Project 2025 Would Leave Everyone in the Dark For Storms Like Helene

As of Friday morning at around 8:30 AM ET, close to four million customers across Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia were without electricity. Hurricane Helene, downgraded to a tropical storm after it lost strength over land, rampaged across the Florida panhandle on its way north, and it still has days of rain left to drop on Tennessee, Kentucky, and surrounding areas.

The National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service have not pulled any punches in the days leading up to the storm’s arrival, and in the hours since it has started wreaking havoc over land. The agencies have issued warnings screaming at people in the Tallahassee area to “TAKE COVER NOW!” and to treat the oncoming category 4 cyclone as if it were a tornado, and for those in parts of the Carolinas this morning to “SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!” as flash flooding and landslides grew more likely.

It will take a few days to dig out and dry off and really see what Helene hath wrought, but we can at least say that the government agencies tasked with keeping us safe from weather disasters are, it seems, doing their best. And so it is maybe a good time to remember: Project 2025 and the Republican Party would like to gut those agencies down to the bone.

“Break Up NOAA” is the very first subheading on page 674 of the Heritage Guide to Fascism. Project 2025 states that NOAA and its main offices including the National Weather Service are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” Yes: knowing when a flood is coming and the science of why warming helped bring it to your door is the thing that will bring America to its knees. Or something.

The document goes on to insist that the National Weather Service focus more on “commercial operations” rather than, you know, trying to help people not die in a tornado. It wants to “review the work of the National Hurricane Center,” which in GOP doublespeak just means “more or less get rid of the National Hurricane Center.” And of course it would “downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research,” which apparently is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism.”

In short, if Trump wins a second term his administration would make it a priority to hear as little as possible from government about the changing climate, and would take the steps to make that a reality. If that means making it so the millions of people in the path of increasingly damaging hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, heat waves, and floods are caught flat-footed the next time a climate-related threat appears, so be it.