If there is an active attempt at privatizing NOAA then you should be able to point to specific, real-world things that are happening to effect this change.
> Their budget proposals trying to slash a quarter of NOAA budgets doesn't seem like a cherry-picked issue...
Because these aren't part of a plan specifically targeting NOAA. They're broad attacks on government infrastructure. The distinction is important.
> And acting like the things happening at the NSF don't have any relationship to data used for NOAA is another thing. Oh, it's just programs being axed at the NSF, no worries, they'd surely never touch NOAA. I'm sure data about ocean temperatures has absolutely nothing to do with weather!
How, specifically, does slashing programs at NSF lead to "privitization of NOAA"?
> Then why did DOGE happen? Why submit budget proposals slashing NOAA by a quarter??
Because _that's what Conservatives do_ in American politics. They virtue signal to their base and then run away from things as their efforts are neutered. Where have you been since the 2000? The executive branch doesn't set the budget, their recommendations to Congress are ceremonial at best. A cheap and easy way to generate optics without committing to actions with extremely negative repercussions.
Tell me - where are the Republican Congressional budget proposals which slash NOAA's OAR budget?
> Acting like these things aren't happening is continuing to ignore the foxes circling the henhouse. You were seemingly even unaware about the Regional Climate Centers going offline, telling me it didn't happen
Now you're just being disingenuous. You said they were cut - they _weren't_, they were caught in the blast radius of government funding shenangians in Congress along with hundreds or thousands of other programs. Show me an EO or a piece of legislation that eliminates the RCCs, will you?
> Thinking Project 2025 is just a conspiracy theory when they have been actively working towards many of these policy goals all because Trump told you an obvious lie. I'm sorry, but if you're one of the people supposedly there helping to ensure these programs have a successful future and don't see the obvious attempts to smash these programs it makes me even more worried about their futures.
No one said Project 2025 is a conspiracy theory.
It's not productive to waste time with you. You have no idea what you're talking about. But let me be very blunt - _you are making everyone's job harder_ by defaulting to Project 2025 and ascribing motives to actions where there aren't any. The Trump Administration _literally doesn't care_ about NOAA, and the agency has its defenders on both sides of the aisle in Congress who have actively responded to acute crises whenever the Admin's chaos creates them.
As the wailing about "muh NOAA is being privatized!" grows louder, it derails our interventions to safe harbor the agency because thoughtful, constructive compromise can be washed away as P2025 doomerism.
Stop exaggerating what's going on to win internet points.
Before I rebut, I want to make very clear - I'm correcting the record because _in the future_ there could be serious threats to NOAA. Crying wolf today when things are tenuous but steady actively harms the community's preparation for when the knives _do_ come out for NOAA. As they have done so many times before, the slashers will point to these episodes of crying wolf as a smokescreen. It's literally their only play.
> This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall!
You do realize that the NWS was understaffed _before_ the administration and the DOGE cuts, right? We're also riding the crest of a retirement wave from the major restructuring that happened in the early 90's.
> They were, temporarily.
Because of funding lapses during the _government shutdown_. Like many _other_ agencies and offices. Geeze.
> This bumbling executive action is the Trump administration's attempt at restructuring...
It really isn't. Anyone who has been around the public-private nexus surrounding NOAA knows the folks who have been itching to overhaul NOAA, and they're not particularly subtle about it. Notably, none of them were brought into any administrative or leadership positions that could actually effect structural change at NOAA.
The reality is that despite its section in Project 2025, conservatives don't actually care about NOAA; they care about climate change and have used scalpels to excise key government programs relating to it. But NOAA has been shielded because of any executive agency, NOAA and the NWS have extremely favorable ratings from the public and are actively and vigorously defended by a bipartisan coalition in Congress.
> This is probably untrue. They've publicly announced more spending in 2025 than what they spent total in 2024 and that's just in big headline contracts. They haven't bothered reporting actuals in the 2025 CDP spend like they have for the previous decade. Huh I wonder why.
Everyone expected the CDP to grow following the success of EPIC and the maturation and adoption of JEDI has the next-generation data assimilation framework for our modeling ecosystem. Hell - part of NOAA's last major action plans in the early 2020's explicitly called for it to grow in scope!
The reason you don't see actuals from CDP spend is because (a) the government is dysfunctional and Congress is ignoring its oversight to actual make sure these numbers are published in a timely manner, and (b) very few awards have actually been given out. It took what, 4 years for the first microwave sounding data purchase to happen, and it was only a 1-year award to Tomorrow and OMS?
> So go read their budget proposals. Go see AMS' own worries about what the administration will do. Go see them talking about staffing shortages. See the fact the NWS isn't launching as many balloons. See the lack of staffing in Oklahoma during tornado season. See the elimination of public datasets at climate.gov, see those staffers who were laid off and never had those positions backfilled.
I do read the proposals. I spend time on Capitol Hill working through these budgets with offices in both chambers and from both political parties. I also spend time with the House Science and the Senate SST committee staff.
Yes, there are real issues that NOAA and the NWS face. And I would absolutely fault the federal government for not being _as aggressive_ at remediating these issues.
But you're cherry-picking issues to paint a significantly more sinister story than what is actually happening.
You do understand how this isn't an example of what I'm asking for, right?
In 20 years worth of history - you can't identify a single piece of legislation or a single executive action to demonstrate an ongoing threat to NOAA? You have to immediately jump to the tautology of "Project 2025 is dismantling NOAA because an article two years ago said Project 2025 was going to dismantle NOAA"?
> Meanwhile you fully acknowledge they attempted to radically downsize twice in less than two years and acknowledge they've massively expanded the existing forecast commercialization. "No signs whatsoever" while you point obvious signs.
Uh, no. The CDP has moved forward at nearly the same rate it's been trudging along. There's a broad consensus across the weather enterprise that the CDP should _grow_ to better allow NOAA to access new data coming online from commercial sources - data which is already being acquired by competitor agencies such as the UK Met Office and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting.
Furthermore, it's ridiculous to conflate the bumbling executive actions like DOGE with earnest, deliberate restructuring of NOAA.
> NOAA's budgets may have been approved by Congress, but they still face massive staffing shortages. The Trump administration has made it clear they don't care about impoundments and choosing to not spend money allotted by Congress.
That's embellishing quite a bit. Define "massive" staffing shortages, will you? All those roles being actively filled by the National Weather Service? I can't go a single day without seeing someone in my extended network on LinkedIn announcing that they've been hired for a NWS forecaster role!
The one thing I'll give you is that there has been significant churn across OAR and EMC - but that's more due to the huge amount of money flowing into AI/ML ventures into weather/climate and more lucrative private sector opportunities than we've seen for a very long time.
> When the regional climate offices went offline, do you think it was just incompetence, or testing the waters about letting such programs just die?
You mean Regional Climate Centers? Despite the same set of challenges that virtually any institution that leveraged federal funds has seen, none of these have been "shut down."
> Sounds like they just haven't been fully successful at implementing their obvious policy goals. If they didn't want to do it, why write the budget that way? Why authorize those DOGE cuts? Isn't the expansion of commercialization in the plans of increasing commercialization?
Sounds like they _aren't implementing those goals_. You're mistaking the chaos of 2025 with actual policy coherence.
> It's like you refuse to see the obvious reality immediately in your face and choose to believe a convicted fraudster.
I don't believe anything other than what I see with my own eyes and do with my own hands, day-in and day-out working in the weather enterprise.
I don't know who runs that website, but it has flat out falsehoods on it. If you search for "NOAA", two items come up with notes [1]:
1. "Note: The administration is firing NOAA employees and closing NOAA offices; reconciliation bill rescinds some NOAA funds." Uh, no - there have not been any NOAA office closures. The President's FY26 budget eviscerated NOAA OAR, but those cuts were almost entirely rolled back by Congress. Yes, NOAA and NWS employees were caught up in the DOGE probationary purges back in early 2025, but in many cases (a) they were hired back, and (b) the NWS is aggressively hiring at all levels to replace churn.
2. "Note: Private companies are now gathering weather data for NOAA; administration is "readying plans" to transfer National Center for Atmospheric Research work to private companies." NOAA has purchased data from the private sector for 30 years. The explosion in commercial earth observation has dramatically increased the available data that can be directly used in numerical weather modeling, and NOAA has operated a Commercial Data Program for over a decade to supplement its own investments. This is an expected evolution of the weather enterprise that was predicted and urged as far back as the National Academies' "Fair Weather" report in 2003 [2]. Furthermore - NCAR is part of the NSF, not NOAA, which really calls into question WTF your website is talking about.
There have been no signs whatsoever that these types of changes would be happening. The only noticeable changes at NOAA - and anyone who works in the world of meteorology in the United States - have been a doubling down on existing, vetted programs for commercial data acquisition (all of which target supplemental capability, not backbone replacement) and a doubling down on existing modeling R&D (namely the re-up of EPIC and the commitment to the UFS).
NOAA is helmed by veterans of the weather enterprise. Do you see the American Meteorological Society issuing statements decrying the commercialization of the NWS or NOAA? Honestly, because NOAA is a Department of Commerce agency and the head of that cabinet department - Lutnick - has no interest whatsoever in weather or climate, there really isn't any ongoing concern that NOAA will be massively torn apart.
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
> The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
In general, they aren't.
The sole example I can think of that even skirts with this was specifically an attempt by AccuWeather in the 2000's, coordinating with then-Senator Rick Santorum's office. And that was universally decried by the entire weather enterprise.
I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).
Can you share more about who you are and what your firm does?
Apologies if this interpretation is off-base, but I don't think it's a good thing that there is a nascent cottage industry of "software dev firms" that are elbowing their way into these grants. That is another glaring warning sign that what the NSF is doing right now is grossly inconsistent with what it is _supposed_ to be doing.
But not even. At least in the domain I work in, there is virtually no interest of engaging with these NSF programs. Regardless of what's put in writing in the calls for applicants, there's still a significant prejudice that NSF - by being a part of the government - will be slow and ineffective at administering awards, and therefore it's a waste of time for any agile, fast-moving company.
On the flip-side, my academic colleagues are tearing out their hair trying to get some - any - funding to support their labs. I'm completely inundated with request from colleagues to provide an LOI or some other evidence that our company is interested in working with their lab on something. But that's even _less_ attractive for many private companies!
That would be a crappy trade; today, the public benefits multiple times over as commercialization of technology drives the innovation economy. Who cares about sharing a measly fraction of direct profits when we all get long-term growth of our investment and retirement portfolios at upwards of 10% annually?
I'm not the big Lebowski but this is the "opinion" of the majority of scientific societies in the US as well as watchdog organizations who have long followed science regulatory and spending action.
It's not exactly new. We've been through this with the crackdown on climate science during the W Bush administration, with sequestration during the early/mid 2010's, and with the budget shenanigans during the first Trump administration. Denying the painfully obvious impact of our contemporary science policy is like fiddling while Rome is burning.
Yes. Myself and colleagues used to get outreach fairly regularly to join new faculty at universities trying to establish themselves in China. I'm in industry these days, but some of my colleagues report a significant uptick in these types of outreach over the past year.