It's absolutely the goal. There has been a push from places like weather.com to privatize much of NOAA for years. Noaa's free information is really good so it

It's absolutely the goal. There has been a push from places like weather.com to privatize much of NOAA for years. Noaa's free information is really good so it makes the playing field a bit too level for private companies. They don't really offer a substantially better product than NOAA so it makes their product less valuable. A few years ago we had a company reach out to us saying they could give us hyper-localized forecasts for our ultra endurance events. After our first event using them I checked their data against NOAA. Surprise, their data was far less accurate than weather.gov. Every private weather service is using NOAA's dataset and then tweaking it or adding their own data. All of them.