The NWC budget is chump change in the federal budget. And unlike many parts of the fedgov, the NWC actually delivers something of considerable value for the tax dollars spent.
As Nauti Nurse noted, do you think a private company would arrange to fly aircraft into a Cat 5 hurricane for critical forecast info?
Unlike much of the fedgov, this ain't broken.
Of course they could. Private enterprise can do anything government can do, only cheaper, and often better.It's the same people working in both areas. Being part of a government run business doesn't make them smarter, or more able to come up with good ideas, just less efficient, and on the taxpayers dole.
Freed from constraints, they might come up with way better and even more accurate solutions.
As for it being chump change in the Federal budget, lots of chump change adds up to big money.
If you look at Forecast Watch or Forecast Advisor, you will see quite detailed evidence that is more than anecdotal that the private companies do much better the government NWS. Don’t these poor statistics concern you?
Why are people paying for a service that is provided for free by the government? Presumably because they think that they are getting a better job done.
This is not a deep argument. The question is one of incentives. If your company would get the same amount of money no matter what job that it did, how hard would you all do in trying to please customers? Is that a particularly surprising result? If the company gave away its product for free, how much poorer would its product have to be before people would pay for another competing product? Those are the only two major points that the article is making.