Free weather reports in the United States are a miracle of the modern administrative state. For most of our lives we’ve been able to pull up weather.gov or a website that feeds off its information like Google or AccuWeather and figure out how hot or cold it’ll be for the rest of the week. Will it rain that day? Government run weather satellites are pretty good at predicting if it will.
Conservatives, of course, would like to change all that.
As first spotted by The Atlantic, Project 2025 contains a plan to break apart the National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “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,” Project 2025 says. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
Project 2025 is an 881-page product of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. It’s a plan for the first 180 days of Republican rule should Donald Trump win the presidency. Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 after it took a beating in the press, but a lot of its plans track with things he and his allies have talked about on the campaign trail or attempted in his previous administration.
The dirty secret of private weather tracking sites like AccuWeather, Dark Sky, and The Weather Channel is that they get a lot of the data they use to make predictions from government sources in the U.S. and abroad. They all process the data using proprietary systems, but many of the inputs are free. That’s always bothered the people who run AccuWeather.
The privatization of weather reports is a conservative project that long predates Trump and Project 2025. In 2005, Republican Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill aimed at forcing the NWS and NOAA to stop providing free weather reports. AccuWeather, which was headquartered in Santorum’s home state, lobbied hard for the bill. It died in committee.
AccuWeather tried again during Trump’s first presidency. Trump nominated AccuWeather CEO Barry Lee Myers to head the NOAA. Smelling a fox in the henhouse, the Senate refused to confirm him.
AccuWeather is all over Project 2025. “Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather,” it says. “The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
It’s a bizarre assertion. The current state of play allows various weather companies to compete by using the same raw data from the government. Commercializing the data would only increase the cost of doing business for each and every company that uses the data. When costs go up, corporations don’t eat it. They push it onto the end user. Under Project 2025’s plan, free weather reports would end and the cost of the third-party apps would increase.
Project 2025 argued that most Americans use AccuWeather instead of the NWS. Strangely, it didn’t mention other third-party sources for weather reports. “Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS,” it says.
It links to the study: an AccuWeather-authored press release.
AccuWeather’s current leadership, like Trump, is putting distance between itself and Project 2025. “AccuWeather does not agree with the view, and AccuWeather has not suggested, that the National Weather Service (NWS) should fully commercialize its operations. The authors of ‘Project 2025’ used us as an example of forecasts and warnings provided by private sector companies without the knowledge or permission of AccuWeather,” Current AccuWeather CEO Steven R. Smith said in a statement released on its website.
Update 7/17/2024 at 1:05pm: This story has been updated with a comment from AccuWeather.
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