With the close 2024 elections just days away, the future of the federal agencies responsible for weather forecasting, climate change research and disaster recovery hangs in the balance.
These agencies, namely the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), have become increasingly politicized in recent years, despite the agencies’ history of staying above the fray. But with natural disasters fueled by climate change now regularly ravaging the US – there have already been 24 weather events this year, each causing at least $1 billion in damage – the agencies have taken on a bigger role. And in doing so, they have become a target for some conservatives who are skeptical of climate change and want to cut government budgets.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised deep cuts to federal budgets, and Elon Musk, one of his most outspoken surrogates, said last week he would cut at least $2 trillion from the budget if he served in a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 922-page conservative policy roadmap compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, recommends that NOAA be “broken up and downsized” and focuses on FEMA, suggesting that much of the financial burden for disaster recovery be shifted to the state and local governments.
That could dramatically change what disaster response looks like in the United States.
“It’s becoming almost inconceivable that states could ever recover without long, costly recovery periods that would come out of state and local budgets,” said Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA administrator under the Obama administration.
It’s not entirely clear what a second Trump administration would mean for FEMA or NOAA. Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, even though many of its authors were his advisers. Trump campaign officials told NBC News in emails that “Project 2025 has NOTHING to do with President Trump or his campaign” and that only the president “and no other organization or former personnel represents the policy for the second term.” The campaign did not respond to follow-up questions about its plans for NOAA and FEMA.
FEMA has already become the target of scrutiny and criticism from some Republican leaders in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Trump and several other prominent Republicans went so far as to make false claims that FEMA money was going illegally to immigrants in the US. At the same time, widespread misinformation about the two storms caused meteorologists to become targets of threats, despite the remarkable accuracy of their forecasts.
These forecasts may no longer be freely available to the public or state governments if Project 2025 recommendations are implemented, as NOAA oversees the National Weather Service.
In interviews, academic experts and current and former agency officials said that even an agenda based in part on the conservative roadmap could make the U.S. more vulnerable to extreme weather, in a world where major disasters have already become more intense and frequent.
Currently, FEMA assistance covers at least 75% of the costs of major disasters, but Project 2025 proposals would reduce that share to just 25%.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., who served as Florida’s director of Emergency Management under Gov. Ron DeSantis from 2019 to 2021, said limiting relief aid could turn some communities into ghost towns. He pointed to Hurricane Michael, which hit Florida in 2018 as a Category 5 storm.
“These areas would not have recovered if the federal government had not come in and paid for the response and recovery efforts,” Moskowitz said.
The hardest-hit areas that benefited most from federal aid, he added, “voted for Donald Trump, voted for Rick Scott, voted for Ron DeSantis.”
Since Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the federal government has approved more than $1.2 billion in assistance for recovery efforts, according to FEMA. That includes more than $185 million in assistance for 116,000 households in North Carolina and more than $413 million for more than 125,000 households in Florida, where both storms made landfall.
If the Project 2025 proposals had been in place during Helene, Fugate said, they would likely have resulted in “more loss of life, a much slower response and very little financial assistance to help communities recover.”
Project 2025 recommends that NOAA “be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, transferred to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
Matthew Sanders, acting associate director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford University, said privatizing weather forecasting could lead to valuing companies’ profits over providing a robust public service, jeopardizing the quality of forecasts could bring.
“There is an important role for a neutral, centralized government agency that private companies cannot or do not want to play in this area,” Sanders said.
Matthew Burgess, an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming’s College of Business, said privatizing weather forecasting could also create situations in which state or local governments with more resources get access to better quality forecasts, while those with fewer resources stay in trouble. dark. Or, he said, a region with a higher risk of hurricanes or tornadoes could be forced to pay more for those forecasts.
“Right now, Florida gets free hurricane forecasts from the federal government,” Burgess said. “If we privatize that, the private sector will probably operate more efficiently on average, but will that be offset by an incentive to increase prices? Because when a hurricane threatens, you really need that forecast, and you’re going to pay whatever they charge.
In a statement, the Heritage Foundation said: “Project 2025 does not call for the elimination of NOAA or the NWS. The claim is false and ridiculous.”
“There is a distinction between privatization and commercialization,” the statement added. “Using commercial products to provide taxpayers with a better outcome at a lower cost is nothing new.”
In addition to the proposals for certain agencies, Project 2025 also calls for the dissolution of federal research on climate change. But understanding the effects of climate change is integral to forecasting, especially for storms, because warmer oceans cause hurricanes to intensify more quickly and a warmer atmosphere allows them to dump more rain.
“That’s why everyone gets up every day to come here and do their research, so that people are better prepared … to make decisions that are critical to them and their families,” said DeNa Carlis, director of NOAA’s National Severe Storms. Laboratory.
Ending climate research would make the U.S. more vulnerable to its effects, Fugate said.
“Just because you don’t like the answer doesn’t mean the information isn’t important,” he said. “How do we prepare if we ignore what is coming?”
Amid the growing lack of trust in government institutions, Sanders said, major cuts to research or to weather or disaster agencies could further erode trust.
“Climate change is a very unique problem because, like most environmental problems, it does not respect our political borders, nor our state borders,” he said. “We need centralized federal agencies to respond to climate change, agencies that can address large, significant, multi-state disasters at the right scale.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
