The Threat of Project 2025 on Climate

This week’s episode is a bit of a crossover. We’re sharing the fourth and final episode of MSNBC’s “The Threat of Project 2025” special series for the How to Win podcast. In this episode, Chris speaks with Grist climate reporter Zoya Teirstein for her take on Project 2025’s impact on climate and the environment, especially in communities already suffering from climate-related catastrophes. Then, Dr. Vernon Morris, a professor of chemistry and atmospheric sciences at Arizona State University, shares his experience working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the important work at stake should NOAA be dismantled by this conservative agenda.

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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.

Chris Hayes: Welcome to the fourth and final episode of our series, “The Threat of Project 2025,” presented by the “How to Win” podcast. I’m Chris Hayes, and on this final episode, we’ll be talking all about the threat of Project 2025 to the climate and the environment.

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Joy Reid: Project 2025 plans to make our air and water dirtier by limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to combat pollution and eliminating limits on forever chemicals in drinking water. It calls for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, gutting clean energy programs, and repealing President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

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Chris Hayes: Project 2025 has all sorts of dramatic suggestions regarding the federal government as it relates to energy and climate. Just some of those ideas include removing federal restrictions on drilling on public lands, moving the EPA away from focusing on and reporting on climate change, dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and privatizing the National Weather Service. Yes, really. Now, a lot of these ideas stem from what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts calls climate alarmism. This is Robert speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this year.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

Kevin Roberts: Elites tell us we have this existential crisis with so-called climate change, so much so that climate alarmism is probably the greatest cause for mental health crisis in the world. The solutions the average person know based on climate change are far worse and more harmful and cost more human lives than do the problem and the problems themselves.

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Chris Hayes: Trump’s thinking about climate change and global warming tends to be dismissive and denialist broadly in line with the Kevin Roberts of the world, although in his own inimitable way a bit harder to decipher.

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Donald Trump: You know, the biggest threat is not global warming where the ocean’s going to rise one one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. And you’ll have more, you’ll have more oceanfront property, right? The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming.

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Chris Hayes: We should point out Trump has disavowed Project 2025. Although a lot of the people working on the project have ties to him, including people that used to serve in his administration, one of whom recently told someone who was secretly recording him, the president supports them. But if you look at his record in his first term, like his move to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, there’s a lot that would obviously line up with the Heritage Foundation’s thinking around quote, “climate alarmism” and rolling back environmental regulations.

And while the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has taken this kind of holistic approach to climate change, on energy issues, Trump seems caught in a bygone age. If you ask him anything about the topic, he pulls out Sarah Palin’s slogan from the 2008 campaign. Here he is earlier this summer at the Republican National Convention.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

Donald Trump: I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately, bring down interest rates and lower the cost of energy. We will drill, baby, drill.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

Chris Hayes: As we end yet another summer with record-breaking heat, we’re going to dig into the threat of Project 2025 to the climate and the environment. We’ll be talking to climate reporter Zoya Teirstein, who’s been digging into the Project 2025 playbook while also reporting from the ground in communities already suffering from climate catastrophes. And I’ll chat with Dr. Vernon Morris, who’s a professor of chemistry and atmospheric sciences, who has spent decades working closely with one of the federal agencies that Project 2025 wants to dismantle. That’s all coming up.

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Joining me now is Zoya Teirstein. She’s a climate reporter for Grist. Welcome to the show, Zoya.

Zoya Teirstein: Thanks for having me.

Chris Hayes: So Zoya, as someone who covers climate specifically, when you first heard about Project 2025 or sort of got your hands on it to look into it, like what was your expectation for what they would have to say about it, climate?

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, it’s a good question. I actually wasn’t even going to cover that, the blueprint at all, because, you know, Trump had disavowed it and there’s really no saying how much of it he would implement if he were reelected. But as I started reading through it, I realized that it was so much more sweeping and far-reaching than I had thought. And really, many of its implications would be climate and environment related. So it felt like I absolutely had to cover it. I mean, I was actually pretty shocked as I was reading through it. It’s so extensive and touches basically every aspect of government. I didn’t realize that it was a total overhaul of the federal government at the time.

So yeah, I had to cover it. And then as I got into it and I looked into the history of these blueprints which come out pretty regularly, and obviously the Heritage Foundation has been influencing public campaigns and presidents for a long time, I realized that two-thirds or so of their previous recognitions have been implemented or considered under Trump in his first term. It became clear that there was something there. It wasn’t just a shot in the dark sort of policy paper.

Chris Hayes: That’s actually a really important point because one of the things that people have done to sort of defend Project 2025 is to say like, oh, Heritage does this every four years for new Republican administration, which is basically true. They’ve been doing it for a very long time. But your point is like, yes, and a lot of their recommendations made it into the government the first time around.

Zoya Teirstein: Yes, that and they haven’t ever done it like this. This is a much larger and more extensive effort. And it’s obvious why, right? You know, when this paper came out, it was clear that things were on the up and up for Republicans. I mean, Biden was floundering at various points and then Trump got shot. So it felt like, okay, there’s this opportunity, this golden opportunity, he’s definitely a shoo-in. We’ve got to, you know, put this out and hammer it hard. And things have changed since, but it’s interesting.

Chris Hayes: What would you say as someone who covers climate and went through the climate sections of this, we should say like it’s fairly scattered. I mean, there’s an energy section, but there’s not a sort of specific climate section, partly because they don’t believe in that as a kind of conceptual, like a logical concept or category for governing. What would you say the big kind of takeaway is if you were just explaining to someone the broad vision?

Zoya Teirstein: I think the best way to sum up its impact on climate policy and environmental policy would be to talk about its efforts to sort of weaken and shrink the administrative state. This has been talked about a lot. It has unique implications for climate policy. So basically, to give you sort of a very small example, I normally cover climate change and human health for Grist and sort of politics also, especially when there’s election coming up. And one of the things I look at a lot is how the CDC puts out advisories to states around things like Lyme disease or mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue, et cetera.

One of the things this document would do is it would basically prevent the CDC from issuing any advisories around what happens. So for example, there’s a huge spike in tick-borne illnesses in Connecticut. The CDC could collect data on that. It could publish that data, but it couldn’t tell Connecticut what to do about it. That small example, sort of extrapolate that across all of the federal government. That is exactly what this blueprint aims to do. It aims to separate agencies from their enforcement powers, from their interpretation powers, and their rulemaking powers.

Chris Hayes: So, in terms of like public health and climate, you know, one of the terms in the report is like climate alarmism, that they’re going to purge climate alarmism from the federal government and from its communications. The idea being that any mentions of climate, like for instance, like tropical borne diseases are creeping northward because the globe is warming, for instance, has to be gotten rid of so that the government is going to speak with this sort of like affectless flatness about very pressing challenges like climate.

Zoya Teirstein: Exactly. And you know, you can see that across the board. There’s so many little rules in there and suggestions in there that you could pull out. I think one of the most interesting ones is this document would prevent the EPA, for example, from assessing the knock-on positive effects of its regulations, its proposals. So let’s say shutting down a power plant in this area would have this impact on the frontline community that suffered from the air pollution from that power plant for decades. The EPA could no longer look at that benefit and assess it and include it as one of the reasons why closing that power plant would be a good idea. So it’s that kind of separation too. There’s plenty of other examples.

Chris Hayes: So you’re rigging the cost benefit analysis by reaching in and basically saying, you cannot consider this category of benefits, thereby totally upending the ledger for all assessments of the value of regulation.

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, and you could even go a step further and say that they’re trying to eliminate the cost benefit analysis kind of entirely. It’s just, you know, let’s just do this thing. It’s economically feasible. The state wants to do it. Why assess, you know, the knock on effects of this policy or this proposal?

Chris Hayes: One more thing that I think seems really relevant to climate is the notion of they call it schedule F, which is an executive order that Donald Trump issued in his final days in 2020. It was then revoked by the Biden administration. But basically, this vision that suffuses Project 2025, which is there’s too many civil servants, they call them bureaucrats. These bureaucrats are too independent and not under the control of the single figurehead of the president of the United States and we wore political appointees up and down the bureaucracy so that people who are basically sworn MAGA loyalists are the kind of people, you know, taking soil samples. I mean, that’s an extreme example, but how would that affect the government dealing with climate?

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, I spoke to a number of experts for my piece on Project 2025 and its climate implications. And every one of them said that the elimination of career personnel in the federal government would be possibly the most damaging to the implementation and enforcement of climate regulations and environmental regulations. And the reason for that is that, you know, I don’t think many of us think of this on a regular basis. We think about government and how it works and the laws and what they pass and, you know, getting elected. But so much of government, which is huge, relies on career personnel passing down what they know to other people. And that’s how the government keeps on running.

They want to eliminate, you know, tens of thousands of government career employees. And doing that would be, you know, I’ve heard from experts, catastrophic for actually, you know, keeping the government running smoothly. I think that it’s very interesting that they want more political appointees up and down, you know, sort of infused within the administrative state, considering that their efforts to weaken that state are so pronounced. It’s like this weird irony where it’s like, okay, well, we want more, you know, MAGA people. in government, but also we want government to be smaller and less powerful and we want to weaken it.

It’s just an interesting thing. It’s like the executive branch must have all of this power, but then government itself can’t be as effective as it should be.

Chris Hayes: Yeah, they want, I mean, a strong president and a weak bureaucracy is basically the --

Zoya Teirstein: Correct.

Chris Hayes: -- it’s kind of the sweet spot, which is, you’re right. There’s like an inherent tension in that because they definitely want a strong executive. They definitely want a strong Article II, but they don’t want the other things that come with the modern administrative state. They basically want like one guy.

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah and --

Chris Hayes: And they name Donald Trump. Like, I don’t think they want one guy to have that power if it’s not him. But they very much want one guy to have it in the person of Donald Trump.

Zoya Teirstein: Right. I mean, that seems to be what the case is.

Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about a few specifics. The Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, Trump-Vance are officially on the record of wanting to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. Like you would have to do that legislatively. But what do you think the implications? Inflation Reduction Act, obviously, still exists. The tax credits that are powering the green transition in a more fruitful way than anything we’ve ever seen in this country are going to last another decade or so. What would it mean for the Inflation Reduction Act if, you know, Project 2025 were to be implemented?

Zoya Teirstein: I wish I had a better answer for you, Chris. I spoke to someone at Treasury who is in charge of IRA implementation and rollout, and he said that even they don’t know what might happen.

Chris Hayes: Right.

Zoya Teirstein: I think that a lot of that money is kind of like getting out the door as we’re talking right now. And some of that will be really hard to sort of rescind once it’s out. And also I will say that, I mean, a lot of Republican states are benefiting disproportionately from the IRA compared to, you know, democratic states. So it’s really about whether it’s politically viable, I think, to do that. I think that Trump in the past has been pretty amenable when Republican states speak up, I’m thinking of offshore drilling, for example. So I wish I could say one way or another, I think that’s sort of the golden question is what happens to the IRA.

Chris Hayes: And I think one of the things that’s interesting about it, just to be honest about this, and I’ve reported on this fair amount, is that it’s a pretty clever design at the core of the IRA, which is basically giving out a lot of money. And the political logic of this is like, people like free money. And so if you sort of center the strategy on free money, and particularly a state like Georgia, which is disproportionately getting that money, it’s going to be a hard golden goose to kill. And I think there’s some logic to that, even if Trump were to be elected.

Zoya Teirstein: That’s right. And, you know, also, we’ve heard very little from Kamala Harris about, you know, climate change in general. I think that’s by design.

Chris Hayes: Yup. Agreed.

Zoya Teirstein: I don’t think that it’s politically popular to talk about climate change at all. And that, you know, I think for her is fine. She’s made that calculation and she’s running with it. I mean, if you notice her campaign videos initially, like didn’t even mention the words climate change. And she ran on a $10 trillion climate plan in 2019. And now I said nothing about the issues. You know, there’s a reasoning there that’s really interesting to unpack. I think that looking ahead, and this is back to the administrative state, it seems like Republicans or sort of the right-wing in America generally has coalesced around this weakening of the administrative state as sort of this like governing ethos. What’s ironic about that for Democrats wanting to pass climate policy is that that flies in the face of passing climate policy, especially if that climate policy needs to be enforced. So for example, you’ll remember the CEP, the Clean Energy Performance Program, which was the sort of the original iteration of the IRA clean energy tax credits, was actually supposed to be carrots and sticks. But then, of course, the sticks got eliminated courtesy of Joe Manchin and others in government. And now, you’re left with this sort of effective but toothless piece of legislation. And going forward, the question has to be asked. I mean, this probably will not be the last piece of climate legislation passed in the foreseeable future. I mean, who knows?

Chris Hayes: Yeah, we got to hope.

Zoya Teirstein: We got to hope, right. I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’m being blindly optimistic about the potential for, you know, disaster aversion. But anyway, so if there is climate policy passed at some point in the foreseeable future, at some point it’ll have to be carrots and sticks. And if the weakening of the administrative state is successful, then it’ll be hard to enforce those sticks. So I think that Democrats --

Chris Hayes: Yeah.

Zoya Teirstein: -- need to be thinking a little more carefully about if they want to pass climate policy that includes penalties and rewards for like utilities, for example, for ratcheting down their emissions or using more clean power, then they’re going to have to think pretty critically about what does that look like from like a Supreme Court perspective, from a judicial perspective, from a lawmaking perspective. So there’s a lot to think about there.

Chris Hayes: In the chapter of the Department of Energy, because there is no climate chapter. There’s a chapter on energy, the guy named Bernard L. McNamee, who’s the person who wrote it, writes that a conservative president must be committed to unleashing all of America’s energy resources and making the energy economy serve the American people. You know, that’s sort of boilerplate. But the irony here is, A, that’s something that Trump is obsessed with. The two issues he pivots to are the border and fossil fuel drilling. I mean, you ask him anything, like people literally would be like, well, apartment rents are too high. He’s like, you got to drill and you got to close the border. Like you could give him anything and those are the two that he goes back to. So in that respect, Trump and Project 2025 are very much aligned. We also know that he had this private dinner with oil and fossil fuel executives where he said you should raise a billion dollars for me because I’m going to, you know, take the brakes off. So in practical terms, like what does that mean? What is that section of Project 2025, you know, unleashing all of America’s energy resources? What do you think that practically means?

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, I think if you’re looking at what parts of that of Project 2025 will be implemented going forward, if Trump is reelected, you can feel pretty confident that that section, the drill baby drill part is going to be, that’s sort of a shoe in, not only because it’s so thorough and it also aligns with Trump’s first term, but also because the GOP platform also centers sort of unleashing, you know, energy independence front and center. That’s the first, you know, plank in their platform. That’s very short, I will say. And then Trump obviously talks about it all the time as well. I think what that looks like is actually not all that different than what President Biden has been doing.

Chris Hayes: This is the thing. People don’t realize that the U.S. is extracting more fossil fuel than any nation on earth ever. It’s exporting. It’s now a net exporter. We are getting a lot of hydrocarbons out of the ground and sending them around the world.

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah. President Biden has approved 50% more oil and gas leases or had approved 50% more in the first three years of his term compared to Trump’s first three years, which is, you know --

Chris Hayes: Wow. Really?

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, that’s a stat. Okay, so if Trump is reelected, you can expect national monuments to be opened up for exploration for natural resources. And then you can also expect loosening of restrictions on offshore drilling on LNG exports. I mean, LNG is a big area that’s --

Chris Hayes: Liquified natural gas.

Zoya Teirstein: Liquified natural gas. That’s right. So, Biden tried to pause new LNG exports and that of course was struck down by a judge not long after. So --

Chris Hayes: Right. So, the Biden folks have been generally, they have not been throwing the heft of the government against hydrocarbon extraction or exports, but there are things that they’re not allowing, I guess is the sort of takeaway, right? There are places, national monuments, particularly sensitive indigenous sites out west, liquefied natural gas exports. There are places where they’re saying no or they’re throwing up a yellow signal that could be converted into, hey, go for it.

Zoya Teirstein: That’s right, Chris. I think that Democrats, the Biden administration specifically think of fossil fuels as like a necessary evil in the short term. Whereas for Trump and the GOP writ-large, I think it’s safe to say that, you know, it’s not about natural gas being a bridge fuel or anything like that. It’s really about, you know, just unleashing everything that the U.S. has to offer and just saying, okay, go crazy, go for it. Let’s make a lot of money.

Chris Hayes: Yeah. There are some detailed suggestions in the document. One of them is tells the government to eliminate the endangerment finding. Can you tell us what that means?

Zoya Teirstein: So, Project 2025 recommends eliminating the endangerment finding, which is the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants and other industries under the Clean Air Act.

Chris Hayes: I just want to be clear. this sounds like some small technical thing, eliminate the endangerment finding. The endangerment finding is the lever being used under the passage of the Clean Air Act for all kinds of emissions regulations. We don’t have a carbon tax in this country. To the extent that we have an emissions regulations regime, it’s based on the Clean Air Act, which predates climate. And getting rid of that would get rid of like basically, the one big emissions regime the federal government has, right?

Zoya Teirstein: That’s right. I mean, I think you could look at almost any of these quote, unquote “smaller.” I mean, I even said they’re smaller because it’s less big than saying, okay, let’s open up all this public land for drilling. But really, you’re right that these smaller suggestions, there’s just so many of them throughout the document, again, that could have vast implications for people, you know, the minute that they’re eliminated.

Chris Hayes: There’s another specific thing they call for. They want to prevent agencies from looking what are called co-benefits. What are co-benefits and how would that work? Why would that matter?

Zoya Teirstein: I think somewhat similar to the engagement finding, co-benefit is the flip side of that, where you know, if for example, the EPA proposes a rule around power plant emissions or pollutants from power plants, it can then assess the impact of that proposal on, for example, frontline communities near that power plant. So if it reduces air pollution, for example, then the EPA can say, okay, that’s a knock-on, that’s a co-benefit of this policy.

Chris Hayes: Right. So we’re doing it, we’re going to reduce air pollution in the aggregate, but also there’s going to be these health benefits for these people that live nearby.

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, these people who have suffered for, you know, probably decades in some cases from asthma and other pollutant connected disorders or illnesses. So, this would prevent the EPA from assessing that connection. So, it’s like siloing each piece of government in its own little niche and not allowing what Biden has really taken advantage of during his term, which is sort of like a holistic view of government working together on, you know, major challenges like climate change. It would sort of prevent that from happening. It would break those links.

Chris Hayes: One of the most high profile suggestions and something that we’ve been focusing a lot is to either restructure or dismantle or move a bunch of longstanding agencies that are actually some of the most centrally important in the entire federal government if you ask people like, what part of the federal government do you interface with the most? This might be the winner. They want to either eliminate or privatize NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They want to move FEMA, which handles emergency response to another department. Under NOAA, of course, is the National Weather Service. What would that mean for people?

Zoya Teirstein: I’m so glad you asked this question. So moving FEMA sounds maybe crazy. And I spoke to a number of experts who confirmed that, yes, that would be absolutely insane and frankly impossible. That’s a part of the document where they’re really reaching for the stars for whatever reason. And also, some experts I spoke to were frankly bewildered by that proposal. I mean, what does moving FEMA out from where it is right now under the umbrella of DOT, Department of Transportation, or somewhere else, Department of Interior, what would that do? I think what’s interesting about this, and there’s two parts to this. The first is that you can clearly see that there’s this aim to privatize, to sort of make government more efficient, to weaken, to make government smaller by turning to private companies to do some of this work. which sounds like a very American idea in some respects.

I think that moving or eliminating the National Weather Service, for example, would have vast implications for people, like everyday people who just want to check their phone for the weather, for example, because so much of that relies on these government satellites. There’s also an inherent irony in these proposals as well. You can see that they want to keep the Hurricane Forecasting Center for whatever reason. Now, the Hurricane Forecasting Center relies on National Weather Service data to make its forecast. So some of this stuff, it doesn’t add up.

Chris Hayes: Right, you’re going to get rid of the National Weather Service. And I think actually this is probably like geographical sensitivities. Like you could not tell the people of Florida we’re getting rid of the National Hurricane Center. I mean, you just couldn’t do it, or South Carolina or Louisiana. And these are states that have huge amounts of Republican voters and Republican politicians who would just completely rebel. So instead what you say is like, we’re going to keep the National Hurricane Center, which we understand you guys rely on. The National Weather Service that everyone uses and much of the data that informs the Hurricane Center is going to get shopped out or sold off or privatized. And you know, we’ll figure out how that’s going to work somehow.

Zoya Teirstein: Right. There are also aspects of this proposal in regards to FEMA that some experts told me are actually good ideas. The first is that right now the federal government shoulders about three-fourths of the costs of hurricane relief, of disaster relief recovery in this country. That, in some ways, incentivizes states to continue making risky decisions.

Chris Hayes: Yep. Build in areas that, you know --

Zoya Teirstein: That they should be retreating from, basically.

Chris Hayes: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right.

Zoya Teirstein: So this proposal proposes moving some of the costs of disaster recovery onto states. And an expert I spoke to who studies flood resilience and has been doing this work for many decades, so that’s not a bad idea that people at FEMA are probably thinking about the need for that at some point. FEMA stretched incredibly thin.

Chris Hayes: That’s interesting.

Zoya Teirstein: So there are nuggets of ideas that experts said could move the country in a positive direction in terms of, you know, like FEMA reform, but they’re sort of buried in these nonsensical other ideas that would bog down FEMA for, you know, years and years and years and just figuring out how to move their personnel from one place to the other.

Chris Hayes: When we come back, the federal agency behind helping you get dressed in the morning and why it’s in danger.

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Chris Hayes: Welcome back. I want to talk more with Zoya, but before we do, I wanted to dig into one of the more dramatic but still under-reported policy proposals outlined by Project 2025, dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA. NOAA, among many other things, houses the National Weather Service. I wanted to speak with someone who had first-hand knowledge of how NOAA works and who would stand to be most affected if it were to be dismantled or privatized. Dr. Vernon Morris is the Associate Dean for Knowledge Enterprise and Strategic Outcomes at Arizona State University. Before that, he was a professor of chemistry and atmospheric sciences at Howard University. That’s also where he ran a NOAA Cooperative Science Center for almost two decades. I asked him what he would say to the layperson who doesn’t know what NOAA is or why it’s important.

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Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about what’s commonly referred to as NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is one of these, you know, the federal government is enormous. It’s got thousands of different little agencies and sub-agencies, many of which people may not know. NOAA is actually probably one, you know, people don’t know it necessarily --

Vernon Morris: Yeah.

Chris Hayes: -- but one of the more vital public facing aspects of the entire federal government. Tell us about, if you’re talking to someone who’s a lay person that doesn’t know what NOAA is or why it’s important, what would you say to them?

Vernon Morris: I’d say NOAA is the agency that provides the essential information that helps you live your best life. That’d be the simplest way I would say it. They give you the weather forecast, the water forecast, the information for your fishing forecast if you like to fish. I love to fish, but you’re going to be out on a boat in any body of water adjacent to the United States or internal to the United States. It’s NOAA information that’s helping you know when to go out, whether you’re going to be able to sail that day or you need to motor that day, whether you’re going to be able to fish well that day or call it in, just be on the water. It affects every aspect of our lives, you know, from insurance to transportation to economy.

I think one of the limitations on NOAA’s visibility is that it sits not as a separate agency like NASA, but it sits inside the Department of Commerce. And so it’s buried sort of down in there. EPA has less purview. And I think, you know, a different type of impact on day-to-day lives. It’s important, vitally important, but it doesn’t have the breadth of impact that NOAA has. People don’t recognize all the things that NOAA does.

Chris Hayes: And that National Weather Service specifically, which you just mentioned, which is inside NOAA, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but most of the data we have about the weather, a thing that people check multiple times a day, if you’re me, right? I mean, the source of all that data is the National Weather Service, right?

Vernon Morris: Primary source is National Weather Service. Some of the data does come from NASA satellites. Some of the data comes from defense satellites. We collect the data, but the system that pulls all that data in, cleans quality controls, puts it into the models that we then see the graphics and predictions on, that’s all NOAA.

Chris Hayes: A key animating goal of the agency is to make sure that people have usable data that they can use for their lives.

Vernon Morris: Immediately usable and like the scale of use, ultimately has to get down to you, right? If you go out and look at a forecast, you don’t actually care if it’s raining across the entire city as much as, is it going to rain on me or where I’m going?

Chris Hayes: Right. Exactly.

Vernon Morris: To get that information, you have to do a different type of experimentation, experimental design, measurements, modeling, optimization, and NOAA is the place that focuses on that.

Chris Hayes: Let’s talk a little bit about what might happen to NOAA in the future and particularly under Project 2025, which explicitly calls to get rid of it. It 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. Do you think that’s a good idea?

Vernon Morris: Me personally, no. Even if I took a piece of that, let’s say Guam is now going to be responsible for all of their weather forecasts, all of their fishery forecasts, all of their ocean forecasts, their own satellite data. How is Guam going to do that, right?

Chris Hayes: Right.

Vernon Morris: Unless there’s going to be this huge infusion of millions, if not billions of dollars. So it’s not practical in the territories. For most states, it’s not practical as you look at state budgets. It’s only practical at a national level, economically. If you think about how weather systems move, how can I break down the communication that NOAA has over the contiguous United States and say, okay, Montana and California aren’t going to talk to each other, but we’re just going to assume that the weather systems never go between those two states.

Chris Hayes: Right.

Vernon Morris: Or Idaho and Montana. You know, it’s all separate. No, that’s not how the world works. And it’s why NOAA is actually plugged into a lot of international relationships as well. Our weather service communicates with the Mexican weather service, with the Canadian weather service seamlessly because you have to.

Chris Hayes: It also strikes me as one of these situations where you have an enormous repository of expertise, knowledge, intellectual capital, institutional memory, technical insight, and also, unlike a lot of federal agencies that may have all those things, a very clear user-directed mission, which is aggregating data across the United States, figuring out the best models to provide people very vital, useful daily information they need. And it seems to me, and you’re correct me if I’m wrong, it seems to me like NOAA and National Weather Service do a pretty darn good job of that.

Vernon Morris: They do an excellent job of it. They do an excellent job. I mean, so much rides on the ability for you to access information at anytime, anywhere in the nation, at high resolution, and if you said, well, I want to see a little bit more. I want to see what the radar actually looks like. I want to probe the data just a little bit. You have immediate access to that. If you wanted to go beyond just the numbers on your phone to say, you know, I wonder how my grandma is doing in Nome, Alaska. You could get narrative information, graphical information, satellite information, all of that for free or for the, you know, whatever it costs on average, four cents a day or something.

Chris Hayes: Well, when you say for free or essentially at cost, one of the other aspects of Project 2025 is clearly focused on privatization. Basically saying that really we’re relying on AccuWeather and that AccuWeather is more important, which is of course a private company and that the National Weather Service should just provide the data so that basically that AccuWeather can use it and sell it.

Vernon Morris: Yeah.

Chris Hayes: And I wonder what you think the implications of privatization would be for us as Americans who use this data.

Vernon Morris: Well, the odd part is AccuWeather is right now using NOAA data and selling it. Chris Hayes: Yes, it uses the NOAA data.

Vernon Morris: It’s doing it now.

Chris Hayes: Yeah.

Vernon Morris: Yeah. It’s using it now and making profit. And so dismantling the source then the AccuWeather is not the only company, you know, the weather and climate industry is billion dollar industry, right? But they’re already making money using NOAA data. And so it’s odd in a way to me to say, okay, I’ve got this source of free data that I’m monetizing in a certain way and making profit, making incredible profit. I now want to cut that off.

Chris Hayes: Yeah.

Vernon Morris: And like, okay, who’s going to put the satellites and maintain the satellite systems and optimize the retrievals?

Chris Hayes: Yeah, it seems like killing the goose that’s laying the golden egg. You’ve got enormous public investment in the collection of this data, then you’ve got a private company using that data for whatever its own, you know, proprietary forecasting models, et cetera. But you need the data and presumably you don’t want to get rid of that, like we’re all using it, right?

Vernon Morris: We are using it.

Chris Hayes: Even the folks that are making money off it.

Vernon Morris: Yeah, we’re all using it. And it’s not just the data, it’s the data quality. What NOAA does is they are a data repository that says, we’re not only going to collect all of these data, we’re going to clean and quality assure and quality control it in such a way that if you want it --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Vernon Morris: -- take it and you can build beautiful graphics with it. We’re not going to invest all of our --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Vernon Morris: -- input on the graphics system. So private sector can make some wonderful graphics. They can tell great narrative stories and wraparounds that I think are quite positive. I think that’s great. NOAA is not going to do that, unless it is a gap that citizens need to protect their lives and their property. And NOAA is doing it from sun to bottom of the ocean. Private company is going to look for the markets that they’re going to make money on and focus on that. So you’re going to lose out on space weather in regions that isn’t a large market. So why would a private company invest --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Vernon Morris: -- in a place? So that means people’s lives now get jeopardized. And I think that’s also not in this equation of let’s just dismantle it because it’s not cost effective or I can do it better or XYZ. You’re not taking into account the actual people who get served by this. And I think that’s a danger of looking at cost models and saying, well, you know, no, it may not be cost effective. No, it’s doing too much. No, I don’t think so. I think it’s doing what it needs to do and probably needs more investment as our environment gets more dynamic and harder to predict.

Chris Hayes: It’s striking to me that in a world in which I often feel technology is getting worse or making my life worse, one counter to that is the ability of weather forecast to be as precise as you indicated earlier, where I can look at a map and I can see like, oh, there’s actually a cloud burst right near me. It’s probably going to pass over in the next or minute by minute rain forecast. I mean, it’s incredible how good it’s gotten. Just in the last, I would say, in the last 10 years. And that is all just coming from publicly available, publicly published, publicly aggregated and produced data that is made available with the National Weather Service, which sits inside NOAA, which sits inside the Commerce Department, which is a public good, funded and run by the federal government.

Vernon Morris: Yep. Absolutely. Not only have the forecasts gotten better, but communication in support of what do I need to do? Yes, there’s going to be a cloud burst that comes over me in the next 15 minutes. It’s going to last for 20 minutes. Then it’s going to pass over, but you haven’t told me what to do. You haven’t told me what’s at risk. NOAA also provides those data, provides, hey, we advise this. There’s advisories that go along with here’s the information, here’s the advisory, here’s support for the best decision that you can make for free. Not you got to buy this information. Hey, something’s coming, but I’m not going to tell you what to do unless you pay me a little bit more. No, that’s no good. That’s no good.

And that’s a personal fear of mine is that when you privatize something and everything’s for pay, then you are monetizing potential disaster. You’re monetizing risk, undue risk. You might be placing people at undue risk who can’t pay. You say, well, you can’t pay, I’m going to give the information over here because you’re not going to help me profit which is the bottom line for a business. It’s not the bottom line for the federal government. And that’s important. You’ve got to maintain these bottom lines that have allowed us to get to this point where we can provide the types of services that we do. Public good has got to be the bottom line. It cannot be profit.

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Chris Hayes: I wanted to go back to my conversation with Zoya Teirstein one more time. Her on-the-ground reporting in places like Louisiana, Lake Charles shows that what Dr. Morris is suggesting could happen with a dismantled NOAA is not just hypothetical. Communities are already having a very hard time with a combination of natural disasters and a hobbled administrative state.

You’ve done some reporting recently from a community in Louisiana called Lake Charles. Tell us why you were there and what you found there.

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, this is, I mean, talk about FEMA. And actually, this is also, this has to do with the census, which is also an agency or a program that would be kneecapped severely by Project 2025. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, the city, which is actually really like sort of three cities in one because of hurricane relief efforts that have been stalled in the north, but have moved pretty fast in the south, and there’s obviously racial and class issues there at play that make that happen. Lake Charles was hit by four disasters in a row. This is compounding weather events that, you know, that’s a phenomenon that’s driven by climate change. They were hit by Hurricane Laura, Category Four. And then six weeks later, the next hurricane, since the path of least resistance Laura, left behind, Hurricane Delta, Category Two, hit the same area. And then they had that winter freeze that hit Texas, but also Louisiana is not far off from there. So they also dealt with extreme freeze conditions, very cold, unusual for that area. And then in the spring, they had biblical floods, feet of water.

So they got walloped really hard. And so for a long time, you know, one journalist said that they were the most unfortunate city in the United States, which, you know, I think was true for a time. Their hurricane recovery efforts are still ongoing. That’s what I saw when I visited. I met one man named Edward who was living in a house that I thought when I first pulled up to it was condemned. So many houses in Lake Charles bear like the telltale red tag, which means they’ve been, you know, marked for demolition by the city. But he was still living there, still holding out hope that, you know, someone, sort of anyone, would come and help him save his house. His windows were smashed in, his roof leaked, he had a dog that he was trying to take care of. So it’s not uncommon in North Lake Charles to see that.

Now, what was really stark about it was that in North Lake Charles, there was still plenty of devastation. They were in the process of demolishing their library, their only library. All of the other libraries in the city had been fixed long ago already. You drive down, I don’t know, four or five miles, maybe even less, to South Lake Charles. And anything you want is within a minute of driving anywhere. So there’s, you know, a European wax center and Just Salad and sort of anything you might need. Whereas in North Lake Charles, their hospital is not open seven days a week. I mean, if someone needs medical care in North Lake Charles, they have to drive South. Many of them don’t have cars at this point. But it’s not just that. It’s actually larger and sort of more sinister than that. There’s a lot of invisible impacts that are left behind.

For example, the census collects data on where Americans live every 10 years. They collected their data right before the hurricanes hit. After the hurricanes, people were displaced for a long time. Many of them still haven’t returned, or when they return, they move to different parts of the city. A lot of those people were renters, they’re middle income folks. A lot of them are people of color. And basically, the city, the state, the federal government has no idea where these people are. And that dictates like, you know, where federal resources and state resources are sent. So there’s these sort of like rippling implications that go on for years and years that the federal government needs to figure out how to assess and capture as climate change creates more of these compounding events, but it’s not doing a good job of doing that.

And if Project 2025 was implemented, if those changes were put into effect, the census might even have to include a question on citizenship, for example, which would further dampen census turnout. So there’s a lot of ways in which people on the ground would really feel the consequences of these policies if they’re implemented right away.

Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, for a place like that, like if you didn’t have free and universal access to National Weather Service data, and that was tracking weather disasters, if you had FEMA move to another agency and crippled, like what would that mean for folks in a place like Lake Charles?

Zoya Teirstein: Well, it’s hard enough really to figure out how to file a claim form with FEMA in the first place. I mean, it’s almost a full-time job. You have to be willing to sit on hold for most of your day, for many days in a row. And working-class people who are affected by these hurricanes, usually, typically worst and hardest, don’t have time to do that. So that’s the first thing. I mean, FEMA, it’s very bureaucratic. But moving the agency, the administration, under a different umbrella would, I think, set back its recovery and sort of like payment payouts by many, many months, if not years. I mean, it is logistically, I’m not really sure how you move an administration like that from one place to another. I’m not sure that FEMA’s undergone that level of upheaval in its many, many year history. So I think that in terms of just like who you file your forms to, it makes it that much complicated and moving FEMA somewhere else.

Chris Hayes: Maybe we should sort of end on this note, which is just like one of the consistent themes I always talk about is the fact that like Donald Trump was president of the United States. And for some reason, a lot of people have just kind of forgotten that or pretended to forget it or it’s like, oh, who’s this game show host who’s running and there’s an actual record. There’s a record in federal administration. There’s a record in all these things. Like the Trump administration did stuff on all this. And I guess my question to you is having reported on climate and in the Trump administration, like what can we take away in terms of the actual record of the Trump administration the first time around and the vision in Project 2025? Like how close are they basically?

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, it’s a little bit like reading tea leaves again, because he’s just about it and I’m hesitant to sort of extrapolate too much. But I think that what I remember from reporting on Trump for four years was that he’s not scared of making decisions that are nonsensical. So, you know, you read something in Project 2025 that says, okay, we’re going to move FEMA to DOI or DOT. And you think that’s crazy, that’s never going to happen, that would be a huge lift. I would not put it past him. I mean, his record shows that he’s willing to do that kind of thing. If he gets, you know, someone whispers in his ear, he’s usually amenable. So I think that that is sort of the main takeaway. And the other takeaway, of course, is that as I mentioned before, some two-thirds of the Heritage Foundation’s previous recommendations were implemented or considered in Trump’s first term. So I think you could look at pretty much any piece of this Project 2025 document, which is very long, but you could peruse it, and you could think, okay, there’s a fair shot this is going to get implemented or at least considered under Trump 2.0.

Chris Hayes: I think that point, Zoya, about the main takeaway is like if an idea seems too crazy, unworkable or cockamamie or fringe, it’s not going to happen. Like do not think that is actually a really important one and particularly the second time around when they have more of their own people when they do have a plan, like there is nothing to say that really bad destructive ideas that all the experts are like, please don’t do this, are going to be killed. In fact, they may very well be implemented to the great detriment and destruction of lots of people and communities.

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, he might get out his Sharpie and axe the whole National Weather Service. You never know.

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Chris Hayes: Thanks for tuning into this special series, “The Threat of Project 2025,” presented by the “How to Win 2024” podcast. All episodes of the series are available now, including a new episode on the threat to LGBTQ rights with Jen Psaki, so be sure to keep listening.

The Threat of Project 2025 series is produced by Max Jacobs. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Catherine Anderson and Katie Lau are our sound engineers. Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And Rebecca Kutler is the Senior Vice President of Content Strategy at MSNBC. And I’m Chris Hayes. Search for “How to Win 2024” wherever you get your podcasts and follow the series.

“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.