Because of technological advances, there is very little reason for taxpayers to shell out nearly $1 billion annually to finance a national weather service. As John Lott explains at Foxnews.com, private forecasters exist and (gee, what a surprise) they do a better job than government bureaucrats:

Despite dire predictions from the National Hurricane Center, no hurricanes hit the U.S. last year. …private weather forecasting companies predicted the threat to New Orleans well before the National Weather Service. In fact, AccuWeather issued a forecast that the hurricane would hit New Orleans 12 hours earlier than the government service. …It is not just for hurricanes that private forecasting comes out on top. A new study by Forecast Watch, a company that keeps track of past forecasts, found that from Oct. 1, 2006, through June 30, 2007, the government’s National Weather Service did very poorly in predicting the probability of rain or snow. Comparing the National Weather Service to The Weather Channel, CustomWeather, and DTN Meteorlogix, Forecast Watch found that the government’s next-day forecast had a 21 percent greater error rate between predicted probability of precipitation and the rate that precipitation actually occurred. In looking at predicting snow fall from December 2006 through February 2007, the National Weather Service’s average error was 24 percent greater. “All private forecasting companies did much better than the National Weather Service,” the report concludes.