Barry Myers

Barry Myers was nominated by Trump to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2017. At the time of his nomination, Myers was the CEO of AccuWeather, a privately owned, for-profit weather-forecasting company. Under Myers leadership, Accuweather had lobbied to restrict the National Weather Service, a governmental service which provides free weather forecasting, from providing the service and competing with AccuWeather’s business.

As Michael Lewis, author of The Fifth Risk, pointed out in an interview with NPR, Myers had “been on a two-decade mission to prevent the National Weather Service from communicating with the public so that AccuWeather can do it instead. And that’s how AccuWeather gets paid. And so he has had bills introduced in Congress to essentially forbid the National Weather Service from doing anything but warning right in advance of a weather event that might kill you.” As NPR’s Brian Naylor writes: “In other words, you want to know if it’s going to rain tomorrow? Or which way that hurricane is tracking? Well, buy our app, or subscribe to our forecasts.” Michael Lewis provides an example of this model; during a tornado in Moore, Oklahoma in March 2015, AccuWeather “issued a press release bragging that it had sent a tornado alert to its paying corporate customers in Moore twelve minutes before the tornado hit. The big point is that AccuWeather never broadcast its tornado warning.. While the tornado was touching down in Moore, AccuWeather’s network channel was broadcasting videos of … hippos, swimming.”

Myers nomination was stalled due to concerns over conflict of interest (his brother became CEO of AccuWeather when he stepped down) as well as his lack of an actual scientific background, which stands in contrast to NOAA administrators who typically have scientific expertise, such as oceanography, given the agency’s role in weather, climate, and fisheries research and regulation. It also came out in 2018 that AccuWeather, under Myers, ignored rampant, pervasive and severe sexual harassment.

The importance of an non-politicized NOAA can be seen by events in September 2020, when a National Weather Service forecasting office in Alabama assured residents that a hurricane would not hit the state, contradicting Mr. Trump’s insistence that it would. This led to “sharpie gate” where Trump asserted the hurricane would hit the state–despite the scientific analysis to the contrary. Senior aides at the Commerce Department forced NOAA to publicly rebuke its weather forecasters contradicting President Trump’s claims about the threat Hurricane Dorian posed to that state.