By Michael Woyton
There’s a lot to be frightened about in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook.
From women’s lack of reproductive rights and cutting Social Security and Medicare to eliminating the Department of Education and firing all civil servants who will not be considered loyal enough to work in an administration led by Donald Trump.
Except for the extremely wealthy, it’s likely that not a single average American will remain unaffected if Project 2025 is implemented.
I am sure there are portions of the Project 2025 agenda that are more personal to some than others — I really would appreciate being able to stay married to my husband of more than 11 years — but I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that there might be one portion of the manifesto that will literally affect everyone.
Under the Department of Commerce chapter, which begins on page 696 of the document posted online by NPR, there is a call for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to be “dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
Jumping ahead to page 706, Project 2025 said the agency, which oversees the National Weather Service, takes more than half of the department’s $12 billion annual budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel.
What’s the beef with NOAA besides the perception that it costs too much? Well, according to Project 2025, it’s “become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
The National Weather Service should be fully commercialized, Project 2025 said, because it already provides data that is used by private companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel.
In an effort to demonize NOAA and justify its dissolution, the authors of Project 2025 said the work of the National Hurricane Center, for example, should be scrutinized to make certain its data doesn’t overtly support any one side in the “climate debate.” Remember when President Donald Trump used a black marker to change a hurricane forecast map? What do those pesky scientists really know?
Fast forward to today’s weather forecast and the formation of Hurricane Helene in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA literally has lifesaving information available for residents of the Florida peninsula and northward to Georgia and Mississippi and beyond.
The Miami Herald editorial board updated an opinion piece Wednesday entitled “Florida’s bracing for a major hurricane. This is why we need NOAA, not Project 2025.”
The Herald’s editorial board said the “controversial right-wing blueprint for a GOP-led national government” call for tearing apart NOAA would be “a grave disservice.”
“In Florida, we live and die — sometimes literally — by what the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service, which are parts of NOAA, tell us,” the board wrote.
Regarding the commercialization of the National Weather Service, the board said, “Wonder whose cronies would benefit from that?”
However, the Herald’s editorial board said the more important question is, “who would be harmed by this tearing down of the system we rely on for basic health and safety information. Answer: We would — the people of Florida and any other place that relies enormously on the sober, calm assessments of the government professionals at the hurricane center and the weather service.”
The newspaper’s editorial board said the people of Florida and the rest of the United States need “forecasts that are free of hype, a profit motive and the taint of politics.”
From experience covering more weather events than I care to remember in my part of New York — literally feet of snow and torrents of rain — there is a huge difference in the information provided by the National Weather Service and that of commercial weather businesses that rely on page views and seemingly write just to get eyeballs on smartphones.
For more on Project 2025, watch this two-minute summary by Mehdi Hassan of all 30 chapters:
SEE ALSO: ‘Just a Little Paper for the Ages’: Project 2025
Lead art: National Hurricane Center
FYI: Edited to swap out Hasan’s YouTube video because the tweet didn’t always appear.
On Second Thought 
One thought on “Hurricane Helene Good Reason to Keep NOAA”