Yeah, for all the sarcasm methinks this is a good thing: nothing wrong with a government being able to notify the populace of an emergency, nor running a test to discover weak spots (which there WILL be in a large untested system).
To counter the hysterical: the Constitution provides for Congress specifying the means for the President to call out the militia to defend the region/state/nation; this national alert system is a satisfactory means of doing so. That it extends reasonably to the unorganized militia (and beyond) and reasonably beyond political enemies to natural & artificial disasters is not a Constitutional crisis.
“nothing wrong with a government being able to notify the populace of an emergency”
The existing LOCAL systems work fine. What does FedGov bring to this?
Which emergency of ours in the last 80 years would have benefited from a national warning system?