather Service employee who requested anonymity. So far, most cuts seem to have targeted diversity programs, including the organization’s head of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, who was put on leave after a right-wing social media account targeted them. As to what might happen next, this person said, “pretty much everybody is in the dark.”
President Richard Nixon established NOAA in 1970, but its roots stretch back to 1807 and the creation of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to chart the nation’s coastline. The Weather Bureau followed in 1870 and the Commission of Fish and Fisheries one year later. NOAA still fulfills these roles through divisions like the National Weather Service, or NWS, and Marine Fisheries Service, which helps ensure sustainable harvesting of the oceans and a safe food supply.
Today, the agency employs about 12,000 people worldwide; over half are scientists and engineers. Its current budget is $6.5 billion. Of that, about $1.4 billion goes to the NWS, or about $4 for every citizen. In addition to providing free weather data, forecasts, and alerts, that allocation saves taxpayers money. The agency’s work predicting hurricanes saves billions in avoided damage alone, and allows crisis managers and first responders to better prepare for disasters. By one estimate, every dollar invested in the NWS reaps more than $9 in return.
“It’s a great deal for the American public,” said Pat Spoden, who was a National Weather Service meteorologist from 1987 to 2022. “A lot of people don’t understand or know where the weather data comes from and how much the Weather Service, and NOAA, provides.”
The agency manages 18 satellites, nearly 100 weather balloon launch sites, and around 250 oceanic buoys that produce billions of observations each day. That information goes to 122 forecasting offices, where meteorologists generate weather projections that are disseminated across the country, including on a network of 1,000 NWS radio stations. Beyond providing the basis for weather watch and warning alerts, these reports are the foundation upon which private weather services like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel stand.
“AccuWeather does not have their own fleet of satellites and weather radar and ground stations. They do not operate their own weather predictive models,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “All these private weather enterprises are built upon the public backbone of data.” They’re either using NOAA data directly, Swain added, or adjusting it in some proprietary way.
The private sector also relies on NOAA’s vast research archive, housed at the four offices of the National Centers for Environmental Information. This trove includes historical records detailing changes in Earth’s oceans, land masses, ice sheets, atmosphere, and magnetic field. These repositories offer a wealth of local, national, and international climate findings and modeling, and have recorded nearly real-time analysis of temperature and precipitation changes since 2000. All of this info is invaluable to researchers, analysts, and myriad industries that predict future conditions.
“What most people don’t realize is insurance companies base your rates on that data record and how it is projected to go forward,” said Craig McLean, the agency’s former research division director. “Banking, finance, real estate, the transportation industry, agriculture, they all look in the futures market at data that is stored historically, but also collected daily around the world.”
Yet NOAA’s critics consider the agency, and its information, a threat. Thomas Gilman, who served in the Commerce Department, wrote in Project 2025 that it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to the future of U.S. prosperity.” That document notes “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
Project 2025 seems to favor maintaining only those functions that serve corporate interests, noting that, “because private companies rely on this data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
Seth Herald / AFP via Getty Images
Critics of such a move argue that putting such an essential resource behind a paywall would harm the public. Megan Duzmal, a meteorologist at WYMT, a small TV station in eastern Kentucky, relies upon NOAA data to do her job. The station serves a largely rural area that those in larger markets like Louisville do not focus on.
“They don’t look individually at these communities, but we are able to, as a smaller market, zoom into the small cities here,” Duzmal said, with enough precision to “point out road names.”
The station provided essential information to viewers during a spate of recent floods, most recently after Hurricane Helene. When a storm is brewing, Duzmal receives information about flash flooding risks from a hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Jackson, Kentucky. Assessing the danger requires analyzing complex factors like soil moisture, previous drought conditions, and topography. It demands a firm grasp of both science and local conditions. If the tools she and countless other local meteorologists rely upon are privatized, they could become too expensive for small stations in rural areas. That could prove deadly to residents of communities that already lack robust cellular service and reliable internet providers.
Privatization could also create varying forecasts from competing companies, leading to confusion. “Without the one voice, you run into issues of what do you believe or who do you believe,” said Spoden, the former NWS meteorologist. “It’s just so important to have an official source.”
That raises perhaps the most important question about privatization: What services would companies even be willing to take on? It’s unclear, for instance, that any private enterprise would want to be responsible, and thus liable, for issuing warnings or alerts. Spoden also wonders whether private sector meteorologists would deploy to disaster areas to brief emergency responders, like NWS employees did during the fires in Los Angeles.
“They are the most dedicated group of civil servants you’re going to find,” said Spoden. “It would be very difficult for any private company to do what the National Weather Service does.”
It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will do. It’s an open question, for instance, whether the National Weather Service Employees Organization’s collective bargaining agreement, which runs through 2029, will hold up against any efforts to dismantle the organization. But the employee who fears for their job says the president’s attacks on NOAA feel unprecedented.
“He’s going no holds barred,” they said. “It’s very aggressive.”
