A 2025 Forecast

If you are staying up with the news, I’m thinking not about snow or hurricanes, but financial budget forecasts.

What I expect will happen is a protracted engagement across every congressional and senate committee about what areas of the government will be cut. When you leave out defense spending, social programs like Medicare and Social Security—plus interest payments on the national debt, there isn’t that much to be targeted to cut. For instance, foreign aid that is always been on the chopping block is only 1% of the national budget.

There will be much hand wringing and opinion pieces, lobbying and significant consternation about proposed cuts. Will the cuts actually happen? Yes, some cuts will certainly come, especially to social welfare programs. This New York Times article (an opinion piece) talks about only one small agency within the federal government, NOAA that includes the National Weather Service

Likely the entire organization won’t get the axe, but the author points to a truth that Europe has been pouring money into their weather system. Remember the hurricane season when your national TV forecasters would present “both the USA and European hurricane tracks?”  They do that since the European modeling has been better of late.

Hey, the hurricane season “officially” ended on November 30th!