If you read TFA though, the ambiguity you're citing doesn't seem to be the line they're waffling over. The santorum bill the new NOAA chief supported in the pa

If you read TFA though, the ambiguity you're citing doesn't seem to be the line they're waffling over. The santorum bill the new NOAA chief supported in the past was pretty explicit about allowing _no_ competitive service, which would allow them to preclude even the most basic data sharing. We've shown during the last N crises that american weather forecasting is already notably behind european models, and our lack of proper prediction and information dissemination has been very visible over the last decade of storm recoveries of varying success. I simply don't see the private sector incentives that would lead to fixing this, and see the competition argument as just another avenue to allow existing corporations to extract profit from even the most basic aspects of human safety.