A lot of folks are out there trying to politicize the recent disasters like Hurricane Irene. As Steve Benen notes, there's this bizarre attack on the National Weather Service coming from some Republican sources. It isn't so much that they want to eliminate it or stop paying for it as that they want it to stop giving away its data — paid for by our tax dollars — for free.
There are many private, for-profit weather services out there. None of them are as accurate as the National Weather Service…not even close. They can occasionally point to instances where their forecasts have been more on-target but that's always a matter of highlighting the one time in a hundred that they outperformed the N.W.S. and ignoring the 99 where they either were less accurate or (more likely) merely passed on the N.W.S. prediction. In any case, what the private firms largely do is to take the N.W.S. data and further refine or localize it. I don't think any of them bake from scratch.
Two agendas seem to be at work here. The lesser is that some Republicans appear to object to the National Weather Service because it's a government agency that does its job well at a reasonable cost. Moreover, it's one into which they cannot inject a "Heckua job, Brownie" crony who'll drag its efficiency down to the point where they can cite it as an example of how the government can't do anything right. The other agenda is to try and use the N.W.S. to make a greater profit for private industry.
In 2005, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill to prohibit the National Weather Service from releasing its data and forecasts to the public. Now remember, this is a service that we pay for and which is available to anyone for free. Santorum didn't like that. He wanted to make that information available only to private companies like Accu-Weather, which would then repackage and resell it. His premise was that it was "unfair competition" for a government agency to give away something that others could charge for. Needless to say, his bill went nowhere but it was probably successful from his vantage point. Before he introduced it, he got an awful lot of campaign donations from the Accu-Weather people.