Various corps have been lobbying for the NOAA to stop providing weather info directly to the public, so that it can be more efficiently (read that as monetized) distributed.

Seems pretty evil, since the vast majority of sat based and radar based weather info, including an upgrade ever decade or so, is funded by the NOAA. Of course the corporations want that part to continue. The corps just want weather info from NOAA for free, then charge users money (or ads) to get it.

They've been trying for 20 years? Not very effectively, then.

In particular, haven't they owned both houses of Congress and the presidency in that time?

So either they're all talk (on this subject), or they're incompetent at doing what they want.

You are missing a big factor in this - “neutering” the National Weather Service is not something corporate lobbyists agree on. Yes, commercial weather services would love it to happen, because it would force people to buy more of their products, thereby significantly increasing by their revenue-so of course their lobbyists will be urging for that “neutering” (or even abolition) to take place. But, on the other side, many industries (e.g. aviation, space, maritime, agriculture) are heavily reliant on weather forecasts, and are used to getting them free or cheaply from the government, and don’t want to start paying $$$ to commercial weather services for them - so their lobbyists are going to be urging the opposite. And these other industries have a lot more money and established influence than commercial weather services do, so their lobbyists will win

The Wikipedia article you cited [0] says:

> The bill attracted no cosponsors in the Senate and eventually died in committee

So Santorum couldn’t find a single other Republican Senator to openly support his bill. Why? He may have been in AccuWeather’s pocket, but the other GOP Senators were listening to other lobbyists telling them to do the opposite.

Also, I expect the Pentagon would have been complaining about it behind closed doors. Weather forecasting is very important in the military, and the military is used to getting it for free from NOAA. Forcing them to buy it from commercial weather services would be adding a new expense to the defense budget. Not that people in the Pentagon - and defense contractor lobbyists - are opposed to budget increases, but they’ve got other things they’d rather spend it on than giving bucketloads of DOD money to AccuWeather.

This is the thing about “Rein in Wasteful Federal Spending”-everyone in the GOP agrees with it in principle, but not necessarily on what spending is wasteful. There are other areas of spending where you are far more likely to get a GOP consensus to slash it (e.g. NEA, NEH, CPB, NPR)

Whereas, Project 2025 is just thinktank blather. Thinktanks can recommend doing anything they like, no guarantee it will happen. I doubt many GOP politicians bother to read the whole thing. Very likely, if anyone in a Trump II administration actually tries to implement the “privatize the National Weather Service” part, lobbyists from industries that would be disadvantaged by that will swoop in, and the whole thing will die. Just like it did in 2005.

NOAA spending on medium-to-long term climate modelling, as opposed to short-term weather observation and forecasting, is more likely to get cut - it has limited short-term commercial value, so not many corporate lobbyists to defend it. I don’t think that’s a good thing, but it is what it is. (I should point out I am just an outside observer of US politics, not a participant, from the opposite side of the planet.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Dut...