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?