Project 2025 did not mention NOAA’s work with wildfires. Its authors did not respond to questions about whether firefighters and people living in wildfire-prone areas would need to pay for access to wildfire weather information under their privatization proposals.

Partnering with academia

To execute some of its climate research, NOAA partners with universities across the country. Without those partnerships, “we’d be losing a ton,” said Christine Wiedinmyer, associate director for science at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Wiedinmyer called the partnership between NOAA and the University of Colorado a “win-win-win” for the agency, students, and the people of Colorado because the state’s economy relies so heavily on its environment. Tourism, outdoor recreation, scientific research, farming, forestry, transportation, and other economic sectors all rely on environmental data and are all integral to the state’s prosperity. Colorado has more than 46,000 agriculture jobs alone, according to state data from 2022.

“We employ a lot of people through this cooperative agreement,” Wiedinmyer said. If funding for such partnerships dried up, “we’d have a huge loss of employment for a lot of people.”

Being able to predict streamflow, monitor snowpack, track drought, and respond to wildfires has “huge impacts across the entire West,” Wiedinmyer said. “NOAA is key to providing us observations and data and predictions on this so that we can best manage our resources and our air quality, and best protect human health and livelihood.

“There’s so much that NOAA science contributes to regarding the well-being of the West.”

Wiedinmyer pointed to similar benefits arising from partnerships NOAA has elsewhere in the West, including cooperative agreements with universities in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, as well as Midwestern and Eastern states.

Perils of privatization

Weiss, with the Center for Western Priorities, said he was particularly concerned about how privatizing weather forecasts and eliminating climate modeling could negatively impact rural communities in the West. Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho are some of the country’s least populated places, and under a private weather forecasting model in which profit is a company’s primary motive, there is no guarantee such sparsely populated areas would receive quality, timely predictions.