Here's what it would take to privatize the National Weather Service

Recent cuts across the federal government have raised questions about whether President Donald Trump's administration will aim to dismantle and privatize the National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint of policy proposals published during the presidential campaign and intended to guide the Trump administration should it win a second term contained language suggesting that NOAA "should be broken up and downsized" and that the NWS "should fully commercialize its forecasting operations."

Trump disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign, but Russell Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, was one of the architects of the plan.

A move to privatize the NWS could put Americans in danger and might force them to pay for life-threatening weather and climate information, according to experts.

Critical information amid an extreme weather event -- such as storm surge levels and wind speeds during a hurricane or warnings for possible tornado activity -- may not be readily available to the public if NOAA and the NWS were no longer functioning as government entities, the experts said.

The "overreaching" goal of government should be providing basic health and safety information to protect human lives and property, Jan Null, a professor of meteorology at San Jose State University, told ABC News.

"That's in the core mission statement of the National Weather Service -- to save lives and property," Null said.

The NWS provides basic, integral information with the aim to protect the public rather than make a profit, said ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee.

Currently, with a $1.3 billion annual operating budget, the NWS costs each American about $4 per year.

In comparison, the United States spends more than $800 billion on its annual defense budget.

The weather service budget encompasses operations, facilities, research and "expensive yet essential" hardware -- such as a network of 159 weather radars and coast-to-coast surface observation sites, Zee said.

"The return on investment is about 73 to 1," Null said.

The agency collects and analyzes more than 6.3 billion observations per day and releases about 1.5 million forecasts and 50,000 warnings per year.

"I don't see any way that the private industry could replicate that," Null said.

The weather app built into smartphones relies on NWS data, as do local schools, police, fire houses, city planners and emergency service directors, Zee said. The weather service also works closely with the U.S. military.

"It runs all weather, everywhere, because it's free," Zee said.

The NWS has been tracking and warning about weather for 150 years. But this isn't the first time the federal government has floated the idea of privatizing the weather service.

In 1995, an act was introduced in Congress proposing to dismantle the entire Department of Commerce, which includes the National Weather Service.

Twenty years later, in 2005, a bill referred to as the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 aimed to prevent the National Weather Service from providing information to the public that the private sector could supply.

Neither bill was passed.

"Time after time these proposals hit roadblocks because Congress realized how valuable the National Weather Service is," Zee said.

With the emergence of technological advances in meteorology came the birth of private weather companies, many of which are beginning to acquire their own satellites, according to reports.

But even AccuWeather, a private-sector forecasting media company, does not support a plan to fully privatize the NWS, according to a statement released last year, stating that a “multi-sector approach to weather forecasting” is the practice to save lives and property from weather and climate-related events.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during his confirmation hearing in January that while he won’t dismantle the agency, he thinks the NWS can “deliver the project more efficiently and less expensively.”

When asked whether he agreed with proposals outlined in Project 2025 to privatize some of NOAA’s operations, Lutnick responded, “No.”

NOAA is preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration's mandate for "reductions in force," multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. In addition, officials are exploring the early termination of leases on a portion of the 620 facilities run by NOAA across the country, Democrats and former NOAA leadership officials said in a news conference last month.

Moreover, the NWS recently announced that it would eliminate or reduce weather balloon launches in eight northern locations.

The cuts are fueling concerns that NOAA's ability to deliver lifesaving services, such as forecasting, will suffer as a result.