The Dangerous Ideology Driving the Weather Forecast Cuts

Project 2025: "the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable"

Our collective hearts break for the victims of the Texas flooding. The pain and loss of each tragic update are unimaginable. And reports make clear that if it weren’t for the heroic actions of first responders, far more might have lost their lives.

In the aftermath, there’s been a lot of attention paid and questions asked as to the impact of recent cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service on the ability to have adequately warned the victims of the risk of this flooding. There’s also been focus on the local infrastructure and capacity to adequately relay and amplify any warnings made. (I was once a county commissioner, and in that role, spent a good deal of time trying to ensure that our early warning siren system reached all parts of the county; it was indeed an expensive and complex proposition).

I don’t claim to know all the answers to those questions with respect to the tragedy in Texas. For the sake of those who lost their lives and loved ones, especially the kids, deep assessments should be done of the warnings, response and needed improvements.

DOGE, or Worse?

In the meantime, I worry there’s something getting lost in the wider conversation. And the part that’s being lost only invites tragedy and loss in the long term. We must see far more clearly what’s going on.

Let me explain:

There is no doubt there have been cuts to the overall workforce and capacity of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service, along with a downgrading of FEMA.

And experts have warned us all year that these cuts would make weather predictions and early warnings more difficult: as PBS wrote, “Meteorologists and climate scientists are raising alarms about major cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, saying they will harm the country’s ability to forecast and respond to major weather events and put lives at risk.”

Much of the coverage of these dangerous cuts centers around the role played by DOGE in executing them. I asked Perplexity, the AI tool, what percentage of stories about these NOAA and NWS cuts focus on the role DOGE played. Here was the answer:

“the majority of mainstream news stories and expert analyses about the NOAA and NWS cuts in 2025 reference DOGE as the primary reason or mechanism for those cuts. While an exact percentage is not provided in the search results, the prevalence of DOGE as the cited cause is overwhelming in the coverage sampled here, suggesting that well over half—and likely a clear majority—of such stories attribute the cuts to DOGE.”

And yes, DOGE played the initial cutting role. But the DOGE frame of what’s happening leaves a dangerous false impression, in two ways. It’s much too narrow.

First, the DOGE cuts are just the beginning.

For example, it got lost amid the Medicaid and other cuts, but what was just cut from NOAA in the “Big Ugly Bill”—which almost every Republican just voted for—is far deeper than what DOGE did. Here’s a story from USA Today on this bigger round of cuts that just happened:

“The budget proposed by the White House for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is almost half what it was a year ago, and eliminates all funding for the agency's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the division that coordinates and conducts weather and climate research across the nation.”

That’s right—NO research at all: “The 2026 line item for NOAA Research is blank, compared to an estimated $608 million in 2025.”

“Dozens of private weather forecasters, TV meteorologists and scholars have expressed similar concerns on social media, broadcasts, blogs and newsletters, saying the degradation of forecast accuracy will affect farmers, aircraft pilots and passengers and millions of other Americans, whether they know it or not.”

Second, the framing as if this is due to DOGE leaves the false impression that these cuts are somehow about efficiency. And also, that a bunch of 20-year olds made these cuts in a slap-dash and haphazard effort, without fully appreciating what they were doing.

Here’s an example, again, from that USA Today article: “The cuts, including those by the Department of Government Efficiency and Office of Management and Budget, show little practical knowledge of how the nation’s weather system operates, said Craig McLean, a former NOAA chief scientist and former assistant administrator for research. He compares the administration cuts to dismantling a car engine, then trying to put it back together without parts whose purpose you don’t understand.”

The Truth: This is Ideology, and Greed

Let’s be clear: those leading these cuts are not a bunch of Musk toadies who don’t know what they’re doing. This is not haphazard, nor is it incompetence.

This attack is part of the broader attack on science, and on any research that gives a whiff of credence to the growing dangers of climate change. Which is why all these cuts formed a central part of Project 2025, justified explicitly because of the role these agencies have played in researching climate change and its impacts.

Here it is right on Page 675: the NOAA "has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” As a result, NOAA “should be broken up and downsized.”

Project 2025 called for the agencies within NOAA to be vetted and scrubbed for any research that takes “sides” in the climate change debate. Specifically, Project 2025 called for:

• reviewing the data of the National Hurricane Center and National Environmental Satellite Service to ensure it is “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate” (p. 676)

• “disband[ing] the preponderance of the climate-change research” of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, because “it is the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” (p. 676) — EXACTLY what was just done in the “Big Ugly Bill”

• ensuring politicized appointments to lead the NOAA — “Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.” (p. 677)

Amid all the damage done from this elimination of research, one of the most dangerous is that any connections between climate change and a greater preponderance of extreme and dangerous weather events are basically being eliminated from future study or understanding.

To make matters worse, in true Orwellian fashion, those pushing to dumb us all down about all this science want America to believe that all these facts are, in the end, unknowable. In one of the most striking sentences of the entire document, Project 2025 attacks NOAA because the agency “seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

That’s right, Project 2025 is against trying to plan for future weather events. Whether they be floods, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis or other extreme weather events—the authors are essentially saying: “we just can’t figure it out, so why bother?”

At the time (just as in recent months), experts warned about the danger of all of this: “NOAA’s satellites, aircraft, weather stations and meteorologists constantly collect weather data and expertly offer detailed weather forecasts and predictions to residents, researchers and nearly every third-party weather program, forecasting service or app. NWS weather alerts notify us of hurricanes, tornados and flooding. The NWS forecasts fire weather and issues watches, warnings and advisories for high winds, life-threatening rip currents and other hazards.”

But if the people behind Project 2025, who now occupy the highest rungs of American government, contend that many or most of these things are simply “unplannable” in the first place, then none of those warnings matter.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

Bottom line: what’s happening is not a slap-dash effort at efficiency. It’s not haphazard, nor incompetence. It began before DOGE ever existed.

It’s a purposeful head-in-the-sand strategy about the near-term and long-term risks of climate change and extreme weather events that it fuels.

It’s a deeply rooted and intentional dismantling of science-based detection and prevention, driven and funded by forces who profit from the climate status quo. Apparently if that makes our world more dangerous, that’s a cost they are willing to have us pay.

And it’s built on a pile of lies.

When humans have spent centuries honing our skills at detecting and planning for natural events that threaten lives and communities—saving untold lives through those advancements—we are now being led by a government hell-bent on reversing those advances, and denying future advances.

We are being told that there’s no point in “planning for the unplannable.”

And if we don't reverse what they’re doing, this is all a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Trump’s comment a few days ago was that “nobody anticipated it, nobody saw it.”

If those in charge get their way—and the NOAA cuts are a big start—that hopeless refrain will be the response after nearly every event, no matter how foreseeable. Because that’s what happens when you intentionally put your head in the sand.