The narrative formed quickly over the weekend: Blame President Donald Trump and conservatives.
Within hours of the deadly floods in Central Texas over the holiday weekend, headlines and pundits pointed fingers, not at nature or local preparedness, but at the president and his budget cuts.
But as the waters recede, the facts are surfacing, and they don’t support the left’s reflexive blame game. The National Weather Service did its job. That much is now clear, even to many critics.
According to Wired, “Forecasters began warning days before the storms arrived,” and “meteorologists at the National Weather Service issued flood warnings and river flood advisories.”
According to the Associated Press, the NWS “had extra staff on duty” in anticipation of the severe weather.
Despite this, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos declared on air that there were “significant staffing shortfalls to the National Weather Services offices in the region.”
George Stephanopoulos on @ThisWeekABC: “We’re also learning there were significant staffing shortfalls to the National Weather Services offices in the region.” pic.twitter.com/1xwf7DkQuq
— Brent Baker ???????????????? ???????? (@BrentHBaker) July 6, 2025
That claim, aired on a national broadcast, directly contradicts the AP’s reporting. And it wasn’t just Stephanopoulos pushing the narrative.
Media outlets like NBC News and Mother Jones ran headlines suggesting Trump-era DOGE cuts to the NWS may have played a role in the devastation.
But Wired, a publication not known for defending conservative positions, made it clear: “Meteorologists say the National Weather Service did its job in Texas.”
It bears repeating. The NWS was prepared. It deployed warnings. And it was staffed adequately during the storm. In a lengthy thread on X, the Department of Homeland Security actually provided an hour-by-hour accounting of the agency’s warnings, with the receipts proving advisories were sent out early and often.
The accusation that Trump’s budget cuts somehow caused the flooding is not only cheap, it is also unfounded. Predictably, that didn’t stop activists, pundits, and even medical professionals from weaponizing the tragedy.
One Texas pediatrician went viral after hoping “MAGA residents get what they voted for.” The doctor was suspended and removed from her position following the rant.
Hi @BlueFishMD , any comment??? https://t.co/e8KZc8YF3H
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 6, 2025
It was a ghoulish wish made in the name of political revenge. And it exemplified the broader response from many on the left, one focused more on partisan point-scoring than facts or compassion for those lost and missing.
Michael Shellenberger, a prominent independent journalist who began his career as a left-wing climate crusader, tore into this reaction.
“Trump cuts to the National Weather Service, and climate change, are to blame for the Texas flood deaths, said the media yesterday,” Shellenberger wrote on X. “Today, most admit NWS did its job.”
Climate change caused the Texas floods that killed at least 27 people, say the media. No, it didn't. The lack of a flood warning system did. We've managed floods for millennia, and deaths from them declined 80% in the last 100 years. Climate reporters are trapped in a weird cult pic.twitter.com/Gvu4PdErDt
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 5, 2025
He added that the real problem was the lack of a flood warning system. Reporters who blame climate change, he said, “are trapped in a weird cult.”
Citing Roger Pielke Jr., a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, Shellenberger noted that flood fatality rates in Texas have actually dropped over time.
“As the population of Texas increased from ~9.2 million in 1958 to ~28.6 million in 2018,” Pielke found, “overall flood deaths remained fairly constant, meaning that the fatality rate dropped by about two-thirds.”
This data undermines the claim that climate change is making floods deadlier in the region.
Climate change caused the catastrophic floods that tore through Central Texas over the last few days, killing at least 27 people, including nine children, and turning calm rivers into violent torrents, according to the media.
At Camp Mystic in Kerr County, the Guadalupe River… pic.twitter.com/bMiO9yPvre
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 5, 2025
More importantly, it highlights the role of infrastructure, preparedness, and population growth in disaster outcomes.
Shellenberger went further, pushing back on the notion that this month’s floods were unprecedented. The flooding was certainly extreme:
72-hour rainfall (radar estimates) across the Texas Hill Country really illustrates the highly localized, mesoscale nature to the locations of extreme rainfall and flash #flooding. #TXwx #FlashFloodAlley pic.twitter.com/KKLHfcELe4
— Kathryn Prociv (@KathrynProciv) July 6, 2025
But Shellenberger cited centuries of documented flooding in Central Texas — a region long known as “flash flood alley.”
In fact, devastating floods have occurred there as far back as 1846, just months after Texas became a U.S. state.
One account from a University of Kansas dissertation described how the Guadalupe River “would often rise fifteen feet above its normal stand … carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees.”
Even then, local streams became “raging torrents which could be crossed only by swimming.”
This historical context matters. It reminds us that Texas flooding is not a modern phenomenon caused by carbon emissions or redundant positions at government agencies.
Storms are a persistent and natural risk, one that requires local government to be proactive when given good information. That’s exactly what the NWS provided in this case.
They did not fail. They issued warnings. They staffed up. They delivered the alerts needed.
The tragedy that followed was not due to negligence by the federal government. It was a result of extreme weather and, perhaps more importantly, a lack of municipal flood alert infrastructure. That’s a failure of local planning, not federal or even state forecasting.
It is cowardly and dishonest to blame the Trump-era cuts when the system worked as designed. Even the AP and Wired, not allies of the Trump administration, acknowledge as much.
This is not to say there is no room for improvement in weather readiness. But those improvements must be grounded locally in facts, not in politics.
What happened in Texas was a tragedy. But it should not be twisted into a political spear.
The National Weather Service, despite some staff vacancies unfairly amplified by outlets such as NBC News, rose to the challenge.
As meteorologist Chris Vagasky told NBC News, “The forecasting was good. The warnings were good. It’s always about getting people to receive the message … It appears that is one of the biggest contributors — that last mile.”
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