Did Kristi Noem Just Make Up a Weather-Service Upgrade?
The Homeland Security secretary said Trump came into office promising an NWS upgrade, but no one seems to know what she's talking about
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The day after the Fourth of July flooding in Texas, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in Texas, saying at a news conference that Pres. Donald Trump was upgrading National Weather Service (NWS) technology.
Apparently, she just made it up. When Trump took office, she claimed, he said he wanted to fix federal weather alerts and notifications. If he did, there’s no indication he did so publicly.
Here’s the July 5 exchange, during Noem’s news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):
Q: Wasn't that a fundamental failure of the, of the federal government's responsibility to keep us safe?
Noem: But you know my background is — before I was in the secretary position here under the Trump administration — I was governor of South Dakota and served in Congress for eight years before I was governor, and so I will tell you that, for decades, for years, everybody knows that the weather is extremely difficult to predict, but also that the National Weather Service over the years at times has done well and at times we have all wanted more time and more warning and more alerts and more notification. That is something, and one of the reasons that, when President Trump took office, that he said he wanted to fix and is currently upgrading the technology and the National Weather Service has indicated that, with that and NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], that we needed to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many, many years, and that is the reforms that are ongoing there.”
She added later, “We know that everybody wants more warning time, and that’s why we’re working to upgrade the technologies that [have] been neglected far too long.”
I asked the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) to point me to when Trump took office and said he wanted to fix the technology. DHS did not respond.
I asked the White House whether they could identify any remarks by Trump about fixing or upgrading NWS or NOAA technology. The White House responded by asking whether I had asked DHS.
Online searches haven’t turned up anything about Trump saying he wanted to fix the technology. Nor is there any indication that the NWS or NOAA are undergoing any big, new, “upgrading” of the technology.
There’s apparently no mention of it on the Trump White House website:
I also did a search of Roll Call’s transcription website, factba.se, which turned up no remarks with keywords relevant to Noem’s claim.
Could Noem have simply offered her statement — regardless of its factuality, about agencies she doesn’t even oversee — simply to get off the spot? Her record of veracity is spotty, at best.
She gave an entirely false definition of habeas corpus under oath just a couple months ago. Then she called California officials “socialist.”
Just this weekend I revealed that the White House Bible study Noem attends teaches teaches the long-debunked antisemitic trope that the Jews killed Jesus. In other words, the simple explanation that Noem lied about the NWS can’t be ruled out.
But most media apparently just ignored both the possibility that a major upgrade was under way and the only alternate possibility, that Noem was lying. Even Trump-friendly media struggled to spin what she said.
Media Mishandling
Noem’s fuzziness didn’t make it easy for Fox.
She claimed Trump said he wanted to fix things. And that the technology is currently being upgraded, and that reforms are ongoing of an “ancient system … left in place” for years.
So which is it? Even Fox seemed unsure. The right-wing outlet headlined a video report from July 5 as “Trump admin has been wanting to ‘upgrade’ National Weather Service tech, Kristi Noem says in Texas flood press conference.” They included no video of Trump saying so.
Another Fox headline, from later that day, goes further. Now Trump doesn’t just want to upgrade, he’s aiming to upgrade. And Noem’s utterly unsubstantiated claim about neglect isn’t questioned or fact-checked, just caveated with quotation marks: “Deadly Texas flood exposes 'neglected' weather alert system Trump aims to modernize.”
That story, of course, doesn’t say what elements of the system were supposedly “neglected.” Data-gathering? Modeling? Forecast? Communications? Noem didn’t say and no one apparently asked.
The Fox story does relay Noem’s claim that the administration is working on NOAA and NWS updates, but with zero reference to any indication from prior to July 5 that such work was happening.
The Daily Beast did note that the “ancient” tech Noem complained about, by her own account, dated back at least to the first Trump administration.
But perhaps the biggest irony of all this blame-gaming is that there’s no indication anyone deserves any blame at the national level. Democrats have asked appropriate oversight questions about whether NWS or NOAA had their hands tied by Trump budget cutting or layoffs, but there’s been no credible reporting yet to indicate that.
Just the opposite, there was, early on, substantive reporting that said NWS did as well as any fully staffed, state-of-the-art system could have. Meteorologists told WIRED that the NWS forecasts and warnings were as accurate and timely as they could be.
Instead of defending NWS and NOAA, or even just asking for time for fact-finding, Noem apparently reflexively chose to feed the narrative that federal failings led to death and destruction.
It was appropriate for Democrats to ask whether budget or job cuts contributed, but some media mischaracterized that as fault-finding.
So, finally, two days later, on Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the administration’s forecasting. But Leavitt didn’t call out Noem’s implication that “ancient” systems were to blame or address Noem’s claim that Trump announced currently under-way upgrades.
In fact, both the NWS and its parent agency, the NOAA, routinely upgrade their systems.
And the most significant upgrades appear to have begun under Pres. Joe Biden, who Noem implied was at fault.
NWS Director Ken Graham in February posted about his ten priorities — “Ken’s 10” — for transforming the NWS. But Graham was appointed in 2022 and his ten priorities program dates back to 2023.
The NWS recently upgraded its entire radar network, spending $150 million to bring all 122 radars and the system up to date. That was completed in September 2024. The NOAA supercomputers were upgraded in 2023. So was the update to storm-surge forecasting.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is apparently right now upgrading NWS transmission lines from copper to wireless tech, but there’s no indication the copper lines in any way slowed or degraded NWS communications relevant to the Texas flood.
Trump himself said on Monday, “I wouldn’t blame Biden for it.”
And there are mounting suggestions that it was local officials who were slow to respond to the national warnings, and that local politicians screwed up by not implementing flood-warning systems to gauge river levels and warn nearby residents.
Ironically, the Trump administration does have some culpability, but the media aren’t addressing that amid the back-and-forth over whether Democrats are blaming the White House for NWS cuts. That culpability lies with Trump’s climate policies.
Extreme weather is occurring more frequently due to climate change. As I wrote over the weekend (at my snarky, NSFW Substack), Abbott and other Republicans have made climate change worse by boosting the oil industry and quashing clean-energy initiatives. Now more than ever, that definitely includes Trump. And it means the disasters will just get worse.
I’m a veteran journalist and TV news producer who’s worked at MSNBC — as co-creator of Up w/ Chris Hayes and senior producer for Countdown with Keith Olbermann — CNN, ABCNews, The Daily Show, Air America Radio, and TYT. My original reporting on Substack is made possible by a handful of paid subscribers. Thank you.
Who are we to doubt the Noem? Your reporting failed to forecast the government’s improved capacity to deliver weather maps and sharpies to the Unitary Executive, Sole Tariff Determiner, and Grand Weather Forecaster. If only he had those sharpies earlier in the day!
I’m a patron of TFN- I thought you only worked blue! I was waiting for sarcasm or the fbomb. Ha! In addition to this wonderful deep dive into the nonexistent upgrade, I do remember the DOD was going to cancel sharing info with the NWS and NOAA recently because *they* were upgrading and it would be a national security threat to share for cyber security reasons. They put it off for a month. I wonder if this is what Noem was conflating? Thanks for these, Jonathan. Always so good.