The real reason that NOAA exists is to support businesses, like farms for instance. Weather forecasting adds to the bottom line and businesses depend on them.
Exactly. That's a service that some rich people could be making profit on and here we are just giving it away for the collective good of our society. Won't someone think of (financially screwing over) the farmers?
I think the idea behind getting rid of it with Project 2025 is the hard anti-climate change denial stance they want to push. And they think if we can't track the weather somehow nobody will notice that the weather events are increasing in intensity and occurrence rate.
My understanding is that a lot of the big agribusiness is structured as a monopsony - all the people farming a particular crop have only one big Ag company they all have to sell their produce to and that company sets the price low enough that the farmers doing the actual growing for Big Ag are still getting screwed.
Most ag business, the people working the fields don’t own the land, the corporations do. Most of America’s farmland is owned by corporations and is worked on by employees being paid peanuts. (Frequently, undocumented immigrants whose status is being used to keep them from complaining about the illegally low wages.)
Okay, then get that. Let's say I'm that big business. It means that if I'm doling out weather knowledge for cost so high, then only big business can afford it, mostly because I'm the jackass that bought NOAA & plot too, together. That means that you can't be competitive unless your farming something I don't give a fuck about, today...