Those meteorologists get basically all their data from NOAA. They aren’t running the weather satellites and radars and they definitely aren’t flying planes into the eyes of hurricanes to measure the wind speed. The weather app on your iPhone uses data that ultimately comes from the NOAA.
The budget for NOAA (that has the National weather service, the hurricane center, etc.) was $6.35 billion in 2023 and their budget request this year is $6.6 billion. To compare, we just gave Israel, a rich country, (yet another) $8.7 billion aid package. Basically everything the government does is a rounding error on defense
1, Medicaid, and Medicare. NOAA might be the best value-for-money we spend.
1 Keep in mind, the $800bn plus DoD budget is only a part of defense spending. The Department of Energy manages the nuclear weapons, Veterans Affairs is its own department. The Department of Homeland Security has the intelligence agencies, border patrol, etc. Total defense spending is well past $1 trillion no matter how you want to count it.
"Is there any reason why this needs to be a taxpayer subsidized organization?"
Public safety? Is that a good enough reason? We should be subsiding more things that are in the public interest - programs that benefit the public should never be run by for-profit corporations.
We should be subsiding more things that are in the public interest
Very much agreed! But...
programs that benefit the public should never be run by for-profit corporations.
I wouldn't go that far. In fact, I would actually go so far as to say kind of the opposite: that all "corporations," including "for-profit" ones, should be required to act in the public interest, as originally intended, and that any organization that doesn't want to be subject to those sorts of conditions is perfectly free to remain a full-liability general partnership instead of incorporating. Incorporation is a privilege intended to be granted in exchange for public benefit, and we need to get back to that instead of continuing to let the courts treat it as an entitlement.