Oct. 8, 2024 by David Silverberg

Southwest Floridians know the drill when a hurricane is on the way: buy bottled water, stock up on batteries and canned foods, put up the storm shutters, fill the car and if necessary, get out of town.

But whether hunkering down at home or hitting the road, all eyes turn to news of the storm, whether on television, the Internet, mobile devices, weather apps or social media.

Much of the information on those media is the same—because it all comes from the federal government, which has the resources, the organization and the technology to provide it like no one else. And then there are the periodic updates from the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service, and the Hurricane Hunters who fly into the storms, that are treated like gospel from on high.

But if Project 2025 is implemented, all that information, which is now provided free to the public, would come at a price. The federal government agencies that collect and interpret the data would be broken up. And even the famous Hurricane Hunters would be shunted into a government agency that buys desks and manages the government’s real estate.

The fact that Project 2025 targets the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for elimination has caused public alarm and prompted criticism.

But what is it that Project 2025 actually seeks to do? What does Project 2025 specifically say when it comes to meteorology and government research? And what would be the results for everyday Americans if Project 2025 was actually implemented?

For all Americans, especially those living on the vulnerable, hurricane-prone Gulf “Paradise Coast” of Florida, the future of government meteorology is no academic concern.

Increasingly, it’s a matter of life and death.

Project 2025’s denial of climate change

Project 2025 is the sweeping, 887-page volume of very specific policy recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump. Increasingly infamous, it is a continuation of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership program that has been issued every four years since 1980.

Project 2025’s weather and climate recommendations are contained in its chapter on the Department of Commerce, the agency where the weather services reside. The chapter appears under the byline of Thomas Gilman, who served as the Commerce Department’s chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration during the Donald Trump administration. Prior to taking that position, which required Senate confirmation, Gilman worked for over 40 years in the automotive industry. There, he was employed by the Chrysler Corporation. He rose to be chief financial officer for its lending and financial arm, Chrysler Financial. In 2011 he oversaw Chrysler Financial’s sale to TD Bank Group.

Most of the public’s attention—and alarm—has focused on Project 2025’s intention to do away with NOAA.

Project 2025 does indeed intend to eliminate NOAA and states so quite explicitly at the outset of the chapter (page 674): “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”  

But that is not where Project 2025 will have its most damaging impact.

Rather, it is the fact that Project 2025 views itself at war with what it calls “the climate change alarm industry” and sees NOAA as “a colossal operation” that is “harmful to future US prosperity.”

Throughout the document, Project 2025 proposals are clearly aimed at eliminating independent, science and data-based conclusions that investigate, measure or confirm climate change. Instead it seeks to ensure that government conclusions come into line with administration policy rather than scientific evidence.

Project 2025 holds that NOAA, as a main driver of the “climate change alarm industry,” has a “mission emphasis on prediction and management [that] seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions.”

But more than just eliminating NOAA, Project 2025 believes that science should bend to policy.

A key recommendation is that a new administration should: “Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.”

In another section it argues that NOAA’s office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research “is… the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

When it comes to the work of the National Hurricane Center and the National Environmental Satellite Service, Project 2025 admits that the offices “provide important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions,” but it argues that “Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

Project 2025’s organizational mandates

In addition to changing the entire focus, tenor and scientific independence of government climatological and meteorological efforts, Project 2025 recommends extensive organizational changes.

To understand these recommendations and their impact, it is helpful to be familiar with the current system.

NOAA consists of six main offices:

• The National Weather Service (NWS);
• The National Ocean Service (NOS);
• Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR);
• The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS);
• The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and
• The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps.

Ironically, it was Republican President Richard Nixon who in 1970 consolidated the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Weather Bureau and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries into NOAA, which was made an office of the Commerce Department (although he wanted to make it a full-fledged Cabinet department). This occurred in the wake of 1969’s horrendous Hurricane Camille, which devastated the Louisiana Gulf coast and then—like Hurricane Helene—went north; ultimately dumping its accumulated moisture far from any coast in Nelson County, Va.

Since its creation, NOAA has evolved until it assumed its current form with different offices to deal with different aspects of weather, climate and technology.

Project 2025 sees this evolution in a negative light, especially from a budgetary standpoint.

“NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures),” it notes. The offices, as noted previously, “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

It continues: “NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.”

Project 2025 wants to make NWS (National Weather Service) a revenue-generating operation. It argues that since studies have found that consumer-oriented forecasts and warnings are better provided by local broadcasts and private companies like AccuWeather, NWS “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations”—i.e., charge for its products. This, it states, would bring in revenue, make it compete in a commercial weather marketplace and the profits could be invested in more research and data tailored to customers’ needs.

NWS would become a “performance-based organization,” which in management parlance means it would have measurable goals, set metrics and performance standards—i.e., it would take on the characteristics of a for-profit company rather than a scientific laboratory.

OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research) would be reduced since Project 2025 views much of its work as duplicative of the National Hurricane Center. All of its laboratories, undersea research and other research efforts “should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat.”

NOS (National Ocean Service) would have its functions transferred to the US Coast Guard and the US Geologic Survey. While Project 2025 doesn’t say so explicitly, this would presumably result in its disestablishment.

The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which provides the ships, planes, drones and other hardware used by NOAA agencies, including the famous Hurricane Hunters, “should be broken up and its assets reassigned to the General Services Administration or to other agencies.”

Analysis: Organizational changes

Project 2025 decimates the current structure of weather science and reporting by the US federal government—as it’s intended to do.

The end of the Hurricane Hunters?

Ever since a pilot flew his training aircraft directly into the eye of a hurricane on a bet in 1943, hurricane-hunting pilots and air personnel have been taking up the challenge of measuring storms.

Today they’re known as the Hurricane Hunters and they’re the stuff of legend: the best pilots in the world flying in the most dangerous and challenging weather, bringing back precious, life-saving data.

Project 2025 does not explicitly state that it would abolish the Hurricane Hunters. However, it would break up the NOAA air fleet and reassign its assets to other agencies, most notably the General Services Administration, which oversees the contracting, purchasing and management of the civilian federal government—i.e., science and meteorology is not its main mission.

This would be tantamount to ending the Hurricane Hunters. The whole structure of the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations is designed around the NOAA mission and operates according to its needs. To disperse this elaborate, intricate—and effective—organization, its people and its assets, which include aircraft, vessels, drones, other technologies and their support network, would for all intents and purposes destroy or at the very least disrupt a vast swath of American scientific capabilities when it comes to weather and climate.

And when it comes to hurricanes and dangerous storms, it would create a gaping hole in the public’s awareness and preparedness that could prove deadly just at the moment the nation needs it most.

Crippling research and ignoring the oceans

Project 2025 takes particular aim at oceanic research. OAR and NOS would be broken up and OAR likely eliminated altogether. This targeting appears to be caused by more than just the expense of maintaining these institutions—it is likely the result of oceanic research being a major source of data proving the existence of climate change

This would not only eliminate a vital source of research about the state of the oceans in general, it would also likely eliminate data of critical use to the US Navy, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine and mariners of all types. It would harm national security and impact attempts to enforce maritime borders and provide coastal protection to say nothing of private boating safety.

For-profit weather

It is in Project 2025’s intention to turn the National Weather Service into a for-profit entity that everyday Americans who turn to their television stations and apps for weather information would be impacted.

Accurate, useful government-provided weather data accessible to all Americans is essentially something people have purchased with the tax dollars they pay to the federal government. Suddenly demanding payment for this data would be a form of robbery, taking from them vital information that they already purchased with their taxes.

Free access to government-gathered weather data has also made possible a robust industry of repackaging, interpreting and disseminating that data. It’s behind every weather broadcast and specialized media like the Weather Channel as well as countless apps, blogs and individual weather efforts.

All of this would now be jeopardized as the US government sold its products to the highest bidder.

That sale, or auction, would likely put government weather data in the hands of a few extremely wealthy corporations or individuals—like Elon Musk—who could then repackage it, resell it or withhold it at will. It would destroy the credibility of government-collected weather data and potentially give rise to warped or distorted reporting in the service of private political or commercial aims rather than objective reality.

It would also put a cost on weather data whose price could then be manipulated by the individuals or corporations that owned it. Further, it would create a fragmented and unequal view of the state of the weather and climate, reducing the credibility and reliability of information on which every human being on the planet depends.

Whatever husk of NWS that would remain after its dismantlement by Project 2025 would have to have profit goals, not scientific aims or objectives, as its priority. That would result in a warping and distortion of NWS’ critical, primary mission pursuing realistic, objective science, which it might no longer be able to meet.

Analysis: Climate change denial and the Florida model

At the core of Project 2025’s goals in re-engineering American meteorology is the intention to deny the reality of climate change.

In this, Americans can see a preview of a Project 2025’s end result in the state of Florida.

Over and over again, as concern over climate change rose nationally and its consequences impacted the state with increasing severity, Florida officials responded with increasingly vehement denialism.

In 2015 then-Gov. Rick Scott (R) informally banned use of the term in state government.

His successor, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), initially reversed much of Scott’s anti-environmentalism. However, when DeSantis began a run for the presidency in 2023 on an “anti-woke,” anti-Green New Deal platform, he fully embraced climate denialism.

Ultimately, the state legislature, seeking to curry favor with DeSantis and add to their own denialist credentials, officially banned use of the term in official state documents. In March 2024 the legislature passed House Bill 1645, which struck the term “climate change” from Florida law and official documents.

“Radical green zealots want to impose their climate agenda on people through restrictions, regulations, and taxes,” DeSantis stated at the time he signed the bill.

All of this official denialism did absolutely nothing to stop the onslaught of climate-change induced weather, disasters and challenges. (As this is written, Hurricane Milton is advancing on the Florida peninsula as a Category 5 hurricane, immediately following the ravages of Hurricane Helene.) In fact, official state climate denialism has impeded local efforts to prepare and reverse the effects of climate change in communities’ own front yards, as can be seen in flooding, storms, eroding beaches and wild, unpredictable weather over a fragile and vulnerable landmass.

As DeSantis wanted to “make America Florida” as he put it in his campaign slogan, so Project 2025 would make climate denialism a pillar of American policy. Project 2025 views efforts to respond, reduce or resist climate change as “the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

When added together, it is clear that Project 2025 seeks to alter or censor government climatological and meteorological science and research in order to deny climate change. NOAA agencies would not be following the data and drawing conclusions from it; they would be following administration directives and tailoring their findings to accommodate political policy.

This should not be surprising given former President Donald Trump’s past dismissal of climate change as a “hoax,” his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords or his effort to alter the cone of a hurricane with a Sharpie. Nor should it be surprising given that Gilman, the chapter’s author, spent 40 years working in the fossil fuel automotive industry.

Project 2025 would leave the United States naked, vulnerable and at the mercy of climate change, without the research, resources or will to meet its challenges.

And that would result in countless devastated communities and potentially millions of dead Americans.

Science in service to the nation—or not

Since colonial days Americans have been concerned with weather. As a nation of farmers, they were at its mercy and they needed some way to predict its patterns.

Two of America’s founders were, in a way, weathermen. Benjamin Franklin provided long-range forecasts that farmers used for planting in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, a very popular bestselling annual book. Thomas Jefferson, a planter, regularly took weather measurements and recorded them. On July 4, 1776 he noted that the temperature in Philadelphia reached a high of 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 1870, seeking to create a national weather measuring system and communicate it by telegraph, Congress created a weather office in the US Army’s Signal Division “for the Benefit of Commerce.” In 1890, following a presidential request, Congress transferred weather reporting responsibilities to a civilian US Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture.

Ever since then the United States government has invested in and steadily expanded meteorological and climatological research and technology. The fruits of that steady, sometimes painful, 154-year investment and effort have resulted in the most scientifically advanced, accurate, and capable weather and climate establishment in the world.

The federal government has also organized and refined its weather and climate offices to reflect changing conditions and improve their capabilities.

And throughout this period, just as the weather and climate affected everyone in the territory of the United States, so the US government freely shared its findings and results with all its citizens and the world.

Today people ordinarily think of weather forecasting in personal terms: Will it rain tomorrow? Should I bring an umbrella? Or, more importantly: Where will the storm hit?

But beyond just tomorrow’s predictions, increasingly accurate and sophisticated weather reporting and forecasting has been an incalculably powerful force multiplier for the American military, which can plan operations around it. It has enabled American agriculture to become the most productive in the world. It has made transportation more efficient and it is absolutely essential for air travel and the movement of goods by all modalities. It has, as the first weather office intended, benefited commerce.

The products of American meteorological prowess are everywhere and pervasive. As a rising tide lifts all boats, weather awareness and knowledge benefits all recipients.

Government meteorological efforts have protected Americans from the ravages of the most extreme weather. They have helped to make cities more resilient and enabled planning, whether in agriculture, construction or trade. Indeed, entire commodities markets depend on weather information provided by government research and monitoring.

Right now America is in a crisis as the climate alters due to human influence.

One response is to adapt, take measures that build resilience and preparedness, try to slow global warming, and raise awareness so that every individual can make some small effort to protect and preserve human life on the planet.

The other response is to deny that climate change is happening, to outlaw mention of “climate change,” to twist science to meet preconceived notions, or to ignore it altogether. It’s a response as likely to be successful as the Inquisition’s attempt to stamp out the Copernican solar system by banning the books that explained it.

This is the approach of Project 2025, which puts it into detailed, specific bureaucratic recommendations. If implemented by a second Donald Trump administration, it would cripple science, make Americans vulnerable, destroy cities and accelerate the very processes it seeks to deny. It would also dismantle the greatest research and applied science endeavor in history, one that has been of incalculable benefit to the United States, its citizens and the rest of the world.

Just as they have a choice between two candidates and between democracy and dictatorship in this year’s elections, when they cast their votes, Americans have a choice between ignorance, denial and disaster or knowledge, realism and progress.

On that choice on every ballot hangs the fate of the federal government’s weather and climate enterprise—and arguably, the future of human life on this planet.

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This is one of a series of examinations of the implications of Project 2025 for Southwest Florida and the nation. Other articles in the series are:

Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities

Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters

Project 2025 takes aim at education—and Collier County, Fla.

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg