After all, what do those uppity meteorologists know that the DOGE guys didn’t.
From Ranking Member Meng Opening Statement at the National Weather Service Hearing (March 26, 2026):
That is why it was extremely concerning to see the Weather Service lose roughly 600 employees, including many meteorologists, in the early months of the Trump Administration last year, specifically as a result of the firings and early retirements engineered by Elon Musk and his DOGE team. This was confirmed after Secretary Lutnick falsely told this subcommittee last year that no meteorologists were among the hundreds of employees fired.
Local weather forecast offices were greatly stressed and understaffed across the country. Numerous offices were forced to limit weather balloon launches due to limited staffing. These are devices that measure temperature, pressure, and relative humidity at high altitudes. At one point last year, 45 percent of local weather forecast offices had vacancy rates of 20 percent or higher—the threshold for critical understaffing—while eight offices were missing more than 35 percent of their staff. Sixteen offices were missing their Warning Coordination Meteorologist—the person responsible for making sure emergency managers and the public know what to do when disaster strikes.
Extreme weather impacts us all. It was only a few years ago that Hurricane Ida killed several of my constituents in Queens and dozens more in the region. My heart breaks when I see how deadly the floods in Texas were, or the recent tornadoes in the Midwest. An adequately staffed National Weather Service is essential. It is a matter of life and death for countless communities impacted by extreme weather events. The bottom line is that a hollowed-out National Weather Service is a risk we simply cannot afford.
Despite the difficulties caused by the staffing shortages, the Trump Administration refused to allow for the backfilling of critical frontline National Weather Service meteorologists and other staff until last August, when the Administration finally recognized the problem it had created, and allowed the Weather Service to begin backfilling some vacant positions at local weather forecast offices.
Further compounding these problems, the Trump Administration has required that every contract decision greater than one hundred thousand dollars must first go to the office of Secretary Lutnick for his approval. This has caused bottlenecks and delayed critical missions, impacting the National Weather Service.
For example, a backbone information technology system used by the Weather Service came within hours of shutting down. A local weather forecast office in Kentucky utilized portable toilets in its parking lot during a major storm, due to an inability to get permission to hire a plumber. These are just two examples.
Just some public information: https://ithy.com/article/who-owns-satellite-data-sources-an9m7x7c
Here’s a little more background. As Brucie’s link indicates, private weather services rely to a considerable extent on government data to make money. So do private economists, bond traders, farmers, airlines… No problem here. Government data ought to be publicly available (including medical and pharmaceutical research data produced with government funding.) What should not happen is that data collected by the government ends up being dolled out to the public by private agents for a profit, because the public owns the data.
As Menzie notes, there might not be enough government information available to the public. Here’s Bloomberg on that very same point:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-13/global-weather-forecasts-at-risk-from-us-push-for-private-data
Here are two NOAA scientists describing the rapid access the public currently has to all of NOAA’s weather data, earlier than private weather services provide it:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/noaa-vast-public-weather-data-224612490.html
That’s what we’re losing when NOAA science jobs are cut. Private services would lose it, too. And private services are already slower than NOAA in making weather data available to the public.
If the U.S. government privatizes the collection of weather data, we are likely to have less access to weather data, at a time when weather data is increasingly important because the climate is changing fast; the Farmer’s Almanac is less reliable every day. Heck, the oldest Farmer’s Almanac has just gone out of business.
This is right at the heart of the debate over the uses of data. Y’all know about public goods. They’re the things that by definition should be made available to all by government because that’s most efficient. One characteristic of public goods is that they are “non-rival”; they don’t get used up when they’re used, so there’s no reason to ration them. You know, like data. However, if one has a monopoly on what should be a public good, one CAN ration that good and turn a profit.
The idea of privatizing weather data collection is no different from privatizing other public services, except for the non-rival nature of data. Privatizing government services creates a private profit, some of which can be funneled to politicians as a quid pro quo for the private profit. It’s a form of corruption that’s entirely legal in our system. Remind me – which political party most strongly supports privatizing government services?
Part of the problem is no one really knows how much is too much or too little spending for government products. No one company can afford the cost of satellites or data servers just to provide weather information. However, private companies have become very good at digesting the data and providing summaries and forecasts at an acceptable level for personal or company planning though smartphone apps which the govenment doesn’t bother with (just do a search for “national weather service weather information apps” at the Apple app store).
A long time ago, I grew up in Milwaukee. It had a series of socialist mayors from the late 1800s to the early 1960s. These so-called “sewer socialists” picked the sweet spot between political socialism and capitalism with their focus on basic infrastructure such as sewers and shared amenities such as parks, walkways, and community centers (arenas, stadiums, amphitheaters, etc). By providing sewer systems and water treatment, it generated private growth by allowing those private facilities to link into the basic system for a fee rather than dictating where you must build and how much you must build and who could build what (within the broad constrains of local zoning). But it didn’t take over everything. Power companies provided electricity; petroleum companies provided natural gas. And those companies built their own infrastructure.
The National Weather Service has its website and if you want to go there for information, you can. But the reason those private companies exist is because they are successful at delivering the right amount of information in an efficient, effective, and convenient manner to the granular level of individuals… and can monetize that delivery with advertising.
I remember when personal computers just started with a very, very basic IBM. People could see the value of them and everyone who worked with data wanted one. Our large corporate department was responsible for parts inventory planning and rows of people would be cranking out reports using “Comptometers” to work the data. I approached the Controllers Office (budgeting) with a proposal to speed up the process by purchasing these IBM desktop computers. They agreed: you get one computer for each person eliminated in your staff. Well everyone wanted a computer, but certainly not at the expense of eliminating the whole staff. So we had to work out the balance. Today, one or two people can easily do with current technology what 30-40 people used to do.
Government also has budgets and new technology available. Artificial Intelligence is coming fast for areas that deals with massive amounts of information/data. Sure, we have our spreadsheets and databases and standard reports, but those are analogous to the Comptometer prepared reports of decades ago compared to what AI will do for us.
Are current budget cuts at NOAA and NWS too much? Possibly. Like those personal computers at work, losing a person to get a computer was a tough process and there were some problems to work through. But it forced us to focus on the most important things and then, when the true balance was struck, let us gradually go into much better processes for obtaining and processing the data. I suspect this will be a similar forced process within government agencies. If you are never nudged, you’ll never move.
You need to read before you write. The article I linked to by the two NOAA scientists makes very clear that the weather apps loaded on most phones take data straight from the National Weather Service. The thing you claim we can’t find at the app store is already on your phone. And is faster at providing the latest data than commercial services.
And your point about how much government should spend? You need to read up on “public goods”. As I pointed out above, government provision of public goods is more efficient than private provision. The result is a lower cost for any given level of supply. Wringing our hands over government maybe giving us too much of a good thing while ignoring the evidence that privatization of government services doesn’t save money or improve quality is just silly.
Of course they take the data from NWS. Your need to read my comment before criticizing it. Most people who use smart phones (I’ll grant that you are not most) will search the Apple App or Google Store by subject and then pick the app that seems to suit them most. That’s why The Weather Channel and Accuweather dominate the smartphone market. They do a great job condensing the massive amount of data into what they want with a tap on the screen… today’s weather, hourly, 10-day forecast, radar maps. They also provide headline alerts. All in a well-presented manner that’s intuitive.
If you were ever in the military, you’d know that shopping at the commissary on a base was fine if you wanted the basics. You could get your canned Spam, canned veggies, canned fruit, and a variety of bulk stuff. You could also get some underwear, black socks, white socks, jeans and t-shirts. And if that’s what you wanted, it was efficient. Or, if you were lucky enough to have a town nearby, you could go to the “inefficient” food and clothing stores and get what you really wanted.
The good socialist mayor of NYC announced he will have the city spend $30 million for a grocery story that offers cheap basic staples. Others have pointed out that there are already built stores in NYC for $2-5 million for sale. That sounds efficient.
https://www.aol.com/articles/mamdani-30m-city-owned-grocery-180211501.html
https://www.bizbuysell.com/business-opportunity/supermarket-in-brooklyn-4-million-plus-in-sales-with-real-estate-avail/2495581/
https://www.bizbuysell.com/business-opportunity/supermarket-in-brooklyn-corner-location-established-40-years/2495560/
https://www.bizbuysell.com/business-opportunity/supermarket-little-neck-ny-11362-queens-near-long-island-border/2456790/
Why not just scoop up a bunch of those for $30 million? No construction delays. Already set up for selling groceries. Get 15-20 stores ready to stock and sel for the price of one. (Hey, it’s not the government’s money. We’ll just raise taxes on the rich.) Wouldn’t that serve more people than just one location? You could still buy in bulk and split the inventory between the stores with a few Class 5 delivery trucks.
Government is often very efficient at being very mediocre and wasteful. But it has grand schemes because cost is not an issue.
Brucie…si predictable. When you’re caught not reading before writing, how do you respond? “No, you don’t read!” Third grade sebate in a nutshell.
Then you make stuff up. “Most people” do this or that, because doing this or that fits your argument. How very convenient, and how very third grade. Prove it. Show evidence. Both of your comments are mainly little stories you’ve made up, with no evidence they’re true. They of course soind like they supoort yoir case, because you made them up to support your case, but what do Mamdani’s grocery store have to do with weather data? Nothing. Groceries aren’t public goods.
Really, you need to start addressing facts, not making up stories. I’ve been reading your stuff for years, and it hasn’t gotten any better. Same old faux-news style argumentation. Same old third-grade “Nuh uh! You did!” response when you get caught at it.
Bruce Hall Part of the problem is no one really knows how much is too much or too little spending for government products.
Really? This coming from the guy who prides himself on refusing to read an economics textbook. Governments follow standard economic analysis procedures. I’d hate to count how many benefit/cost studies I did over my career. And while it’s true that government spending doesn’t have the advantage of competitive market signals to establish prices, that doesn’t preclude other mathematical techniques (e.g., Lagrange multipliers) to estimate “shadow prices.”
Of course, it’s always the case that politicians might choose to ignore those economic analyses, but that’s not a problem unique to government. In my part-time “retirement job” I am always puzzled and frustrated by the knowledge gap between technical experts and corporate officers; e.g., heads of marketing departments that have never heard of Markov transition matrices to predict trend in market shares. Idiocy isn’t limited to government.