Although the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has recently distanced himself from it (despite the fact that six of the former president’s cabinet secretaries and at least 140 people who worked in his administration were involved in writing it—whatevs), Project 2025 remains the blueprint for conservative policymaking for any future conservative president.
If it’s not Project 2025, it will be Project 2029, Project 2033, and so on. It’s boilerplate conservative thought, boiled down, in a nod to the efficiency they so love, to a mere 880 pages. As the saying goes, when 110 conservative organizations tell you who they are, believe them.
A running theme throughout the document is the idea that we should shrink the federal government and those remaining in it should carry out the political will of the President (even if that means contradicting accepted scientific knowledge, such as climate change).
Here’s how Project 2025 puts it, regarding various government departments: “Both assertions can be equally true, that the department possesses the expertise, programs, and authorities that will be crucial to the success of a conservative presidency and that its role in the federal bureaucracy would benefit from streamlining and reform.”
Here’s how JD Vance put it in 2022: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
And that demolition project includes decimating and privatizing or commercializing one of the nation’s most trusted and beneficial offices, the National Weather Service (NWS), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They’re the people who give us, among other things, severe weather warnings.
When 110 conservative organizations tell you who they are, believe them.
Here’s the Project’s recommendations in its own words:
Though not an exhaustive set of proposals, the next conservative President should consider whether:
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.
Together, [the six main offices within NOAA] form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity [emphasis ours, but it should be everybody’s].
The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.
That would mean that whatever data comes from the NWS to the public must come via some sort of commercial service—despite taxpayers already paying for the data—such as AccuWeather. That company’s lobbyists and campaign donations have already prevailed in keeping NWS weather warnings off of social media so that the public had to rely on warnings from private, paid-for services instead of direct contact with the NWS.
The report also recommends that “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.”
As an example of what that might look like, we need only recall the former president using the weather map altered by a Sharpie to back up his false assertions of where a hurricane would make landfall.
This isn’t the first time privatizing or commercializing the vital National Weather Service has been proposed, and we wrote about one of the earlier attempts in the book I co-authored with Allen Mikaelian, The Privatization of Everything.
In it, we recalled the story of AccuWeather’s founder and former CEO Joel Myers boasting to CNBC about the pinpoint accuracy of its forecasting service on behalf of its client, Union Pacific Railroad, during a tornado alert.
“Two trains stopped two miles apart, they watched the tornado go between them,” he said. “Unfortunately, it went into a town that didn’t have our service and a couple of dozen people were killed. But the railroad did not lose anything.”
In Project 2025’s version of the hoped-for future, laid out by more than 100 conservative organizations over nearly 900 pages for all to see, we, the public, all live in the town between the trains.
