On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump turned a big storm — Hurricane Helene, which battered a swath of the South including North Carolina and Georgia — into a political cudgel, repeatedly slamming the Biden administration’s federal government for what he described as failures of its response and recovery operation.
Today, with desperate search-and-rescue operations still underway in Central Texas, it is Trump’s federal government that will face scrutiny after flash floods killed more than 100 people.
Accountability rests with any leader at the helm during a disaster. Usually, a president’s first reaction is to promise the full support of the federal government. But Trump’s past and proposed cuts to pillars of the federal disaster-response system make this moment more complicated for him.
Democrats are already seeking to turn those cuts into immediate fodder for political attacks. But it’s too early to say with certainty whether the Trump administration or its predecessors shaped the disaster response in Texas. What we have right now are a lot of questions. Getting answers will be critical as storms like the one in Texas get stronger and more frequent because of climate change.
I’m usually in the business of telling you what we do know. But today, I want to do something a little different and lay out what we still hope to learn. I reached out to my colleague Christopher Flavelle to ask him what he thinks we need to understand about the floods and the federal government. Chris has deep experience covering climate and disaster management, and over the weekend he reported that when the floods hit, key roles were vacant at the National Weather Service’s offices in Texas. Here are the three questions we discussed.
Did staffing cuts at the National Weather Service affect the forecast?
The National Weather Service has been targeted for the staffing cuts pushed across the government by the Department of Government Efficiency. By this spring, a work force that had recently been as large as 4,000 people had lost nearly 600 of those workers. Chris reported that the Weather Service’s office in San Angelo, Texas, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by the flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, a staff forecaster and a meteorologist in charge. Its nearby San Antonio office, which forecasts the weather in other areas hit by the floods, was missing a science officer as well as a warning coordination meteorologist, who retired on April 30 after taking an early retirement package that the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees.