You got your war on women, you got your war on drugs, you got your not-really war on Christmas and now, courtesy of Project 2025, you got your war on weather.
Just as South Florida heads into the teeth of the mean season, the good folks at the Heritage Foundation have a plan for dealing with rain, hail, waterspouts, searing heat, inland flooding and the wind monsters formerly known as hurricanes — just stop looking.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 weighs in at 880-plus pages, so it’s totally understandable if you missed the chapter on taking apart the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and either trashing its component bits — including the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center — or placing those bits in the loving hands of the private sector, aka “fat contracts for friends.”
I mean, you might have been busy bailing out from the rain that closed two emergency rooms in Broward this week. Or you might have been trying to get to one of them: Heat sent an estimated 31,011 Floridians to the hospital between 2018 and 2022. Maybe you were filling out disaster assistance forms from the no-name storm that flooded South Florida last month. Or scrambling to snare one of those rare-as-hen’s-teeth state grants to hurricane-harden your home in anticipation of next month.
Plus, to get to the war on weather (page 664), you must first wade through several hundred ideas on how to make our lives easier, such as making it easier to deny veterans’ disability benefits (pages 649-650); easier for farmers to go broke (page 297); easier for drug manufacturers to charge more to Medicare recipients (page 465); easier for kids to work dangerous jobs (page 595); easier to starve the poor (pages 299-300); easier for just about everyone to get information about your reproductive system (page 497).
But back to page 664. You know how everyone talks about the weather? There will be no more of that. Gov. Ron DeSantis only scrubbed the words climate change from every state document his minions can get their hands on. Amateur. Heritage shows him how the big boys do it.
The hurricane planes that fly meteorologists and researchers into the eye of hurricanes “like riding a roller coaster through a car wash” to gather more precise data? Besides saving big bucks on Dramamine, it’s hard to see the taxpayer benefit to keeping them out of the air. Never mind: Grounded and sent to other government agencies. (Page 677.)
Weather forecasts? The private market can take it over. Like AccuWeather. Except — spoiler alert — AccuWeather doesn’t want to be the next National Weather Service. Maybe because AccuWeather makes money using the free data it gets from the National Weather Service.
It’s all needed, say the Heritage authors, to counter the “climate alarmism” peddled by scientists alarmed about the climate.
For the record: We aren’t alarmed because someone in NOAA told us 2023 was the oceans’ hottest year.
We are alarmed because you can now poach eggs in South Beach surf.
Maybe because Project 2025 is less a blueprint for the next conservative president and more of a hard-right wrecking ball, some Washington folk are all “never-heard-of-it.” We’re looking at you, 140 former Trump employees. But the Heritage Foundation has a track record of results. Back in 1981, it drew up another ambitious plan for making our lives easier. The Reagan administration adopted 60% of it.
Even meteorologists would face an uncertain future, given that Project 2025 also calls for replacing tens of thousands of federal workers with political toadies beholden only to the White House. (Pages everywhere.) Maybe the new and unimproved NOAA won’t fire them. Since the goal is to commercialize forecasting, maybe NOAA will follow the lead of TV stations when a windstorm threatens: Hand them yellow raingear, industrial strength hairspray and an updated life insurance policy, then suggest a walk on the beach.
True, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. But when the storms of September come huffing and puffing and threatening to blow all our houses down, when those first hard drops of rain hit the roof and leaves are being flayed from the trees, we don’t need political appointees with fistfuls of black markers drawing wavy lines on whiteboards and telling us everything is going to be okey-dokey.
We don’t need NOAA dismantled. We need it buffed up: more meteorologists, more tech, more science. Fewer Sharpies, please. More truth.
Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Contact her at pbeall1@gmail.com.
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