Trump’s cuts didn’t cause flood deaths — yet

Efforts by some, including prominent Democrats in Congress, to draw a line between the White House’s defunding of weather preparedness and the more than 100 Texas deaths invites the kind of debunking and backlash that can silence more legitimate criticism of the administration going forward. The fable of the boy who cried wolf is instructive here.

But here’s what people often forget regarding that fable: In the end, there really was a wolf. Part of the reason the administration’s anti-science funding cuts aren’t the culprit here is because they haven’t yet been fully implemented. Once they are, they likely will cost lives, as extreme weather events like this occur more frequently and the federal government is less equipped to respond.

In that sense, the Texas deaths aren’t a smoking gun in the present tragedy but rather a cautionary tale about the future. That’s why Congress must confront the anti-science sabotage in which this president is so fully engaged.

The freak rainstorm that caused the Guadalupe River in central Texas to rise more than 25 feet in less than an hour swept away at least 108 lives as of the latest count Tuesday morning, with almost two-dozen more still missing. Roughly a quarter of the victims were from an all-girls’ Christian summer camp that was hit by the flooding.

Seizing on the fact that the administration has ordered severe funding and staffing cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service and other weather-related federal offices, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a few other Democrats have called for investigations into whether those cuts contributed to the flood’s deadly element of surprise.

“Disgusting!” responded one administration official to that suggestion.

Spare us the faux outrage. President Donald Trump has routinely politicized (and lied about) natural disasters from the California wildfires to tornadoes and hurricanes to the COVID pandemic, to the point of threatening to withhold federal aid from Democrat-run states whose citizens were suffering. This particular White House has less standing than any in modern history to lecture anyone about responsibility, empathy or humanity in the wake of tragedies.

Still, Schumer & Co. appear to have jumped the gun on this one. While there are staffing shortages at the NWS and related entities as part of Trump’s downsizing, all indications are that, given the unpredictability and severity of the flood, the federal systems worked as well as they reasonably could have.

This time.

But what happens with the next such event, once Trump’s staffing and funding cuts are fully implemented?

While the administration has already started pushing out staff at weather-related offices, the biggest cuts are yet to come. In the next budget year, for example, NOAA is slated to lose almost one-third of its budget, including the complete elimination of its primary research branch and the defunding of new aircraft that aid in studying weather patterns.

The Pentagon recently announced it will no longer share satellite data that scientists use to track hurricanes. The NWS (which is part of NOAA) will see a reduction in weather balloon launches, impeding a key tool in data-gathering for forecasts. NWS, NOAA and other offices that have already seen deep staffing cuts will see more under the next budget.

In addition to those cuts to short-term weather preparedness, the administration’s deep hostility toward research into the well-established fact of human-caused climate change threatens to hobble efforts at long-term mitigation of hurricanes, tornadoes and, yes, flash flooding.

While there’s no way to know for certain if climate change contributed directly to last week’s Texas flood, flash flooding generally has become far more common in recent years due to higher average temperatures globally (warmer air holds more moisture). A new Washington Post analysis of NWS data found 145 flood-related deaths in 2024, against a 25-year average of just 85 per year.

No serious scientists today dispute that humanity is contributing to global warming. Yet the Trump administration has moved at every turn to nix federal involvement in studying and addressing the phenomenon, most recently by taking down key websites that had been used to gather and convey public information on climate change.

Again: There’s no evidence that the tragedy that has befallen Texas wouldn’t have done so, and taken just as many lives, absent all of this anti-science obstinance from this administration. This time.

But the more this president is allowed to systematically dismantle weather and climate science at the federal level, the more likely it is that blame for future deaths from flooding (and hurricanes and tornadoes and wildfires) will be legitimately laid at this White House’s doorstep.