Trump appointees have ties to companies that stand to benefit from privatizing weather forecasts

WASHINGTON (AP) — As commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick oversees the U.S. government’s vast efforts to monitor and predict the weather.

The billionaire also ran a financial firm, which he recently left in the control of his adult sons, that stands to benefit if President Donald Trump’s administration follows through on a decade-long Republican effort to privatize government weather forecasting.

Deadly flooding in Texas has drawn a spotlight to budget cuts and staff reductions at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, agencies housed within the Commerce Department that provide the public with free climate and weather data that can be crucial during natural disasters.

What’s drawn less attention is how the downsizing appears to be part of an effort to privatize the work of such agencies. In several instances, the companies poised to step into the void have deep ties to people tapped by Trump to run weather-related agencies.

Privatization would diminish a central role the federal government has played in weather forecasting since the 1800s, which experts say poses a particular harm for those who may not be able to afford commercial weather data.

The effort also reveals the difficulty wealthy members of Trump’s Cabinet have in freeing themselves from conflicts, even if they have met the letter of federal ethics law.

“It’s the most insidious aspect of this: Are we really talking about making weather products available only to those who can afford it?” said Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

The Commerce Department said in a statement that Lutnick has “fully complied with the terms of his ethics agreement with respect to divesture and recusals and will continue to do so.”

Trump nominees have ties to weather-related industries

Privatizing weather agencies has been an aim of Republicans. During Trump’s first presidency, he signed a bill to utilize more private weather data. Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for Trump’s second presidency that was co-authored by his budget director, calls for the NOAA to be broken up and for the weather service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”

Lutnick is not the only one Trump nominated for a key post with close relationships to companies involved in the gathering of weather data.

Trump’s pick to lead the NOAA, Neil Jacobs, was chief atmospheric scientist for Panasonic Weather Solutions and is a proponent of privatization. The president’s nominee for another top NOAA post, Taylor Jordan, is a lobbyist for weather-related clients.

Jordan and Jacobs “will follow the law and rely on the advice of the Department’s ethics counsel in addressing matters involving former clients” if confirmed, the Commerce Department said in its statement.

Elon Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, owns a controlling interest in SpaceX and its satellite subsidiary Starlink. Both are regulated by the NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, which lost about one-third of its staff in layoffs by the Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk created.

SpaceX stands to gain through a new generation of private and federally funded weather satellites that would be carried into orbit on its rockets.

Though Musk departed Washington after a very public falling out with Trump, the DOGE staffers he hired and the cuts he pushed have largely remained in place.

Requests for comment sent to representatives for Musk received no response.

Lutnick ran Cantor Fitzgerald

Lutnick resigned as CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald upon taking office and began the task of divesting his interests.

His two 20-something sons took the reins of his financial empire. But Lutnick’s most recent ethics filing stated he was still selling his holdings in the firm.

An ethics plan from February states Lutnick would request a waiver allowing him to participate in matters with a “direct and predictable effect” on his family’s business. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, meanwhile, show Lutnick is keeping his stake in Cantor close, transferring them to a son.

Cantor spokesperson Erica Chase said Lutnick has had no involvement in running the company since his resignation.

“Cantor and its subsidiaries operate in heavily regulated industries, and maintain robust compliance programs to ensure compliance with all applicable laws,” Chase said.

Federal officials are barred from making decisions that benefit the business holdings of themselves or their spouses, but that prohibition doesn’t extend to their adult children, said Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer in Republican President George W. Bush’s administration.

Cantor has interests in weather and climate. It owns a controlling interest in BGC Group, which operates a weather derivatives marketplace that essentially allows investors to bet on climate risk and where hurricanes will make landfall.

Lutnick also played a pivotal role in cultivating the satellite company Satellogic, which he helped take public and where he held a board seat. Cantor holds a roughly 13% stake in Satellogic, an emerging federal contractor that offers crisp images of natural disasters and weather events in real time.

The White House’s 2026 spending plan proposes $8 billion in cuts for future NOAA satellites, which capture imagery of the planet provided to the public. Satellogic stands to benefit if the government retreats from operating climate-monitoring satellites.

2 Trump nominees have ties to weather companies

Jacobs, Trump’s pick to lead the NOAA, was scheduled to appear Wednesday before a Senate committee weighing his nomination.

Jacobs has long advocated for a greater role for the private sector in government weather forecasting. During a 2023 congressional hearing focused on the future of the NOAA, he expressed concerns about what happens to commercial data purchased by the government.

“They give it away to the rest of the planet for free,” he testified.

He was a consultant at the time for Spire Global and Lynker, both of which have millions of dollars in weather data contracts with the NOAA, records show.

Jordan, Trump’s pick for another top NOAA post, has similarly close relationships. His financial disclosure lists more than a dozen weather-related lobbying clients, including Spire, Lynker and AccuWeather.

Though his nomination is pending, records show he still represents weather companies and works at a Washington lobbying firm.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former federal officials and outside experts have warned for months that President Donald Trump’s deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service could endanger lives.

After torrential rains and flash flooding struck Friday (July 4, 2025) in the Texas Hill Country, the weather service came under fire from local officials who criticized what they described as inadequate forecasts, though most in the Republican-controlled state stopped short of blaming Trump’s cuts. Democrats, meanwhile, wasted little time in linking the staff reductions to the disaster, which is being blamed for the deaths of at least 80 people, including more than two dozen girls and counselors attending a summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River.

The NWS office responsible for that region had five staffers on duty as thunderstorms formed over Texas Thursday evening, the usual number for an overnight shift when severe weather is expected. Current and former NWS officials defended the agency, pointing to urgent flash flood warnings issued in the pre-dawn hours before the river rose.

“This was an exceptional service to come out first with the catastrophic flash flood warning and this shows the awareness of the meteorologists on shift at the NWS office,” said Brian LaMarre, who retired at the end of April as the meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS forecast office in Tampa, Florida. ″There is always the challenge of pinpointing extreme values, however, the fact the catastrophic warning was issued first showed the level of urgency.”

Questions linger about level of coordination
Questions remain, however, about the level of coordination and communication between NWS and local officials on the night of the disaster. The Trump administration has cut hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day. Hundreds more experienced forecasters and senior managers were encouraged to retire early.

The White House also has proposed slashing its parent agency’s budget by 27% and eliminating federal research centers focused on studying the world’s weather, climate and oceans.

The website for the NWS office for Austin/San Antonio, which covers the region that includes hard-hit Kerr County, shows six of 27 positions are listed as vacant. The vacancies include a key manager responsible for issuing warnings and coordinating with local emergency management officials. An online resume for the employee who last held the job showed he left in April after more than 17 years, shortly after mass emails sent to employees urging them to retire early or face potential layoffs.

Democrats on Monday pressed the Trump administration for details about the cuts. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded that the administration conduct an inquiry into whether staffing shortages contributed to “the catastrophic loss of life” in Texas.

Meanwhile, Trump said the job eliminations did not hamper any weather forecasting. The raging waters, he said Sunday, were “a thing that happened in seconds. No one expected it. Nobody saw it.”

Former officials warn that job cuts could hamper future forecasts
Former federal officials and experts have said Trump’s indiscriminate job reductions at NWS and other weather-related agencies will result in brain drain that imperils the federal government’s ability to issue timely and accurate forecasts. Such predictions can save lives, particularly for those in the path of quick-moving storms.

“This situation is getting to the point where something could break,” said Louis Uccellini, a meteorologist who served as NWS director under three presidents, including during Trump’s first term. “The people are being tired out, working through the night and then being there during the day because the next shift is short staffed. Anything like that could create a situation in which important elements of forecasts and warnings are missed.”

After returning to office in January, Trump issued a series of executive orders empowering the Department of Government Efficiency, initially led by mega-billionaire Elon Musk, to enact sweeping staff reductions and cancel contracts at federal agencies, bypassing significant Congressional oversight.

Though Musk has now departed Washington and had a very public falling out with Trump, DOGE staffers he hired and the cuts he sought have largely remained, upending the lives of tens of thousands of federal employees.

Cuts resulted from Republican effort to privatize duties of weather agencies
The cuts follow a decade-long Republican effort to dismantle and privatize many of the duties of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency within the Commerce Department that includes the NWS. The reductions have come as Trump has handed top public posts to officials with ties to private companies that stand to profit from hobbling the taxpayer-funded system for predicting the weather.

Project 2025, the conservative governing blueprint that Trump distanced himself from during the 2024 campaign but that he has broadly moved to enact once in office, calls for dismantling NOAA and further commercializing the weather service.

Chronic staffing shortages have led a handful of offices to curtail the frequency of regional forecasts and weather balloon launches needed to collect atmospheric data. In April, the weather service abruptly ended translations of its forecasts and emergency alerts into languages other than English, including Spanish. The service was soon reinstated after public outcry.

NOAA’s main satellite operations center briefly appeared earlier this year on a list of surplus government real estate set to be sold. Trump’s proposed budget also seeks to shutter key facilities for tracking climate change. The proposed cuts include the observatory atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that for decades has documented the steady rise in plant-warming carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

On June 25, NOAA abruptly announced that the U.S. Department of Defense would no longer process or transmit data from three weather satellites experts said are crucial to accurately predicting the path and strength of hurricanes at sea.

“Removing data from the defense satellite is similar to removing another piece to the public safety puzzle for hurricane intensity forecasting,” said LaMarre, now a private consultant. ”The more pieces removed, the less clear the picture becomes which can reduce the quality of life-saving warnings.”

Trump officials say they didn’t fire meteorologists
At a pair of Congressional hearings last month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called it “fake news” that the Trump administration had axed any meteorologists, despite detailed reporting from The Associated Press and other media organizations that chronicled the layoffs.

“We are fully staffed with forecasters and scientists,” Lutnick said June 4 before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. “Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.”

Despite a broad freeze on federal hiring directed by Trump, NOAA announced last month it would seek to fill more than 100 “mission-critical field positions,” as well as plug holes at some regional weather offices by reassigning staff. Those positions have not yet been publicly posted, though a NOAA spokesperson said Sunday they would be soon.

Asked by AP how the NWS could simultaneously be fully staffed and still advertise “mission critical positions” as open, Commerce spokesperson Kristen Eichamer said the “National Hurricane Center is fully staffed to meet this season’s demand, and any recruitment efforts are simply meant to deepen our talent pool.”

“The secretary is committed to providing Americans with the most accurate, up-to-date weather data by ensuring the National Weather Service is fully equipped with the personnel and technology it needs,” Eichamer said. “For the first time, we are integrating technology that’s more accurate and agile than ever before to achieve this goal, and with it the NWS is poised to deliver critical weather information to Americans.”

Uccellini and the four prior NWS directors who served under Democratic and Republican presidents criticized the Trump cuts in an open letter issued in May; they said the administration’s actions resulted in the departures of about 550 employees — an overall reduction of more than 10 percent.

“NWS staff will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services,” they wrote. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life. We know that’s a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines – and by the people who depend on their efforts.”

NOAA’s budget for fiscal year 2024 was just under $6.4 billion, of which less than $1.4 billion went to NWS.

Experts worry about forecasts for hurricanes
While experts say it would be illegal for Trump to eliminate NOAA without Congressional approval, some former federal officials worry the cuts could result in a patchwork system where taxpayers finance the operation of satellites and collection of atmospheric data but are left to pay private services that would issue forecasts and severe weather warnings. That arrangement, critics say, could lead to delays or missed emergency alerts that, in turn, could result in avoidable deaths.

D. James Baker, who served as NOAA’s administrator during the Clinton administration, questioned whether private forecasting companies would provide the public with services that don’t generate profits.

“Would they be interested in serving small communities in Maine, let’s say?” Baker asked. “Is there a business model that gets data to all citizens that need it? Will companies take on legal risks, share information with disaster management agencies, be held accountable as government agencies are? Simply cutting NOAA without identifying how the forecasts will continue to be provided is dangerous.”

Though the National Hurricane Center in Miami has been largely spared staff reductions like those at regional NWS offices, some professionals who depend on federal forecasts and data greeted the June start of the tropical weather season with profound worry.

In an unusual broadcast on June 3, longtime South Florida TV meteorologist John Morales warned his viewers that the Trump administration cuts meant he might not be able to provide as accurate forecasts for hurricanes as he had in years past. He cited staffing shortfalls of between 20% and 40% at NWS offices from Tampa to Key West and urged his NBC 6 audience in greater Miami to call their congressional representatives.

“What we are starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded,” Morales said. “And we may not know exactly how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline.”

KERRVILLE, Texas (AP) — Before heading to bed before the Fourth of July holiday, Christopher Flowers checked the weather while staying at a friend’s house along the Guadalupe River. Nothing in the forecast alarmed him.

Hours later, he was rushing to safety: He woke up in darkness to electrical sockets popping and ankle-deep water. Quickly, his family scrambled nine people into the attic. Phones buzzed with alerts, Flowers recalled Saturday (July 5, 2025), but he did not remember when in the chaos they started.

“What they need is some kind of external system, like a tornado warning that tells people to get out now,” Flowers, 44, said.

The destructive fast-moving waters that began before sunrise Friday in the Texas Hill Country killed at least 43 people in Kerr County, authorities said Saturday, and an unknown number of people remained missing. Those still unaccounted for included 27 girls from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along a river in Kerr County where most of the dead were recovered.

But as authorities launch one of the largest search-and-rescue efforts in recent Texas history, they have come under intensifying scrutiny over preparations and why residents and youth summer camps that are dotted along the river were not alerted sooner or told to evacuate.

The National Weather Service sent out a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare alert notifying of imminent danger.

Local officials have insisted that no one saw the flood potential coming and have defended their actions.

“There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, whose district includes Kerr County. “There’s a lot of people saying ‘why’ and ‘how,’ and I understand that.”

When the warnings began
An initial flood watch — which generally urges residents to be weather-aware — was issued by the local National Weather Service office at 1:18 p.m. Thursday.

It predicted between 5 to 7 inches (12.7 to 17.8 centimeters) of rain. Weather messaging from the office, including automated alerts delivered to mobile phones to people in threatened areas, grew increasingly ominous in the early morning hours of Friday, urging people to move to higher ground and evacuate flood-prone areas, said Jason Runyen, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service office.

At 4:03 a.m., the office issued an urgent warning that raised the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life.

Jonathan Porter, the chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, a private weather forecasting company that uses National Weather Service data, said it appeared evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities.

“People, businesses, and governments should take action based on Flash Flood Warnings that are issued, regardless of the rainfall amounts that have occurred or are forecast,” Porter said in a statement.

Officials say they didn’t expect this
Local officials have said they had not expected such an intense downpour that was the equivalent of months’ worth of rain for the area.

“We know we get rains. We know the river rises,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official. “But nobody saw this coming.”

Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said he was jogging along the river early in the morning and didn’t notice any problems at 4 a.m. A little over an hour later, at 5:20 a.m., the water level had risen dramatically and “we almost weren’t able to get out of the park,” he said.

Rice also noted that the public can become desensitized to too many weather warnings.

No county flood warning system
Kelly said the county considered a flood warning system along the river that would have functioned like a tornado warning siren about six or seven years ago, before he was elected, but that the idea never got off the ground because of the expense.

“We’ve looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost,” Kelly said.

He said he didn’t know what kind of safety and evacuation plans the camps may have had.

“What I do know is the flood hit the camp first, and it came in the middle of the night. I don’t know where the kids were,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of alarm systems they had. That will come out in time.”

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Saturday it was difficult for forecasters to predict just how much rain would fall. She said the Trump administration would make it a priority to upgrade National Weather Service technology used to deliver warnings.

“We know that everyone wants more warning time, and that’s why we’re working to upgrade the technology that’s been neglected for far too long to make sure families have as much advance notice as possible,” Noem said during a press conference with state and federal leaders.

Weather service had extra staffers
The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, which delivers forecasts for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas, had extra staff on duty during the storms, Runyen said.

Where the office would typically have two forecasters on duty during clear weather, they had up to five on staff.

“There were extra people in here that night, and that’s typical in every weather service office — you staff up for an event and bring people in on overtime and hold people over,” Runyen said.