What does Project 2025 say about the National Weather Service, NOAA and National Hurricane Center?

As Florida braced for Hurricane Helene, some weather and politics observers were mad about Project 2025.

"Reminder that Project 2025 would dismantle the National Weather Service and NOAA," wrote the League of Conservation Voters on X. 

NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, founded in 1970. 

"As Florida prepares for a major hurricane to make landfall this week, don’t forget that Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would eliminate the National Weather Service and NOAA," Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal YouTube influencer, posted on Instagram.

We heard a similar statement about Project 2025 from U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., during a Sept. 19 House Oversight Committee hearing.

"Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA, wants to get rid of the National Weather Service — the people that tell you the weather and help you prepare for hurricanes," said Moskowitz, a past Florida emergency management director under Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.

Moskowitz quipped about how hurricane forecasting would function under Project 2025 and a Trump administration.

"Maybe we will just do it with a Magic 8 ball or maybe with a Ouija board. Or maybe we will do hurricane cones like President Trump did, right where he just circled in another state that wasn’t in the cones," Moskowitz said. 

Moskowitz’s swipe at Trump referred to a Sharpie-doctored map Trump displayed in 2019, when he falsely said all hurricane models predicted Dorian would hit Alabama. (And Moskowitz wasn’t the first to come up with that Magic 8 ball line.)

Partisan jostling aside, what does Project 2025 say about NOAA and the National Weather Service?

A Moskowitz spokesperson, Keith Nagy, said "while Project 2025 does not call for the complete dismantling of the NOAA, it intends to undermine the agency's independence from the executive branch and eliminate many of its internal departments. Any threats toward the NOAA or NWS jeopardizes life-saving information about hurricanes, heat waves, and other extreme weather events."

A NOAA spokesperson declined to comment.

Project 2025 is the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a Republican administration. Trump has disavowed it, but it was written by several former Trump administration officials. In 2022, when Trump gave a keynote speech at a Heritage event in Florida, he said the organization would "lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do." 

Project 2025 includes about four pages on NOAA and the National Weather Service. That part was written by Thomas F. Gilman, who was an official in Trump’s Commerce Department.

The document describes NOAA as a primary component "of the climate change alarm industry" and said it "should be broken up and downsized." 

The National Weather Service, one of six NOAA offices, provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. The National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service within NOAA.

Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency "should focus on its data-gathering services," and "should fully commercialize its forecasting operations."

It said that "commercialization of weather technologies should be prioritized to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in the most cost-efficient technologies for high quality research and weather data." Investing in commercial partners will increase competition, Project 2025 said.

Project 2025 also said the National Weather Service should become a "performance-based organization" held accountable for achieving specific results, even if the head of the agency must "deviate from government rules" to achieve those results.

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The document said little about the National Hurricane Center. It said the administration should "review the work of the National Hurricane Center" and that "data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate."

We asked several experts who are familiar with the NOAA and the National Weather Service’s work about Moskowitz’s statement. They said Project 2025 doesn’t call for the National Weather Service’s termination, but limits its work.

Craig Fugate served as former President Barack Obama’s administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and as then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s emergency management director. He recently served on a federal advisory committee, the Space Weather Advisory Group under NOAA.

"While Project 2025 doesn't call for the elimination of the NWS, it places restrictions on research, climate products, and potentially limiting access to the NWS forecasters and centers such as the National Hurricane Center," Fugate said.

Private sector criticism of the National Weather Service isn’t new, Fugate said.

A 2005 bill by then-Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Fugate said, would have eliminated the free dissemination of weather information provided by the National Weather Service. The bill drew no co-sponsors and foundered.

Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said Project 2025’s vague language made it difficult to assess whether it called for eliminating NOAA and the National Weather Service. But "the intent is clearly to cripple public weather forecasting," he said.

Thoman cited examples of Project 2025’s vague phrasing on the National Weather Service:

• "Should focus on its data-gathering services." Thoman asked whether that means doing nothing but data gathering. If so, then the weather and climate models produced continuously by the National Weather Service that private companies rely on would go away, he said.
   

• "Should fully commercialize its forecasting operations." Thoman asked if that means the National Weather Service should charge for forecasts or abandon weather forecasting entirely. 

Although Project 2025 seems to push collaboration with the private sector, that already happens. Private entities, including TV forecasters and AccuWeather, use NOAA data, Rachel Cleetus, policy director in the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said. (AccuWeather said it did not support what Project 2025 recommended.)

"The reality is NOAA and the National Weather Service are already working with a lot of commercial partners so it is unclear what exactly is the intention there," Cleetus said.

She also said dismantling NOAA could render the agency ineffective.

"The idea that it could be broken up and somehow still be able to do this essential work, it won’t be possible," Cleetus said.

Moskowitz said, "Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA" and the National Weather Service.

Project 2025 has a few pages about NOAA and the National Weather Service and some of its phrasing is vague.

But it does call for major changes. It described NOAA as a primary component "of the climate change alarm industry" and said it "should be broken up and downsized."

It doesn’t explicitly call for getting rid of the National Weather Service, but it says it should "fully commercialize its forecasting operations."

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PolitiFact Staff writer Madison Czopek contributed to this fact-check.