Other communities around the country may find themselves just as exposed for the next catastrophe, emergency managers and scientists warned — pointing to the soaring toll of climate change and the Trump administration’s steep cuts to weather and disaster spending.
Those cuts may not have played a direct role in the death toll from the central Texas floods, a point the
White House argued strenuously Monday while maintaining that “the National Weather Service did its job” in predicting the rising waters.
Meteorologists and climate scientists
also praised NWS for its accurate, timely forecasts.
But the weather service and its parent organization are reeling from mass layoffs and early retirements pushed by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, and the sprawling tax bill that he
signed last week canceled more than $200 million in spending that was supposed to improve weather forecasting and make communities more resilient to disasters.
Federal grants to help communities afford flood warning systems are also drying up after the Trump administration halted two main programs that once funded such work. And the White House acknowledged Monday that it’s
still weighing the fate of the nation’s premier disaster responder, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, more than five months after Trump said that
“I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”
Even without final answers about the cause of the Texas death toll, one longtime emergency manager said one fact is clear: “That many people did not need to die,” said Michael Coen, who served as FEMA’s chief of staff during the Biden and Obama administrations. He said Kerr County should have invested in better flood defenses or, at the very least, relocated camping cabins away from the river.
