Rick Santorum's campaign could be clouded by 7-year-old attack on National Weather Service
By BOB KING | 1/5/12 6:53 PM EST
Will Rick Santorum’s lost crusade against the National Weather Service rain on his suddenly hot presidential campaign?
While a seemingly obscure issue next to abortion, gay marriage and tax cuts, weather forecasting inspired a defining controversy for the tail end of Santorum’s U.S. Senate career: his sponsorship of a 2005 bill aimed at hobbling the federal agency’s ability to compete with commercial forecasters like AccuWeather.
The bill went nowhere but brought Santorum a nationwide pasting from bloggers, weather enthusiasts, airline pilots and other critics. Some of them noted that executives from AccuWeather — a company based in State College, Pa., in Santorum's home state — had donated thousands of dollars to his campaigns over the years.
Doubling down later in the year, Santorum also accused the weather service's National Hurricane Center of flubbing its forecasts for Hurricane Katrina's initial landfall in Florida, despite the days of all-too-prescient warnings the agency had given that the storm would subsequently strike the Gulf Coast.
In contrast, fellow Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who was chairing the Senate Commerce Committee's Disaster Prediction and Prevention Subcommittee, called the agency's work on Katrina “one of the most accurate hurricane predictions we have ever seen.”
Weather doesn't show up as a top issue on Santorum's presidential campaign website, and AccuWeather doesn’t appear in his 2012 campaign donations. But some of his opponents, such as the liberal website Daily Kos, have tried to revive memories of the 2005 legislation this week — including with headlines claiming inaccurately that Santorum had tried to “abolish” the weather service.
In fact, Santorum's failed legislation would have left the weather service intact, although with significantly reduced ability to distribute its information directly to the public.
Critics of the bill say the legislation reflects an outdated worldview — one that says government data should flow through profit-making middlemen, rather than being released freely to one and all.
“I think what you see out of Santorum — in particular the weather data thing — is that some private businesses should be anointed to make tons of money off the taxpayers,” said open-government advocate Carl Malamud. “That's a very 1970s, 1980s mind-set. That's a pre-Internet mindset.”
Malamud, who has pushed federal entities such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, Patent and Trademark Office, Smithsonian Institution and court system to make their data more freely available, called Santorum's bill “one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.”
Attempts to reach Santorum's campaign spokespeople about the issue were unsuccessful this week.
Under the bill, commercial weather providers like AccuWeather would have continued to get access to the weather service's data, while the federal agency would have been prohibited from providing “a product or service ... that is or could be provided by the private sector.” The legislation would have counteracted a 2004 policy change by the George W. Bush administration that had broadened the weather service's ability to create new products and release data, including over the Internet.
At the time, Santorum said the bill was needed to prevent the weather service from driving competitors out of business.
“It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free,” Santorum said in a statement when he introduced the bill. He said the bill would also force the weather service to focus on its “core missions,” such as improving its forecasts of hurricanes and other severe weather.
Opponents, including Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), argued that the bill threatened to deny vital information to residents of hurricane-threatened states by reverting the weather service to a “pre-Internet era.”