Among the more baffling Republican obsessions is their continued war against ... weather forecasting. This is another one of those fetishes that you can't blame on Donald Trump, who likely has no idea what the government's role in weather forecasting is or why it would have one; the insistence that what the nation needs most is to have fewer weather satellites, fewer forecasters, and fewer forecasts has been consistent among Republican budget hackers for a long time now.
[T]he Trump administration’s climate denial and proposed cuts threaten these advances, spreading turmoil in the very agencies that can predict disasters better than ever. The president’s budget proposal would slash the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget by 16 percent, including 6 percent from the National Weather Service.[...]
Earlier this year, along with recommending that Congress gut funding for NOAA, President Trump proposed an 11 percent cut from the National Science Foundation’s budget, slashing funds from the institution behind much of the country’s basic scientific research. If Congress agrees, it would be the first budget cut in the foundation’s 67-year history.
At the National Weather Service, the Washington Post recently reported that the agency couldn’t fill 216 vacant positions as a result of a Trump-imposed hiring freeze. As a result, meteorologists were working double shifts when hurricane after hurricane hit last month and covering for each other from afar.
The ideological underpinnings for cutting weather forecasting abilities even as the danger to American infrastructure and communities continues to rise are thready, and apparently simply premised on the notion that government does Too Much and it should do Less, across the board, because rich people are tired of subsidizing such things.
It will unavoidably be Bad, of course; weather forecasting is famously contingent on collecting great gobs of data to feed to evermore finely-tuned data-twiddlers, and having less data will, invariably, result in less accurate predictions. But the same advocates suggest giving less food to poor children, or less medical care to immigrants, or repairing fewer bridges, or turning any number of key government functions over to private companies just to see what profits can be squeezed out of the process. The consequences of all those other actions are similarly brushed aside if not denied outright.
Weather, though. An entire sub-war against government scientists competently forecasting the weather. That's a stumper.