This week, as wildfires break out across Texas, life-saving alerts are being issued by the National Weather Service (NWS), informing evacuations ahead of the advancing threat. On the ground, firefighters are using National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites for wildfire monitoring in real time. This is just one of dozens of emergencies our first responders rely on NOAA and NWS data for on any given week. Simply put: NOAA and the NWS save lives and must be defended against the Trump administration’s ongoing assault.
We are witnessing the vanishing of our own US assets which taxpayers have funded and built over generations to serve the public good. We need those assets and will suffer in their absence. And we may be forced to pay the private sector to dole them back out to us, piecemeal. We need to call the theft, harm and grift what it is—and stop it.
The theft
Since 1849, when the Smithsonian Institution began furnishing telegraph offices with weather instruments, meteorological data have been continuously and systematically collected in the United States. In 1870, Congress established within the US Army’s Signal Service the very 19th-century named Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce and tasked it with issuing weather forecasts and warnings.
Later, the service became a civilian agency when Congress transferred its meteorological responsibilities to the US Weather Bureau under the Department of Agriculture. Today, those duties are carried out by the National Weather Service (NWS), housed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the Department of Commerce. And thanks to the progression of recognizing the value of investing in weather forecasts and warnings, the American people own the NWS, a public service that is paid for with your tax dollars. That investment totals about $1.3 billion dollars annually—or about $7 per person in the United States—and it puts much more than this back into the US national economy.
The NWS’ own assessment in 2017 found that private businesses can derive up to $13 billion dollars in economic value from weather knowledge, and that its freely-available data powers a $7 billion-dollar market that creates tailored weather products for business and people. Economy-wide, the value of weather and climate information to the US economy exceeds $100 billion annually, which is roughly 10 times the investment made by taxpayers through federal agencies such as NOAA, involved in weather-related science and services.
That weather app on your phone, or the weather report on TV? How about the storm forecast that the airports you fly in or out of receive every three hours for the next 36 hours and are the basis for rerouting or grounding planes? That’s critical for safe air travel, and yes, that was paid by taxpayers and also belongs to you. The 418 people who were rescued last year from incidents over water, land, and in downed aircraft? That was possible because the Coast Guard and the military had access to NOAA’s search and rescue-aided satellites. All of it is powered by NOAA’s free and public data that are available for public safety or business operations.
At UCS, we know full well how valuable the data are—we power our own Danger Season extreme weather tracker using the NWS’s daily-updated data (another free service!)
But the valuable data and information that we obtain from NWS is at risk of being stolen. The Trump administration, Elon Musk, and DOGE—the black-box entity that has no actual legal authority to dismantle agencies created by Congress—have signaled as much by illegally invading NOAA headquarters, firing thousands of its staff, and canceling leases on some of its key buildings.
Here we are in the era of presidential overreach, where a Republican-controlled Congress is allowing the executive branch to usurp its powers, and a Democratic minority leadership is unwilling to use its remaining power to block these illegal actions. And that overreach has slipped into the judicial branch, where the Trump administration is openly ignoring judges’ decisions and orders to reverse course on illegal executive action.
But why? The Trump government wants to dismantle the climate and weather science conducted by NOAA because evidence of a warming world resulting from burning their products is a pesky reality for the fossil fuel industry that gave millions to his campaign. In addition, he would like to put behind a paywall those parts that they will not be able to completely eliminate—the NWS. This is not speculation. Just read the chapter on the Department of Commerce in the Trump government’s blueprint for dismantlement, Project 2025. Or if you can’t stomach the lunacy of the nearly 900-page document, read my blogpost readout of the plan for NOAA and NWS. This is very, very harmful.
The harm
Where is the harm in dismantling—or even simply compromising—NWS and its parent office, NOAA? Without accurate, updated, and free weather information, we lose the ability to prepare ourselves for potentially lethal extreme weather such as hurricanes, heat waves, floods, and snowstorms.
Travel by air becomes an uncertain activity that could kill you (think of the Age of Exploration, when galleons departed with very little certainty of arriving safely on the other side of the world, much less coming back!), as airports will not have reliable and updated storm forecasts. The national economy suffers because weather events account for impactful fluctuations in the country’s GDP and affect the ability of all sectors to provide goods and services. Planning for weather-related risks requires information that can help reduce uncertainty that is costly for business; its absence hampers emergency managers and first responders.
As it turns out, we lose quite a bit of life-saving alert information. I took a look at the number of times that the NWS issued an alert that impacted a county (or county-equivalents in the territories) each day between 2010 and 2024, a metric I call county-alert days. I use this metric rather than the raw number of alerts because NWS alerts often span multiple counties, so the raw number does not quite communicate the spread of alerts in counties.
NWS keeps track of nearly 70 different types of extreme weather, so I grouped them into thirteen categories. I am sure meteorologists may disagree with some of my grouping choices, but I think this serves to illustrate my point: Between 2010 and 2024, NWS issued extreme weather alerts that impacted all 3,144 counties (and equivalents) a whopping 3.7 million times.
I also grouped the alerts geographically according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment regions to show how different regions of the country face different kinds of extreme weather. Wildfires in the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Northwest have prompted thousands of fire weather (also called “red flag”) alerts by the NWS; historically, alerts in the Southeast and the Northeast are mostly related to flood, cold, heat, and wind. The US Caribbean (that’s Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) have faced floods, dangerous ocean weather and currents, and in the previous two years, extreme heat alerts that were not common before. Note that the small number of storms does not reflect their devastating impact, such as Hurricane María’s in 2017. Finally, Hawai’i and the Pacific Islands have faced much flooding and storms, and in the last few years have seen red flag weather alerts for wildfires such as the terrible Maui fires of 2023.
Let’s say you live in a coastal community along the Gulf of Mexico. Would you like to know how much storm surge or wind speed you need to prepare for in the face of an incoming hurricane, or when you need to evacuate to higher ground? Well, you could have this information if NOAA could fly their hurricane hunters, those very cool aircraft flown by very brave pilots who soar into hurricanes to collect data that are fed into storm track models to refine projections of intensity, speed, and landfall as hurricanes form, evolve, and intensify rapidly from one day to the next (a hallmark behavior of storms in the climate change era).
But guess what? There is no certainty we will have such information this hurricane season. In February, flight directors and other pilots were fired, but news media reported that some were rehired in March. No clear information is coming through from the administration, so it’s anybody’s guess if there will in fact be planes, pilots, and a flight plan ready to go if and when hurricanes threaten populated areas in the Gulf of Mexico.
For other types of extreme weather worsened by climate change, harm will follow as well: farmers will lose drought monitoring that they rely on to plan and prepare for the season; forest managers and wildfire first responders will lose seasonal and monthly wildfire risk outlooks. Alerts about rapid-onset events such as extreme heat domes and flooding are also at risk of being lost.
Hurricane season and the time of the year when climate change makes extreme weather more likely (we call it Danger Season) are right around the corner. Without our hurricane hunters and their pilots, weather balloons, and forecasters, we are going impaired into seasonal climate and extreme weather dangers that we already know are destroying lives and property.
The presidential grift of what’s ours
So… <deep breath>. Let’s take Project 2025 seriously about its goal of privatizing NWS—which we definitely should take seriously, since in the first two long months of the Trump administration it has reliably been its modus operandi. According to pages 674-677, it appears that the theft and the harm will be followed by the further crime of privatizing what we own and pay for already.
What we already own and pay for is giving back dividends in lives and property saved, increasing prosperity, reducing uncertainty about extreme weather impacts, and providing the scientific bedrock of knowledge that can inform how to safeguard us from a climate-changed world. And the unilateral and illegal actions of the administration intend to put this service behind a paywall to make us pay again for it?
Public services exist to provide parity in access to all people in society without regard to their ability to individually fork out money for such a service—so those unable to pay will end up paying twice: once with their tax dollars, and once with their wellbeing or with their lives. Paywalled weather alerts will deprive individuals, households, or towns with lower incomes of access to life-saving services.
And there are early indications of the privatization to come. The private company WindBorne Systems has offered to backfill atmospheric data no longer collected by weather balloons in Alaska after the Juneau local NWS office lost 10% of its staff due to downsizing. While this may look like good corporate citizen action from a technically-savvy and well-resourced private company, businesses exist to make money, so it is a bit hard to see how WindBorne will be willing or able to permanently fill the gap in data collection in Alaska without compensation.
Is this the wasteful spending that President Trump and Musk pledged to root out? Are we supposed to accept the demolition of the jobs, the infrastructure, and the data that saves lives and property and increases prosperity, under the pretense of rooting out a federal workforce that is falsely vilified as being lazy, leeching the system, and wasting taxpayers’ money?
There is a perverse psychology of revenge at play here. In dismantling the federal workforce, the administration’s goal has been, in the words of director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought (and architect of Project 2025), for “the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” This vengeful discourse has been embraced by a significant part of the country who gleefully watch the administration’s actions inflicting pain on the federal workforce across the board.
Year after year, billion-dollar disasters, many of them worsened by climate, destroy and displace communities across the country. And as Danger Season and the heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires it brings loom over us, people across the country and territories—regardless of political persuasion—will suffer under extreme weather disasters without life-saving information, and without adequately-funded and staffed emergency management, recovery, and reconstruction services.
The life- and property-saving value that federal workers bring to the people of this country is on the line, and I fear that the consequences of dismantling the country’s weather and climate forecasting enterprise as well as disaster assistance and recovery agencies will strike a blow to communities still reeling from previous years’ extreme weather in addition to this year’s worsening economic challenges related to market uncertainties and cost of living increases.
The Trump administration is dismantling institutions, firing expert staff, and stealing data paid for out of our own pockets. Such theft will lead to harm as we lose the information that saves lives, protects property, and enables prosperity across many aspects of daily life in the US. It will also change how the US has regarded science and the NWS as a beloved and public good.
The country has invested in, and innovated through, this scientific public service for over a century, not for selling it to the highest bidder, but for the common good. Dismantling NOAA and the National Weather Service is a presidential grift that we must oppose.
When we save science, we save lives. Take action to tell the Trump administration to stop its all-out war on our science and our scientists.