Monica Medina

And so we will be more and more dependent on, say, the European satellites and their forecasts, but we aren't paying for them and we're not cooperating and we're not providing them data.

So we're kind of letting down the rest of the world and we're creating the conditions where

Say our transportation systems, our airplanes, our ships need accurate forecasts.

Our military defenses need accurate forecasts around the world.

We'll be less and less capable of doing that the more we degrade our own weather service.

And you know who's going to catch up to us?

China.

We have always had a better weather forecasting capability than the Chinese.

But the minute we start to degrade ours, they're going to continue to invest just like they have in

Things like chips and in solar panels and batteries and everything else in the technology realm where they're trying to catch us or passing us.

This is going to be just another place where we lose our edge.

And we are an incredibly...

We are incredibly dependent on our weather forecasts because our country is so big and our weather is so dynamic.

We really need these forecasts to be the best they can be in order for our economy to hum, for us to have the kind of efficiency and effectiveness that we've gotten used to.

You know, we used to not be able to

anticipate when a big storm would come and we'd have all kinds of flight cancellations and people would be stranded in all kinds of places and now we can see those things coming and we can plan for them the same thing happens you know if there's a storm and our ports need to shut down we can plan for that there are really important business needs that these weather forecasts rely on and we've been a good partner globally in the world meteorological organization

And we partnered with lots of other countries.

And now we're going to be letting them down and degrading our own forecasts at the same time.

So let me talk to you about two things that I think tell the story.

First is during the first Trump administration, some of you probably remember that time when the President Trump took out a Sharpie and changed the hurricane forecast