Sen. Maria Cantwell urges Trump to invest in modernized weather forecast system: "The money will save you money"
"The money will save you money, for sure," Cantwell said in an interview on CBS News Monday. "The kind of investments you could make here are about taking a $20 billion [disaster] event and saying, if we would have done these things in advance, it wouldn't have cost us that much money. If storms are costing us this much, we have to come up with better solutions."
The Democratic congresswoman, a prominent voice in environmental policy on Capitol Hill and ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees weather and disasters. Cantwell penned the letter in the wake of disastrous flooding that killed at least 135 people in Central Texas. The July 4 flash flood prompted a massive search and recovery operations and raised questions about whether forecasts and warnings could have been more effective ahead of time.
Cantwell's letter outlined five bipartisan recommendations to improve U.S. forecasting. It comes as the Trump administration continues to make cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency focused on weather and climate, and the National Weather Service, its subagency in charge of daily forecasts.
NOAA is slated to see a 27% reduction in its budget at the start of the 2026 fiscal year, which could impact weather forecasting in a number of ways, including terminating research programs aimed at helping predict future precipitation rates and improve flash flood warning systems. The committee recently held a confirmation hearing for Dr. Neil Jacobs to become NOAA's new leader.
"Communities across the United States are experiencing more frequent, intense, and costly flash floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, atmospheric rivers, landslides, heatwaves, and wildfires," Cantwell's letter said. She cited deadly — and costly — natural disasters that have ravaged communities around the United States in the last two years alone, including the Texas floods as well as last year's flooding from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the devastating fires in Los Angeles and the Hawaiian island of Maui.
Examples like these suggest "that providing Americans with more timely and accurate weather information can avoid billions in property losses and save lives," she wrote.
CBS News has reached out to the White House for the administration's response.
Cantwell's recommendations emphasize improvements in how weather data is collected and analyzed, as well as systems for notifying communities of severe weather. They include:Tracy J. Wholf
contributed to this report.
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