Okay But Why Are They Defunding the Weather Service?
The Weather Service is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Around a thousand NOAA employees have been laid off since February, amid plans to fire nearly 20 percent of the agency’s total workforce and cut $1.6 billion from their budget. Employees are calling it “devastating” – not just for them personally, but for the safety of all Americans.
The Impact of Extreme Weather
Last year, extreme weather cost us hundreds of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. But something that’s a little harder to measure is how many lives have been saved simply by knowing that extreme weather is coming.
We need NOAA to help us predict storms and warn people when they need to evacuate. Their data is also used by airports to make sure planes can fly safely, by farmers to know when to plant their crops, by fishing companies to know when it’s safe to send boats out on the water, and by construction companies to plan the best time to pour concrete and to calculate the right risks of wildfires or flooding. Individually, we rely on our weather apps and local meteorologists to tell us when it’s safe to go out for a hike or what to pack for an upcoming trip.
The information for every single one of these things comes from NOAA. If you’re frustrated by inaccurate weather reports right now, just wait until we don’t have a reliable Weather Service!
We’ve had some form of a national Weather Service since 1807. The full National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration we have today was established in 1970 by President Nixon for a “better protection of life and property from natural hazards and a better understanding of the environment.” But the agency is now under attack by the Trump Administration. Given how much we all rely on NOAA’s services, why is it being dismantled?
We know it’s not about saving money. Extreme weather costs billions of dollars in damage, and studies show that for every dollar invested in NOAA, it actually saves us six dollars we’d otherwise have to spend later on repairs and losses.
We Need to Talk about Climate Change
And there’s no way around it: extreme weather is caused by climate change. There’s almost unanimous agreement amongst scientists that the Earth has been warming at an increasingly rapid rate, mostly caused by an increase in carbon dioxide from human activities. 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, beating the previous record that had just been set the year before in 2023.
Despite this, Trump has been defunding research since he was inaugurated in January. He withdrew from the Paris Agreement, a worldwide project to reduce greenhouse gasses, and entire government webpages have been removed that mention climate change. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. Defunding the Weather Service will only make us less able to mitigate disasters when they strike.
Connecting the Dots to Project 2025
NOAA and the Weather Service are directly mentioned in Project 2025. If you haven’t heard about Project 2025, it’s the disturbing 900-page manifesto crafted by far-right extremists that Trump immediately began implementing the moment he was sworn into office. He even hired Russell Vought, one of the main authors of Project 2025, as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. That’s the very same office that’s ordering all of these cuts.
“NOAA should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” Vought wrote in Project 2025. He accuses the agency of being “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” That last part is particularly upsetting, since we know the science of climate change is real.
Their goal is to make the Weather Service a private, for-profit service that billionaires can earn dividends from. But some things are a public good – like schools, parks, and information. Who benefits when climate and weather information is suddenly paywalled? The millionaires and billionaires who run the companies that would now own that information.
Humans are amazing, and we can solve so many problems – but we can’t do it without resources and support. If we want to survive and thrive over the next few generations, we need the best scientists and the best information about our atmosphere and oceans. Privatizing a service that benefits everyone puts us all at risk.