Military bases in the path of Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm on Monday, are taking immediate action ahead of its expected landfall this week, as the Department of Defense continues to grow its recovery efforts from Helene's deadly damage.

Air Force Reserve hurricane pilots, based out of the 403rd Wing at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, gathered data and provided it to government meteorologists that showed Milton has grown from a tropical storm to a devastating hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It is projected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday.

"Data from an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft indicate that Milton has strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane," the National Hurricane Center said in an update Monday. "The maximum sustained winds are estimated to be 160 mph (250 km/h) with higher gusts."

The news of the devastating hurricane's projected landfall this week comes as National Guard and active-duty soldiers converged on the southeastern U.S. last week to continue recovery and clean-up efforts after the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene -- the second-deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in the past 50 years, according to CNN, with at least 232 deaths reported across six states.

MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa is right in Milton's path, National Weather Service projections showed, and base officials ordered widespread evacuations Monday.

The vast majority of base services, schools and other resources were also scheduled to close on Tuesday.

"Unfortunately, we've done this before," Col. Edward Szczepanik, commander of MacDill’s 6th Air Refueling Wing, said in a video statement on Facebook. "So, let's be good teammates and help each other out so that we can all close the base and weather the storm."

MacDill also evacuated 12 of its KC-135 aircraft to McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas, Rose Riley, a Department of the Air Force spokeswoman, said.

The 482nd Fighter Wing at Homestead Air Reserve Base south of Miami also began relocating aircraft, moving seven of its F-16 fighter jets to San Antonio, Texas, Riley added.

Navy officials announced Monday that they were also taking precautionary measures ahead of the storm.

Officials said in a statement to Military.com that three Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers at Naval Station Mayport in Jacksonville on Florida's northeastern coast -- the USS Donald Cook (DDG 75), the USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116) and the USS Lassen (DDG 82) -- would be moved out to sea on Monday.

Other ships at Naval Station Mayport will be anchored in "heavy weather mooring positions." Aircraft will also be evacuated or hangared at the base.

It’s against this increasingly alarming situation that there’s growing awareness of the right’s long-held desires to gut NOAA, the very agency that has been so critical to helping residents and authorities brace for storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton, as well as understand the realities of climate change. But with a second Trump term a very real possibility, threats to NOAA carry new significance. That’s because Project 2025, the right-wing extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, explicitly calls for NOAA’s break-up. That plan can be found on page 674, which describes NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

“It should be broken up and downsized,” Project 2025 says of the agency, adding that its functions “could be provided commercially, likely at lower
cost and higher quality.” The document then acknowledges the important work of the National Hurricane Center but asserts that it should nonetheless be reviewed.

As The Atlantic pointed out in a piece this summer, privatizing the work of NOAA could make weather forecasts less accessible and undermine American scientists’ ability to collaborate with international colleagues. But even if NOAA was not fully eliminated, experts say Project 2025’s other proposals could significantly harm the agency. “There are lots of ways they go after an agency without calling for its immediate elimination, and I think they are hiding behind the fact that they haven’t explicitly called for elimination,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the nonpartisan FactCheck.org. “These different offices are working together very closely to provide…both short-term as well as long-range information to help inform weather and climate predictions,” Cleetus added. “So the idea that you would dismantle it and it would still continue to be able to provide the service, that’s just not accurate.”

This makes investing in NOAA—not dismantling it—crucial. Last week, the Biden administration announced $22.78 million to support research on water-driven climate impacts.

But confronting the realities of climate change—and supporting officials who do—does not seem like a priority for those in Trump’s orbit. Consider my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen’s recent dispatch from a New York Times climate event at which Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, dismissed the realities of climate science. “I enjoy my high-carbon lifestyle,” Roberts told the audience.