A Government Service and Why I Like It

There has been a flurry of anti-government sentiment, which I will not elaborate on. Many times, we hear of a mission like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and think that it will somehow help us in our struggles or keep an out-of-control government in check.

I hear you, but I’d ask that you consider the many government employees who are experts in their field and take a public salary (meaning less than market rate) to provide their expertise in their domain to us all. These folks are at risk because of the policies that egotistical and greedy men are attempting to apply. This is occurring through many means, but primarily through political appointees that come from industry backgrounds under recent administrations. The only ones hurt by the privatization of these services are We The People, whose forebearers created the foundations for these services to exist in the first place.

This is not a Red vs. Blue culture issue and I would implore you to consider the NWS, and what I believe the future holds for them under the regimes that have, and currently reign in the US. These are the governmental agencies I fear are victims of what Cory Doctrow calls “enshittification”. I extend the concept of big tech venture capital floating a subsidized service, to government public funding of a free service, with the result being a highly adopted product with low accessibility barriers that gets turned into a profit center for so-called “genius entrepreneurs” to exploit at the expense of the masses.

National Weather Service

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the parent agency of National Weather Service (NWS). NOAA is a newer agency to NWS and related agencies, formed under Nixon, and is the one most Americans are probably familiar with. For the sake of this conversation, I will be talking about NOAA and NWS in the same breath and refer to them as NWS, because I care about the weather mission specifically. NWS is a historically vital and cutting-edge agency. Established in the late 1800’s, they have had a single mission which is clearly stated on weather.gov:

Provide weather, water, and climate data, forecasts, warnings, and impact-based
decision support services for the protection of life and property and enhancement
of the national economy.

Initially NWS was founded as a network of observatories around the US sharing data about current conditions around the country on the newly developed telegraph system. Congress placed it under Department of War as they felt military discipline would ensure promptness, regularity, and accuracy in their observations. NWS operates 122 Weather Forcast Offices around the US and provides up-to-date weather information at no cost to the general public.

In the past NWS and NASA have been the arbiters of weather data, and importantly satellite data. This data is free to the public to this day, and you can even receive live data from satellites as they pass over you. This data is consumed by the public in so many forms that you can hardly recognize them behind the sheen of private interfaces that repackage NWS products.

Part of observing weather is gathering as much data as possible. The data is required to successfully model and predict what’s coming. Individuals in the public have volunteered in various capacities to add data to this mass; for example SKYWARN, which is a network of volunteer weather spotters that help keep communities safe by reporting weather events accurately at the scene. These folks are trained by NWS and help ensure safety and awareness in natural disaster territory. Growing up in Tornado Alley, I have fond memories of one of my friend’s mom being a weather spotter and teaching us how to identify if a tornado was forming.

There also have been collectives of private individuals who distribute their data through personal weather stations that stream live conditions over the internet to a central entity for processing and forecasting. Weather Underground is an internet service that was established in 1995 as an offshoot of a weather database from the University of Michigan. Through the 2000’s it grew its presence by funneling NWS data to the public in accessible formats, including Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and consumable products in print and television. It also grew through the contribution of volunteer data to improve its predictions on top of the data from NWS. These were the glory years when Weather Underground had an open, free API and you could pull whatever weather data you wanted as long as you didn’t abuse the service; a truly open flow of information, provided by a public product being filtered through a private entity supported by volunteers. It was used by everyone as a primary source for weather data from the Associated Press to your local meteorologist. Through the 2010s and into the 2020s Weather Underground was acquired by IBM and The Weather Channel (TWC) and underwent a corporate restructuring. IBM sold TWC to private equity in 2023 along with all of its properties including WunderGround. Nowadays you can still volunteer data to WunderGround, but now the API is closed and TWC wants their fucking money if you want weather data in an accessible format, much less enhanced products that use volunteer data.

A quarter million folks still volunteer their weather data to WunderGround, and I don’t fault them, but I do think it’s wrong for people providing data in goodwill to be profiteered off, especially when I feel it should be available to everyone at no cost. TWC has always fundamentally based its publications on data from NWS, but as space has become more accessible, it has become cost-effective for private companies to launch satellites that can provide equal or better data than NWS can provide from their vehicles. This has continued to the point that NWS buys some of its products from private companies today and still provides them to the public. That means that public money is already being paid to private equity for weather products that we all consume. TWC, Accuweather, and their private equity owners, would very much like for Weather.gov to not exist and for all the data provided by the NWS, including what it consumes from private companies and provides to the public, to be paid services not negotiated by public money into free products.

The core mission of NWS includes the phrase “enhancement of the national economy”, and I think it is important to note that the market also uses weather data in very important ways when making financial decisions. And maybe yes, market makers and other financial entities should have to pay market rates or substantial tax for access to substantially better data. That being said, “protection of life and property”, should take precedence over all else, and more importantly to me, the data should be open for anyone to examine so we can continue to learn about our world and make discoveries about how it functions.

The current administration and members of the private sector have raised questions about the government stifling profits by providing access to weather data for free and argue consumers would pay for such information. They are not wrong, but they are enshittifying access to weather data, which I feel is a core public service pioneered by the US. Middlemen need to step off the weather business and let it continue to be freely available and furnished by the government.

I like being able to access satellite data by pointing a dish at the sky or downloading radar data from NOAA’s site. I don’t want to have to pay for my weather, and I don’t want to encourage the privatization of access to volunteered data. I also don’t want people who have had generations of expertise in predicting and providing fundamental weather services (122 offices across the US) to be forced into a privatized environment where their “performance” is judged by someone looking to profit off the product of predicting the weather. When it comes to the weather, I trust TWC and private equity much less than the current providers who are relatively low-paid government employees that probably enjoy wrangling weather data.

I believe that NOAA will be targeted for privatization and, as a result, there will be a decline in the accessibility and quality of weather data to the general public, a reduction in local meteorologists to only those working for Allen Media Group (TWC) and AccuWeather, and a rapid increase of exorbitant fees paid to private entities for the operational weather data used by the armed forces.