As Florida prepared for Hurricane Helene, some weather and political observers went crazy for Project 2025.

“Reminder that Project 2025 would dismantle the National Weather Service and NOAA,” the League of Conservation Voters wrote on X.

NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration founded in 1970.

“As Florida prepares for a major hurricane to make landfall this week, don’t forget that Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would eliminate the National Weather Service and NOAA,” Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal YouTube influencer, wrote on Instagram.

We heard similar testimony about Project 2025 from U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Florida, during a House Oversight Committee hearing on September 19.

“Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA, wants to get rid of the National Weather Service — the people who tell you the weather and help you prepare for hurricanes,” said Moskowitz, a former emergency management director in Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis. R-Fla.

Moskowitz joked about how hurricane forecasts would work under Project 2025 and a Trump administration.

“Maybe we’ll just do it with a Magic 8-Ball or maybe a Ouija board. Or maybe we’ll do hurricane cones like President Trump did, right where he was orbiting in another state that wasn’t in the cones,” Moskowitz said.

Moskowitz’s dig at Trump referenced a Sharpie-edited map Trump viewed in 2019 when he incorrectly said all hurricane models had predicted Dorian would hit Alabama. (And Moskowitz wasn’t the first to come up with this Magic 8 Ball line.)

Partisan scrum aside, what does Project 2025 say about NOAA and the National Weather Service?

A Moskowitz spokesman, Keith Nagy, said: “While Project 2025 does not call for the complete dissolution of NOAA, it is intended to undermine the agency’s independence from the executive branch and eliminate many of its internal departments.” Any threats to NOAA or NWS puts life-saving information about hurricanes, heat waves and other extreme weather events at risk.”

A NOAA spokesman declined to comment.

Project 2025 is the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a Republican government. Trump has denied it, but it was written by several former Trump administration officials. When Trump gave a keynote address at a heritage event in Florida in 2022, he said the organization would “lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

Project 2025 is about four pages about NOAA and the National Weather Service. This part was written by Thomas F. Gilman, an official in Trump’s Commerce Department.

The document describes NOAA as a major component of “the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be disbanded and downsized.”

The National Weather Service, one of six NOAA offices, provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. The National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service within NOAA.

Project 2025 would not completely end the National Weather Service. It said the agency “should focus on its data collection services” and “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”

It states that “commercialization of weather technologies should be prioritized to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in the most cost-effective technologies for high-quality research and weather data.” Investing in trading partners would increase competition, the 2025 Project said.

Project 2025 also says the National Weather Service should become a “performance-based organization” accountable for achieving certain results, even if the agency’s leader must “deviate from government rules” to achieve those results.

The document said little about the National Hurricane Center. It said the government should “review the work of the National Hurricane Center” and “data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments, designed to support one side in the climate debate.”

We asked several experts familiar with the work of NOAA and the National Weather Service about Moskowitz’s statement. They said Project 2025 does not call for shutting down the National Weather Service but limits its work.

Craig Fugate served as former President Barack Obama’s administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and as emergency management director for then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. He recently served on a federal advisory committee, NOAA’s Space Weather Advisory Group.

“While Project 2025 does not call for the abolition of the NWS, it does limit research and climate products and potentially restrict access to NWS forecasters and centers such as the National Hurricane Center,” Fugate said.

Private sector criticism of the National Weather Service is not new, Fugate said.

A 2005 bill by then-Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Fugate said, would have eliminated the National Weather Service’s free dissemination of weather information. The bill found no co-sponsors and failed.

Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said Project 2025’s vague language made it difficult to assess whether it called for eliminating NOAA and the National Weather Service. But “the intent is clearly to cripple public weather forecasting,” he said.

Thoman gave examples of the vague wording of Project 2025 on the National Weather Service:

• “Should focus on its data collection services.” Thoman asked if that meant doing nothing other than collecting data. If so, the weather and climate models continually produced by the National Weather Service and relied on by private companies would disappear, he said.
• “Should fully commercialize its forecasting activities.” Thoman asked whether that means the National Weather Service should charge for forecasts or give up weather forecasting altogether.

Although Project 2025 appears to push collaboration with the private sector, this is already happening. Private entities, including television forecasters and AccuWeather, use NOAA data, said Rachel Cleetus, policy director in the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. (AccuWeather said it does not support Project 2025’s recommendations.)

“The reality is that NOAA and the National Weather Service already work with many commercial partners, so it is unclear exactly what is intended there,” Cleetus said.

She also said disbanding NOAA could render the agency ineffective.

“The idea that it could be disbanded and somehow still be able to do this important work is not going to be possible,” Cleetus said.

Moskowitz said, “Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA and the National Weather Service.”

Project 2025 contains a few pages about NOAA and the National Weather Service, and some of its language is vague.

But it requires big changes. It described NOAA as a major component of “the climate alarm systems industry” and said it “should be disbanded and downsized.”

It doesn’t specifically call for abolishing the National Weather Service, but does say it should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”

We rate this statement as half true.

PolitiFact staff writer Madison Czopek contributed to this fact check.

This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, part of the Poynter Institute. The sources for this fact check can be found here.