With communities still reeling from Hurricane Helene, one of the deadliest storms to ever hit the US, further pain in the form of Hurricane Milton is about to hit Florida. Experts warn that such disasters will be worsened if Donald Trump is elected and follows the policies of the controversial right-wing Project 2025 manifesto.
Under Project 2025, authored by numerous former Trump officials but disavowed by the former president himself, federal forecasts of severe storms and aid to devastated towns and cities would be drastically scaled back. Emergency management officials say the cuts would seriously worsen the outcomes of a storm like Helene.
Project 2025 calls for the “breakup and downsizing” of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), calling it a primary part “of the climate change alert industry.” The agency’s climate research is “harmful to future American prosperity” and should be disbanded, the document said.
Noaa houses the National Weather Service (NWS) which provides forecasts and analysis on hurricanes and other extreme weather events. Project 2025 calls for the agency to “fully commercialize its forecasting activities.”
“They want to pretend that climate change is not having a clear impact,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire and who called the proposals “ridiculous.”
Introducing a profit motive into the NWS would undermine its commitment to the public interest, Rosenberg said.
“A company’s primary motivation is profit, and do you really want things like severe weather forecasts for things like a huge storm to be driven by profit?” Rosenberg asked.
If the playbook were to go into effect, it would also radically reshape the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), ending its federal flood insurance program — the nation’s largest federal flood insurance provider — and cutting disaster assistance.
“It would result in more suffering, more complicated responses and greater risks across the country,” said Samantha Montano, an emergency management expert at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
Project 2025 “will unequivocally result in more people dying from a hurricane,” said Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who previously served as Florida’s emergency management director.
Tracking the storm
Prior to disasters, the NWS surveys first responders and residents; before Helene, the agency sent “urgent” alerts across the southeastern US. Emergency responders compare these warnings and forecasts to floodplains and maps “to determine how people should prepare,” Moskowitz said.
These warnings are based on data from Noaa’s Asheville, North Carolina-based National Centers for Environmental Information, which puts weather into a historical perspective.
“If the forecast for Helene includes words like unprecedented, extremely rare and catastrophic, those words are based on the very real climatological data,” said Marjorie McGuirk, an Asheville meteorologist who has worked for the centers for years.
Noaa’s predictions about Helene were “absolutely precise” because they took this climate data into account, McGuirk said.
“Project 2025 pretty much puts an end to that,” she said. “It destroys the integrity of predictions.”
Aid workers reportedly regret not taking Noaa’s warnings more seriously than Helene did. But provinces did receive mandatory evacuation orders, which likely saved lives.
“If it were privatized, would it still provide predictions for emergency managers?” Moscowwitz asked. “And what if there are business investors involved who have an interest in keeping people in their homes?”
NWS forecasts are currently free to access, but Project 2025 could put forecasts behind a paywall, leaving poorer government agencies and communities less prepared.
Although Project 2025 says Americans already rely on private forecasts from companies like AccuWeather, those companies broadly rely on NWS data to inform their own products.
Dismantling the weather service would also disrupt the NWS’s National Hurricane Center (NHC), which forecasts and tracks tropical cyclones. Project 2025 calls for a “review” of the NHC and for it to be “presented neutrally, without adjustments designed to support one side in the climate debate.”
Project 2025 also says the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) should be “disbanded” because it is “the source of much of Noaa’s climate alarmism.” But the agency conducts research that supports most national weather and forecasting studies.
It’s a “nonsensical” claim, Rosenberg said. “Climate change is noticeably changing both the pattern and intensity of storms. Do they take that into account in their predictions? Yes, they are better,” he said.
After the storm hits
Project 2025 envisions a radically different role for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which is currently dealing with the devastating aftermath of Helene, amid a whirlwind of misinformation and falsehoods fueled by Trump that funding is being targeted at immigrants at the expense of disasters. communities.
Fema has even said that its disaster fund will not be used for any purpose other than helping those in need after storms like Helene. However, such a response would be reformed under Project 2025 regulations, with Fema being moved from the Ministry of Homeland Security to the Ministry of the Interior or the Ministry of Transport.
Under this plan, Fema would provide far less assistance to communities and place the responsibility on states and local governments, with the federal government covering only 25% of disaster costs, or up to 75% for “truly catastrophic events” , the report said. document. Currently, under the Stafford Act, Fema covers at least 75% of disaster costs once claimed, and up to 100% at the president’s discretion.
Project 2025 also calls for Fema to direct scrap subsidies to states to help them become more resilient to future storms and to privatize the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which provides most flood coverage to Americans. Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump official and author of Project 2025, wrote that “if we target them (Fema) more closely when deployed, they will do better.”
If this shrunken version of Fema had been in place before Hurricane Helene and now Hurricane Milton, the initial cleanup after the storms would remain much the same, but the longer-term recovery would “look very different” for places that are already too have to do with Years of recovery, Montano said.
“The states could not afford the costs associated with rebuilding roads, bridges and other infrastructure, let alone have money for individuals and businesses,” she said.
“The nonprofit sector wouldn’t be able to make up the difference. It’s a very bad idea.”
Even the initial recovery of hurricane-affected communities would be hampered by less federal support, said former Fema administrator Craig Fugate, who pointed out that the removal of fallen trees and other debris alone after Hurricane Michael in 2018 was five times more than the total costs. annual budget of the hard-hit city of Mexico Beach, Florida.
“States typically don’t have a lot of extra money in circulation, so they would have to decide whether to raise taxes or cut programs to offset the funding,” Fugate said. “You would have to take money out of schools, prisons and health care to respond to a disaster. Most likely, local governments would go bankrupt.”
In the longer term, a reduced role for Fema would mean that as vital structures such as schools, hospitals and highways are rebuilt, they would not have to adhere to federal guidelines that require a much stronger resilience standard than many states do, to deal with the reality of extreme weather due to the climate crisis.
In North Carolina, for example, the Republican-led state legislature has rolled back construction requirements for extreme weather events, a move experts say makes residents more vulnerable to major storms like Helene.
Private insurers would likely not step in or immediately go bankrupt if they had to fill the void left by a defunct federal flood insurance system, Fugate said, leaving even more people without flood insurance. The federal initiative was created in the 1960s after private insurers fled the market in the wake of several disastrous floods.
“Relying solely on the market would make no sense – the reason we have the NFIP is because private companies refused to report on flooding,” Montano said. “There is no evidence that a robust and effective private insurance market would exist given the risks we see now. There are definitely problems with the NIV, but we need to fix the program we have.”
Former Fema executives agree that the agency needs reforms, but they talked about retooling it for an era of climate crisis and more intense storms that were unknown when the agency was founded in 1979. The growing cavalcade of disasters is underlined by the rapid tracking of Helene’s impact. due to the expected landfall of Hurricane Milton in Florida.
“We are heading into unprecedented times, we are receiving these disaster declarations every other day this year,” says Anne Bink, who led Fema’s response and recovery operation until May this year.
“FEMA is needed more than ever by state and local governments due to the increased pace of disasters. We cannot just rebuild as before, we really need to invest in resilience.”
Neither the Heritage Foundation, the lead author of Project 2025, nor the Trump campaign responded to questions about predicting and responding to disasters.
