Who's To Blame For Texas' Abysmal Flood Response?
The ongoing flood crisis in Texas has the members of the public who are paying attention rightfully outraged at the disjoined response from government at the local, state, and national level. The Trump administration (and Republicans more generally) has tried to sidestep questions of blame, but its fingerprints are all over this tragedy. Here’s a list of especially culpable actors.
Trump/Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s influence over federal decision-making has once again proven disastrous—this time for the National Weather Service (NWS). Mass layoffs linked to Musk’s DOGE initiative have led to a staffing collapse at the NWS Austin/San Antonio field office. Key personnel like Paul Yura (the office’s long-serving warning coordination meteorologist) and Victor Murphy (the climate services program manager for the Southern Region) were pushed to retire in late April. Furthermore, five of the eleven NWS weather balloons that would have been gathering essential forecasting data for the region each morning have been grounded due to staffing issues.
Regardless of Musk’s current relationship with Trump, there is a direct line from the pair’s joint assault on the government to Texas’ lamentable flood response.
Kristi Noem
We can trace a similar causal line from Kristi Noem’s June 11th directive and the delayed deployment of federal emergency services. By requiring her personal sign-off on grants or contracts over $100,000, the DHS Secretary all-but guaranteed FEMAS paralysis—a reality that current and former employees warned about.
These newly imposed “bureaucratic obstacles” meant that FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Teams weren’t deployed until July 7, a whole 72 hours after flooding began. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Noem also let hundreds of FEMA call center workers get laid off in the middle of this crisis. Between July 5 and July 7, the agency’s call response rate dropped from 99.7 percent to 15.9 percent while employees waited for contract approval.
David Richardson
Richardson—who, thanks to Noem, is currently in charge at FEMA despite having no background in disaster management—recently admitted that the agency has yet to form a full disaster response plan. Worse, Richardson rescinded FEMA’s current plan without offering any replacement. The fact that it took Richardson over a week to visit Central Texas reflects his callous commitment to “push things down to states,” even if lives are at stake.
Ted Cruz
As Texans faced catastrophic flooding, Senator Ted Cruz was vacationing in Greece. That alone is damning, given that Cruz was similarly AWOL when Winter Storm Uri devastated his state. But worse than the senator’s latest ill-timed vacation are his legislative efforts before taking off, according to Mother Jones:
But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.
Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150 million fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.
In true Cruz fashion, he’s choosing deregulation over disaster preparedness—leaving his constituents literally underwater while he guts the agencies that could help.
Greg Abbott
The Texas governor has drawn widespread condemnation for his continued efforts to sidestep accountability in the wake of this tragedy. Last Tuesday, he characterized an inquiry into “who is to blame” as “the word choice of losers,” in a bizarre attempt to equate the floods to a football game. This response casts doubt on how thorough any subsequent investigation will be, especially as Abbott continues to push back against “critics who have called for investigations into unfilled staff positions at [NWS] offices in Texas.“
RDP will continue to monitor the impacts of Trump’s disastrous disaster policy. Check out our tracker to stay up to date.
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Don’t forget that Noem was busy polling her Instagram followers about which picture of her should be the official photo in SD… while people died not being able to get phone or rescue help.
Clueless, callous and criminal!