In 1890–91 Congress moved the US weather service from the Army to a civilian Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture, at President Harrison's request

According to the National Weather Service's official history timeline (weather.gov), Congress, "at the request of President Benjamin Harrison, passes an act transferring the meteorological responsibilities of the Signal Service to the newly-created U.S. Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture." This ended roughly two decades of military control over American weather forecasting, which had begun in 1870 as an Army Signal Service operation (claim-us-national-weather-service-born-1870-inside-army-signal-service).

The transfer coincided with the end of Adolphus Greely's directorship of the Signal Corps' Weather Bureau (1887–1891). The move is what turned the weather service into a civilian scientific agency, the institutional line that runs through to today's National Weather Service.

The NWS's own timeline states the fact of the transfer and its sponsor but gives no explicit rationale for the change. Secondary sources gesture at "civilian control" as the motive, but the primary timeline checked at capture does not state a reason, so this note asserts only what the primary supports. The open question of why the move happened is routed to question-why-was-the-weather-bureau-moved-to-agriculture-in-1890-91.