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.
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.