Dear John,
Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes form in the Southeast. Floods and winter storms threaten the Midwest and Northeast. Across the country, Americans face predictable, yet increasingly destructive climate disasters. For more than 150 years, the National Weather Service has been our trusted, free source of life-saving forecasts, warnings, and alerts — keeping families safe, communities prepared, and lives intact.
Families are able to evacuate from disasters safely because this data is collected and shared without a price tag. But Trump’s plan would dismantle this system by privatizing the National Weather Service, transforming it — as Project 2025 calls for — into a subscription-only business.
This plan would force families and first responders to pay for critical alerts. Do we really want to have to face a message like, “There’s a storm surge warning of 15 feet — pay to find out where”? For less than $4 per American of our tax money per year, today’s Weather Service delivers billions of daily observations that no private company could replicate for less.
Our favorite weather apps aren’t replacements for the National Weather Service — they depend on it. Every forecast, radar image, and alert comes from the data collected and analyzed by this public agency. Even if billionaires poured billions into trying to duplicate it, the result would be slower, less accurate, and dangerously incomplete.
Send your members of Congress a direct message, to demand they protect the National Weather Service as a public trust, and ensure that free weather warnings remain accessible via smartphone to every American.
This push for privatization isn’t about efficiency or modernization. It’s about profit. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — a billionaire financial executive whose firm could directly benefit — has been pushing for this scheme. Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s extremist plan to “fully commercialize” weather forecasting — would put survival behind a paywall.
Scientists would be cut off from reliable data; emergency managers would be forced to make life-and-death calls with incomplete information; and millions of ordinary Americans would be left vulnerable to profiteering during the worst moments of their lives.
Weather forecasting is not a luxury — it is a public good. It keeps entire communities safe and costs pennies on the dollar to maintain. To dismantle it in the name of billionaire profit is reckless, immoral, and potentially deadly.
Tell Congress: Protect the National Weather Service. Keep forecasts and warnings free and accessible for every American. Lives depend on it.
Thank you for standing up to defend safety over profits.
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action
