Originally by Julianne McShane at motherjones.com
Another hurricane is barreling toward the Florida coastline.Forecasters predict Hurricane Milton—now a Category 5 storm—will “remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida,” according to the National Hurricane Center, a division of the federally-funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. As of Monday afternoon, Hurricane Milton was about 700 miles southwest of Tampa, with maximum sustained winds of 175 miles per hour. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has since directed millions of residents to evacuate. All of this comes as the state is still recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.
It’s against this increasingly alarming situation that there’s growing awareness of the right’s long-held desires to gut NOAA, the very agency that has been so critical to helping residents and authorities brace for storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton, as well as understand the realities of climate change. But with a second Trump term a very real possibility, threats to NOAA carry new significance. That’s because Project 2025, the right-wing extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, explicitly calls for NOAA’s break-up. That plan can be found on page 674, which describes NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
“It should be broken up and downsized,” Project 2025 says of the agency, adding that its functions “could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.” The document then acknowledges the important work of the National Hurricane Center but asserts that it should nonetheless be reviewed.
As The Atlantic pointed out in a piece this summer, privatizing the work of NOAA could make weather forecasts less accessible and undermine American scientists’ ability to collaborate with international colleagues. But even if NOAA was not fully eliminated, experts say Project 2025’s other proposals could significantly harm the agency. “There are lots of ways they go after an agency without calling for its immediate elimination, and I think they are hiding behind the fact that they haven’t explicitly called for elimination,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the nonpartisan FactCheck.org. “These different offices are working together very closely to provide…both short-term as well as long-range information to help inform weather and climate predictions,” Cleetus added. “So the idea that you would dismantle it and it would still continue to be able to provide the service, that’s just not accurate.”
This makes investing in NOAA—not dismantling it—crucial. Last week, the Biden administration announced $22.78 million to support research on water-driven climate impacts.
But confronting the realities of climate change—and supporting officials who do—does not seem like a priority for those in Trump’s orbit. Consider my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen’s recent dispatch from a New York Times climate event at which Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, dismissed the realities of climate science. “I enjoy my high-carbon lifestyle,” Roberts told the audience.
In the meantime, continue following NOAA’s updates to ensure you stay safe if you are in Hurricane Milton’s path. While agency officials track the storm, Trump is, again, ranting on Truth Social.
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