Project 2025 wants you caught by surprise
Streets in low-lying areas here are already flooded and Hurricane Helene isn’t even here yet. Public schools are closed preemtively. Emergency preparations are underway. But at least we had warnings as close as your TV or computer.
A writer some time back recounted an airplane conversation in which his seatmate remarked that the great thing about computers was that you could always turn them off. Considering that they and thousands of others were sitting in aluminum tubes in the air traffic pattern high above a major city, and that the only thing keeping them from colliding and dying was FAA air traffic computers, the writer was pretty sure he didn’t want them turned off. *
Project 2025 wants a lot of government turned off. Like the ones that warn us of impending weather disasters (Media Matters from May):
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that predicts changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coastlines and provides data that informs lifesaving forecasts such as tracking hurricanes, is in the crosshairs of Project 2025, the conservative battle plan for a potential second Trump presidency which describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” But researchers have pushed back on these charges and defended NOAA’s climate data and meteorological work — while forecasters are predicting an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season and experts say this summer could rival last year’s record heat.
Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the credibility of the agency and the veracity of the data it produces. It also illustrates that the conservative plan is not just to dismantle U.S. climate policy, but also to scrub the climate data that underpins it.
I live in one of those purple areas. I don’t want NOAA turned off, thank you very much.
* My father’s brother died in a midair collision over Manhattan in 1960.