Okay, But Why are they Defunding the Weather Service?

Last year, extreme weather cost us hundreds of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. So… why is the Trump Administration defunding the Weather Service?

The Weather Service is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We need NOAA to help us predict storms and warn people when they need to evacuate. The data is 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 calculate the right risks of wildfires or flooding. And individual Americans rely on their weather apps and local meteorologists to tell them when it’s safe to go out for a hike or what to pack for an upcoming vacation. The weather app on your phone isn’t magical - it relies on weather data provided by NOAA.

Climate and weather may be complicated, but the reason why Trump is cutting NOAA is very simple: it’s in Project 2025.

What Project 2025 wants to do is make NOAA a private, for-profit service. 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 now own that information.

If we want to survive and thrive over the next few generations, we need access to the best information about our atmosphere and oceans. Weather isn’t a partisan issue and we should keep it that way.

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Transcript

Okay, But Why Are They Defunding The Weather Service?

CLIP: “It could be the most powerful hurricane to hit the Tampa Bay area in more than a century as tonight more than 2 million people are without power as Milton’s storm surge threatens destruction in the dark with roads underwater as it continues to rise.” 

Narration: Last year, extreme weather cost us hundreds of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. So… why is the Trump Administration defunding the Weather Service?

The Weather Service is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA also includes five other departments, like the National Ocean Service. Around a thousand employees have been laid off since February, with plans to fire nearly 20 percent of the agency’s 12,000-person 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.

We need NOAA to help us predict storms and warn people when they need to evacuate. The data is 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 calculate the right risks of wildfires or flooding. Individual Americans rely on their weather apps and local meteorologists to tell them when it’s safe to go out for a hike or what to pack for an upcoming vacation. 

And the information for every single one of these things comes from NOAA. The weather app on your phone isn’t magical - it relies on weather data provided by the federal government. If you’re frustrated by inaccurate weather reports right now, just wait until we don’t have a reliable Weather Service!

A national Weather Service has existed in some form since 1807, when President Thomas Jefferson founded the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to provide maps for sailing ships. The full National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration we have today was established in 1970 by President Nixon for, quote, “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. They’re cancelling weather balloon launches, shutting down websites, and cutting language translation services which means that people who don’t speak English can no longer get important weather warnings. In some laboratories, cancelled janitorial services are leading to piles of hazardous waste. And like we’ve seen in other federal departments, none of it seems to be well-planned… numerous employees have been laid off, rehired, and laid off again. “Dysfunction is the polite way of putting it,” says Andrew Rosenberg, the former deputy director of NOAA’s marine fisheries service. “A year from now, people will notice things are missing that used to be there and DOGE will say: ‘See, we told you government can’t do things’ instead of ‘We broke it and it got worse.”

So if we need these departments and their data so badly, why are they being dismantled?

It can’t just be to save money, because studies show that for every dollar invested in NOAA, it actually saves us six dollars. Extreme weather costs billions of dollars in damage, not to mention trade and agriculture and all of the things we mentioned earlier. This isn’t just an issue for the United States either – projections show that the world’s economy will lose about $38 trillion dollars a year by 2049 just from climate change. 

But Trump has been defunding research and removing references to climate change 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 make mention of climate change. There isn’t space in this episode to go over every piece of scientific evidence that shows climate change is real, but there’s almost unanimous agreement amongst scientists that the Earth has been warming at an increasingly rapid rate and is mostly caused by an increase in carbon dioxide from human activities. A 2019 review of more than 11 thousand scientific papers found the consensus on climate change to be at 100% – yes, one hundred percent. 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, beating the previous record that had just been set the year before in 2023. 

We get it, that’s scary. But putting our heads in the sand won’t save us, it’ll only make us less prepared. And defunding the Weather Service will only make us less able to deal with disasters like hurricanes when they strike. Humans are amazing and we can solve so many problems - but we can’t do it without resources and support.

Climate and weather may be complicated, but the reason why Trump is cutting NOAA is actually simple: it’s in Project 2025.

NOAA and the Weather Service are directly mentioned in the 900-page far-right manifesto. Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 while on the campaign trail, but he’s now putting it into effect - including hiring 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 these billions of dollars in budget cuts.

“NOAA should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” he wrote in Project 2025. He accuses the agency of being, quote, “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. And again, it can’t even be about money because we know that climate disasters are on track to cost us trillions of dollars.

What Project 2025 wants to do is make the Weather Service a private, for-profit service. 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 now own that information. 

We should also think about the young scientists who are being fired from NOAA and other agencies across the federal government. Like Rebecca, who was recently fired from her position at the Marine Fisheries Service.

CLIP: “On February 27th, I was fired from my position as a research fish biologist at the Alaska Fishery Science Center in Seattle. I began this position in 2024 as I was finishing up my PhD in Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Science. This was my dream job. I had been working toward a career in ocean science since I was a child and the indiscriminate firing of federal employees not only affects my career, it also jeopardizes the work that NOAA Fisheries does.”

As we go into an uncertain future, we need young people to become scientists. The recent layoffs at NOAA send a message to the next generation that science isn’t just an unstable career, it’s not valuable.

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 is a move straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, and that is why Trump is defunding the weather service.

Sources

https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-seeks-end-climate-research-premier-u-s-climate-agency

https://www.howtogeek.com/880368/where-do-weather-apps-get-their-info-from/

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-04-17/californias-national-weather-service-offices-reduce-services-amid-trump-admin-cuts

https://iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/ocean-warming

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/noaa-workers-fired-weather-forecasts-programs-safety-rcna194568

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/noaa-workers-report-intentional-chaos-personnel-cuts-rcna201625

https://www.noaa.gov/heritage/our-history

https://grist.org/climate/hurricane-season-forecast-doge-slashes-noaa-jobs/

https://gizmodo.com/doge-cuts-deflate-noaas-balloon-network-putting-accurate-weather-forecasts-in-jeopardy-2000580887

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fired-rehired-and-fired-again-noaa-employees-are-caught-in-a-liminal-state#:~:text=Tucked%20into%20the%20922%2Dpage,broadsides%20from%20the%20Trump%20administration

https://www.propublica.org/article/noaa-contracts-seattle-lab

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0270467619886266