Project 2025 would drastically alter the National Hurricane Center. What does it mean for LA? (2024)

It's been almostthree years since Hurricane Ida made landfall as a powerful Category 4 storm in Port Fourchon on Aug. 29, 2021, barreling through southeastern Louisiana with such force that many of the scars are still visible today.

Though Ida rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a major hurricane in a matter of threedays, leaving little time for Louisiana officials and residents to properly prepare for its intense impacts, federal hurricane forecasters spelled out the storm's key dangers as it took aim at Louisiana's Gulf Coast.

Weather experts at the National Hurricane Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, warned of incoming catastrophic wind speeds and heavy rains, even predicting a northeastern wobble the storm took once onshore, bringing New Orleans into the edge of Ida's worst winds.

The detailed forecasts, like thousands before it, helped Louisiana leaders decide where to issue evacuation orders, when to open shelters and alerted residents to the incoming impacts. This is made possible because of the global climate data collected and disseminated to the public for free by the NOAA and its six main offices, including the National Weather Service.

But a controversial plan laid out in a 922-page conservative policy handbook proposes that information instead be produced by private companies and sold for profit.

The proposal to break up portions of the NOAA is part ofProject 2025, the Heritage Foundation's vision for a far-right overhaul of the federal government and its operations.

"The next conservative President should consider whether theNational Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories," the document reads.

“Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” the document continues.

The push to privatize segments of NOAA isn't new, with supporters arguing that competition with private forecasting companies like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel could encourage more accurate predictions and improved technology. But some climate economics experts say the comprehensive and often life-saving climate data NOAA provides through weather and hurricane forecasts is best left as it is: free and public.

“Right now, for about a century and a half, we’ve had a global system where countries around the world share data from their weather observing infrastructure," said Dr. Jeffrey Shrader, an environmental and labor economist and assistant professor at Columbia University.

"If we were to privatize weather forecasting in the U.S., that part is kind of impossible to imagine being replicated by the private sector," Shrader said. "If they did and they charged for that, it would really harm weather forecasting in the U.S. but also around the world.”

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 centers on a massive handbook outlining a conservative wish list for sweeping changes in the federal government, from ensuring workersare loyalto the president to outlawing p*rnography and ending student loan relief efforts.

The document was published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank led by Lafayette native Kevin Roberts, and authored in part by several former top Trump administration officials and advisers. Roberts and other Heritage Foundation leaders did not respond to a request for comment.

The policy outline has come under intense scrutiny in recent months, with Democrats pointing to it as an example of what another Trump presidency could look like.

Trump, however, has denied any connection to the plan through his 2024 presidential campaign, saying on social media he doesn't know anything about it and that "some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal."

Trump's campaign released a statement late last month disavowing Project 2025 entirely amid a leadership shakeup at the Heritage Foundation, according tothe Associated Press.

"Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed"

"anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign— it will not end well for you." pic.twitter.com/8kAHEWe7je

— Matthew Choi (@matthewichoi) July 30, 2024

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” Trump campaign advisers said in the statement.

'Break up NOAA'

Project 2025 lays out a vague plan for breaking up and downsizing NOAA, saying the massive agency accounts for over half the $12 billion U.S. Department of Commerce budget and "seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable."

Though the authors of Project 2025 point to the NOAA's wide ranging responsibilities as a provider of environmental information services, environmental stewardship services and applied scientific research, they argue "each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality."

The document alleges the NWS produces less accurate forecasts than its private counterparts and that the agency should focus on collecting and commercializing the data that private companies like AccuWeather so often use to produce their own forecasts.

"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," the document reads.

Scott Smullen, a spokesperson for NOAA, declined to comment on the proposal.

Though Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, attempts to undermine and privatize the National Weather Service, which operates the National Hurricane Center, aren't new to his administration. In 2017, Trump tapped former AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers to lead NOAA, sparking outrage from those who said that Myers' ties to AccuWeather created a massive conflict of interest.

Myers, who for years unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to limit free dissemination of National Weather Service information, withdrew from consideration for the NOAA position in 2019 over medical issues.

"Part of this has already been done or at least attempted," Shrader, the environmental economist at Columbia, said. "So we don’t have to look at Project 2025 to see what Trump might do if he were to get back into the White House. It’s not hypothetical.”

Weather forecasting as a public service

To Shrader, there are two basic economic principles that support weather forecasting as a free, public service.

The first, he said, is that the private sector often under-provides information. If a private company is trading information for profit, once it releases that information, it can be shared and used by anyone. When AccuWeather releases a forecast, for example, a person with access could post the forecast to social media, spreading the information to those who didn't previously have access.

Shrader said that incentivizes the private sector to withhold important information, which is generally not what you want during the severe weather events states like Louisiana so often experience.

Shrader's second point is the classic econ 101 "non-rivalry" argument. A good is considered non-rival if, after it's produced and shared with one consumer, the cost of providing it to another is zero. A weather forecast or a working streetlight, for example, only has to be produced once but can go on to benefit countless people.

Non-rival goods, Shrader said, are generally services that are provided for free to the public, often by the government.

Derek Lemoine is an Abita Springs native who now works as an economics professor at the University of Arizona, studying the economic consequences of climate change. He compared the world of weather forecasting to the private and public school systems.

In the same way that the U.S. government provides its citizens with a free public school education, Lemoine said the government also provides free climate and weather forecasting data. And like how not all students' specific needs are met in public school, public weather forecasting data can at times feel difficult to navigate and overly general.

That's where private forecasting companies come in, Lemoine said, many of which provide customized data to consumers with specific needs, like farmers looking for long-range forecasts for upcoming growing seasons. Much of the data private companies use, Lemoine pointed out, is also pulled from the data NOAA collects and provides for free.

That customized forecasting, just like private schools specifically geared toward things like religion or STEM curriculum, has its place and value, Lemoine said.

But we can't all afford private school tuition, he said, and the same would likely go for private forecasts and weather alerts.

And that brings up a slew of ethical and logistical questions, he said, regarding whether people would have to pay for severe weather forecasts and how private companies would collaborate with government agencies to close roads, open shelters and issue evacuation orders during severe weather events.

“There is a market in weather services," Lemoine said. "The question is whether we should actually eliminate the public part of the market."