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Project 2025Chapter 21 › Proposal

Dismantle the weather and ocean agency

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, chapter 21, p. 664. Written by Thomas F. Gilman.

Dismantle the weather and ocean agency

The document says “shouldWho acts: President, CongressHow: legislationp. 664 in the PDF
What the document says

“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 664

This appears in a list of structural changes the chapter says the next President should consider. The agency houses the National Weather Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service and four other offices, and the chapter records that it takes $6 billion of the department's $12 billion operating budget and more than half its staff. A later passage says the agency has become one of the main drivers of what it calls the climate change alarm industry and is harmful to future prosperity, that this is not to say it is useless but that its current organization corrupts its useful functions, and that it should be broken up and downsized.

What the document actually says

“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 664
That sentence, in plain words

Break up the weather and ocean agency. Close some parts. Move others, sell some off, or hand them to the states.

What this is about

One agency runs the weather service and watches the oceans. The book says it is too big. It says it drives alarm about the climate. It wants it broken up.

What is disputed
What this means is contested

Widely reported as a proposal to abolish the National Weather Service. The chapter does not say that. It proposes breaking up the parent agency and separately says the Weather Service should focus on gathering data and 'fully commercialize its forecasting operations', which leaves the forecasting function in private hands rather than ending it. Readers who describe this as abolition point to the combination of dismantling the parent, commercializing forecasts and downsizing; readers who reject it point to the chapter saying the agency is not useless and naming data-gathering as a continuing public role.

No action is recorded against this proposal. That is not evidence that none has been taken. See what the tracker does not yet cover.

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The quotation is the document's own words, exactly as printed, and we check the page number against the book itself before publishing. The paragraph underneath is our summary, not the document's words. So is the plain English version, which is why it sits beside the quotation rather than replacing it.

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