What Project 2025 Would Mean For Hurricane Forecasts

Millions of Americans along the Gulf Coast and throughout the U.S. Southeast are turning to the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service for accurate information about Hurricane Helene ahead of its expected landfall late Thursday — just as they have with tropical storms going back decades.

But if pro-Donald Trump conservatives have their way, these lifesaving forecasts could come to a screeching halt next year.

Project 2025 ― the sweeping policy blueprint that GOP operatives, including dozens of former Trump administration officials, compiled to guide a second Trump term ― calls for a future Republican administration to “break up” the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA is the parent agency of the 154-year-old National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.

“The National 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,” reads the 920-page manifesto.

Experts warn that doing so would be a deadly mistake. The National Hurricane Center is the lead federal agency for forecasting and tracking tropical weather, which Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said is “critical to coordinating evacuations and emergency response.”

“It’s just one example of how dangerous, deadly, and disastrous Project 2025 would be if implemented,” he told HuffPost.

The Project 2025 authors’ primary beef with NOAA is that the agency is studying human-caused climate change — a global threat that is supercharging hurricanes and other extreme weather and that Trump and his right-wing allies are hellbent on ignoring.

NOAA and its six main divisions “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 reads. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

As for NWS, Project 2025 wants to see its forecast operations “fully commercialized” and its data sold to private companies. The document argues that forecasts from private entities, namely AccuWeather, are more accurate than those of NWS. But as AccuWeather’s chief executive Steven R. Smith told the Los Angeles Times in July, the private, for-profit company relies in part on NOAA data for its own forecasting and does not share Project 2025’s vision for commercializing NWS operations.

NOAA is a bureau of the Department of Commerce. The chapter of Project 2025 that calls for dismantling NOAA was written by Thomas Gilman, a former automotive executive who served under Trump as chief financial officer of the Commerce Department.

Helene is forecast to rapidly intensify over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before slamming into Florida’s Big Bend late Thursday evening as a major Category 3 hurricane or higher. The National Weather Service in Tallahassee is warning of “catastrophic impacts” across the region, including high winds, flash flooding, tornadoes and an “unsurvivable storm surge” of 15 to 20 feet in Apalachee Bay.

“This forecast is a nightmare surge scenario for Apalachee Bay,” NWS Tallahasse wrote in an advisory early Thursday. “Please take any evacuation orders seriously!”

In an editorial on Wednesday, as Helene took aim at Florida, the Miami Herald condemned what Project 2025 would mean for accurate information during future hurricane seasons.

“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 paper’s editorial board wrote.

“It’s hard to put into words how important the information from the NHC and NWS becomes as a storm heads toward us. We cling to the utterances of the weather pros during these times of high stress, as we huddle in our homes or debate whether to flee an on-coming storm. We want — no, we need — forecasts that are free of hype, a profit motive and the taint of politics.”

Along with unraveling the federal agencies that provide free, critical weather forecasting, Project 2025 would likely make it harder for communities to recover in the wake of hurricanes and other disasters. It calls for “reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government,” as well as increasing the threshold for states to secure disaster relief aid.

While Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming he has “no idea who is behind it,” a CNN review identified at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration who played a role in its creation.

Project 2025 envisions meddling with the nation’s premier weather and climate agencies in much the same way that then-President Trump did with an official forecast for Hurricane Dorian in 2019. After Trump used a Sharpie pen to alter a NOAA map for the storm, White House officials pressured NOAA to issue an unsigned statement denouncing a National Weather Service tweet that corrected his false claim that Dorian could strike Alabama.

The Commerce Department’s internal watchdog later concluded that the fiasco, which came to be known as “Sharpiegate,” risked public safety and threatened to undermine public trust in weather warnings.

Project 2025 threatens to do the same.