The political motivation is to portray the government as incapable of doing anything other than defense, so that the functions can be outsourced to the private sector.
Expect a solution to appear shortly after the regime changes.
The people who want to wreck the NWS don't want it outsourced to them. They still want the government to pay for producing all of the weather data and forecasts, then they want the government to designate them the exclusive distributor of that information so they can charge whatever they want.
You still have to pay for those CDNs. If you think this is a red/blue issue you haven’t been following along, though.
Obama allocated funds specifically for satellites, but reduced the operating budget [1]. Trump actually increased funding for several areas as part of the stopgap funding in 2018, particularly for satellites [2].
There are other examples over the decades of course, but something that seems to be a trend is the specificity. Satellites are flashy and exciting and get funding from politicians. Servers? Meh... why don’t they just get a couple extra machines? My laptop is fast as hell and only cost like $600. Bandwidth? Why don’t they just get whatever internet I have at home? That costs like $100/m and the Por— I mean the CNBC videos start immediately.
This why I'm so excited about Cloud in the public sector. Its so easy to defer upgrades on a server fleet, even though it might cost someone more money later on.
The Public Cloud provides a monthly expense that just becomes part of the operation budget.
It's exciting to think about the innovation to government services as an end-result.
> The Public Cloud provides a monthly expense that just becomes part of the operation budget.
Ops budgets aren't infinite. In this example, if the cloud egress costs kept rising due to demand then the weather service would still have to find ways to restrict usage.
(Use four different CDNs.)
The political motivation is to portray the government as incapable of doing anything other than defense, so that the functions can be outsourced to the private sector.
Expect a solution to appear shortly after the regime changes.