Having been thoroughly lambasted on X over the weekend for her takes speculating with a rhetorical wink and nudge that Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) caused the deaths of nearly 100 people (as of this blog) in Texas floods, CNN senior national security analyst and former Obama official Juliette Kayyem used appearances on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to double down on this just-asking-questions escapade.
Her first attempt came Saturday afternoon just before 5:00 p.m. Eastern after a press conference with federal, state, and local officials in the Hill Country:
Fill-in co-host Erica Hill joined in on the just-asking-questions crusade, telling viewers “multiple things can be true at once” as officials ought to “be actively involved in rescue missions” and “mourn those lives that were lost” while also finding a culprit or villain, which she masked as just “ask[ing] those questions” because....climate change.
Kayyem replied that, in essence, people complaining about those like her going “political” should just get over it (click “expand”):
KAYYEM: [P]eople will say that that’s political or whatever, but actually, you’re hearing it from the parents, you’re hearing it from the community and you know — and you heard about faith and faith driving this community through. But part of what faith is, is also recognizing that that danger will come again and we owe it to future generations to do better in terms of either the alerts by the locals or, of course, changes to the federal government disaster system. I am — I am — being honest here, I am — I’m looking at the data. I cannot answer the question yet. Were cuts directly responsible? I know what’s happened to the Texas National Weather Service and NOAA. I know what weather — and weather reporters and locals there are saying.
HILL: Yeah.
KAYYEM: And also, we don’t know what the time frame is in terms of did National Weather Service — you know, consistently, I saw the alerts.
HILL: Sure.
KAYYEM: They were consistently getting more panicked, obviously. Did — was there just too much of a delay? There — those girls — you know, obviously the campsites is what were focused on, but there are other areas. There may have been not enough time regardless, but I don’t think we should pretend that we have nothing to learn.
Kayyem returned in the 9:00 p.m. Eastern hour with this set-up from Situation Room co-host Wolf Blitzer: “[S]ome officials have blamed the National Weather Service Forecast for a lack of information.”
Even though he had just hung up, Kayyem lectured Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) — one of the House members whose constituents were affected — to use his “oversight capacity to do the honest lessons learned, not to place blame, but because there will be more floods and there will be more damage.”
She then floated the “depletions in the National Weather Service and NOAA...because of DOGE and firing” as the sources of blame for the casualties as merely “one theory or one explanation” even though “we don’t know right now.”
“[W]hat worries a lot of us who watch this is that those decisions will be made not on merit, not on need, not on what or harm, but will be based on political calculations and because we don’t know what the White House has in mind. Disasters are always political. We should all, you know — there’s nothing surprising about our times when it comes to politics — I mean, to disasters. Disasters are the fight for limited resources during times of need,” she added.
Incredibly, Kayyem returned for more on Sunday, starting with CNN This Morning. After going through the hoops of how the state, local, and federal agencies work together on search, rescue, recovery, and rebuilding phases, CNN News Central co-host Boris Sanchez turned to DOGE and Trump as the entities to blame because, in this ecosystem, someone has to be the villain (click “expand”):
SANCHEZ: And, Juliette, to the point about staffing at the offices of the National Weather Service and the folks that are in charge of making sure that these warnings get to where they need to go in time for folks to make it out, what is your view on that? Are they properly staffed to handle this kind of major weather event when many of these offices, these NWS offices around the country, they no longer operate 24/7?
KAYYEM: I’ve been one of many screaming from the rooftops that these are government capacities that you only miss when you need them, right? That you may say, oh, we can just cut NWS or NOAA and that’s fine. That’s just part of the DOGE process, but we will find out whether there is a direct connection between what was happening to NWS and NOAA and warnings. I’ve seen some of the what we call tick-tocks (ph), and it appears that NWS and NOAA were doing these alerts. What we don’t know is why were there gaps in local response? It may be this was such a historic storm, no one could have done anything. But this is something that we have to learn more generally. Unless you believe this is the last major climate disaster the United States is ever going to have, we need to focus on weather, science, alerts, early warning systems, and the capacity to get people out so that they can survive. Human life is all that matters in these disasters. Time is short. We need to invest in the capacities that save people’s lives. It’s not just weather. It’s, of course, FEMA, Coast Guard, local and state capacity. This is something that, you know — look, you know, no government thinks that they every — let me put it a different way. Every administration ends up having to deal with disasters. And the more that we can invest in preparing and anticipating them, the fewer horrors than what we’re seeing this weekend will happen as we see them and so, we’ll find out specifically about this. But more generally, we need to invest in these systems to protect us from the climate harms that are surely going to come in the weeks and months and years ahead.
A few hours later, she cropped up again with Sanchez for a similar discussion, fretting Trump will make disaster recoveries more “partisan” not true “investment in science, and understanding what is happening to weather and how to protect communities when it comes early alert systems and of course investments in the Department of Homeland Security that are very much focused on border and not on emergency management.”
Kayyem took a break until the 7:00 p.m. Eastern hour when she insisted “nobody knows” anything for certain yet, but promptly scoffed at beliefs that disasters happen. In her mind, everything is preventable:
I do not buy into the argument that there’s nothing that could have been done. This is a hundred-year storm. We’ve got decades and decades of disaster management to protect children like this. So, everyone needs to stop pretending that either the other party did it or this was not preventable — this tragedy. We have lessons to be learned...[T]he assessment by the President or the governor or outsiders that we know is not true. It’s just not and we need to really find out what happened, because this is beyond a tragedy, it’s — I’m speechless. We should not— we are better at this. And something horrible went wrong.
She continued, speculating about whether a coordinator position having been open at the local National Weather Service office caused the tragedy, citing “a lot of discussion about coordination positions at the National Weather Service that were not available that is translating the flash flood warnings into action” to really make sure they paid attention (i.e. looked at their phones or weather radios).
This went on and closed with another disgusting rhetoric wink:
Situation Room co-host Pamela Brown backed her up, saying it was “interesting” she brought those up and wondered if this disaster will cause President Trump to have “any second thoughts” if the federal government could have done anything “to save these young girls.”
CNN saved highlights from this appearance to reair multiple times overnight into Monday on both an edition of CNN Newsroom International and Early Start.
Kayyem returned live on CNN News Central with co-host Kate Bolduan having the two go down the path of climate fatalist (click “expand”):
BOLDUAN: [W]hen people say, it’s something — I’ve never seen anything like this, it is something — saying those words is something that people are going to have to get more and more used to saying because of the nature of the climate crisis, the effects of which we’re already seeing, harsher, faster, bigger flooding, and that also impacts preparation for, which is exactly kind of what you’re getting at it. It’s — as the ball game changes, they all need to start looking at it a slightly different way and part of — and Alayna was talking about this, there are questions being raised about the impact — the role of the federal government in this preparation. And kind of the nature of the federal government cuts that the administration is putting in place.
(....)
KAYYEM: I think everyone needs to take a step back and realize that our investments in preparing these communities to climate disasters, you don’t even — we don’t even debate climate change. It’s a commitment that we owe these children, but it is what government is about. This is when people need government, when their homes are destroyed, their children are lost, and we need to reinvest in that preparedness. You know, and I’m going to be a little bit personal here, I wrote a book called The Devil Never Sleeps, about sort of ongoing large disasters. But it actually is aligned from a woman who’s very faithful from Joplin, Missouri. They lost over a hundred people in a tornado over a decade ago, but the second part of her line is more important. So The Devil Never Sleeps. But he only wins if we don’t do better next time. And people of all face and no face have to commit to that because we will see these disasters again and again and again.
To see the relevant CNN transcripts, click here (for July 5), here (for July 6), and here (for July 7).