Could Trump’s Return Pose a Threat to Climate and Weather Data?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration might not be a household name, but the federal agency is ubiquitous in homes and businesses across the U.S.

That’s because this federal office of scientific research, and its more familiar arm, the National Weather Service, stores a mind-boggling amount of data that we use everyday. Data from the Weather Service powers many weather forecasts as well as the emergency alerts that ping to our smart devices, helping us decide what to wear, where to go and how to protect ourselves and our families from extreme weather events becoming more frequent under climate change.

In the 2018 book “The Fifth Risk,” which details efforts to shrink the federal government under Donald Trump’s first presidential administration, the author Michael Lewis described what it would mean to lose NOAA information. “Without that data and the Weather Service to make sense of it,” Lewis wrote, “no plane would fly, no bridge would be built and no war would be fought — at least not well.”

But the agency that oversees that omnipresent data could now be under threat by a second Trump administration.

That’s according to Project 2025, the policy framework put together by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The authors of the nearly 900 page document wrote that NOAA “should be broken up and downsized,” calling the agency that employs 12,000 workers across the world “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

“Climate data is absolutely at risk with Project 2025’s call to dissolve the agency,” said Gretchen Gehrke, cofounder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a small group formed in 2016 to back up climate information.