The devastating floods in Kerr County, Texas were breaking news on Sunday morning, and with it came desperate spin that somehow the human lives lost in the flood could be blamed on Trump budget cuts. On ABC’s This Week, former Democrat press secretary George Stephanopoulos launched into the claim of “staffing shortfalls” in National Weather Service offices in Texas:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Mireya, we're also learning that there were significant staffing shortfalls to the National Weather Service’s offices in the region.

MIRAYA VILLARREAL: You know, George, as of right now, the local county officials really didn't want to address that just yet. What they are telling us is they expected between four and six inches of rain. That is what weather experts told them. The National Weather Service as well. They also knew that in remote locations, they might get anywhere from eight to ten inches. But this amount of rain, in such a short amount of time, it was very difficult to navigate. And when the Department of Homeland Security Secretary was here just yesterday, she acknowledged this was an issue. She was going to take these concerns to the White House as well and try and see if there was anything they could do to revamp the system. She says the president is committed to it.

George wasn't paying any attention to the Associated Press account, which said the NWS had extra staff on the ground, according to local meteorologist Jason Runyen: 

The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, which delivers forecasts for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas, had extra staff on duty during the storms, Runyen said.

Where the office would typically have two forecasters on duty during clear weather, they had up to five on staff.

“There were extra people in here that night, and that’s typical in every weather service office — you staff up for an event and bring people in on overtime and hold people over,” Runyen said.

On CNN’s State of the Union, host Dana Bash relied on a “director of the NWS union” for her claims, as if a union officials was totally objective about federal job cuts:

BASH: And just talking about the federal government and even the local government, two Texas National Weather Service offices involved in forecasting and warning about flooding on the Guadalupe River are missing some key staff members.

A director of the NWS union told CNN that the Austin, San Antonio, office is missing a warning coordination meteorologist due to the Trump administration's buyouts. Do you have any indication whether those or other cuts helped play a role in the fact that the people in the flood zone were not prepared and certainly not evacuated?

REP JOAQUIN CASTRO (D-TX): No, I can't say that conclusively.

As the Maze Moore X account pointed out, last October, Bash was furiously spinning the other way after Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Any spin against the Democrats was "raw politics, and dangerous politics." Lara Trump came on the show to blame Biden-Harris FEMA money going to illegal aliens. How dare Lara spread "misinformation"!