As powerful flash floods swept through Texas on Friday and over the weekend, killing more than 100 people, including at least 27 children, internet users questioned how such a catastrophe could occur, with speculation quickly turning toward recent staffing and budget cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
At a news conference on Friday, local officials claimed that NWS forecasts in the days leading up to the floods were inaccurate. On Saturday, Ron Filipkowski, the editor in chief of the progressive media company MeidasTouch, tweeted a brief video clip from that news conference highlighting the remarks of Texas Division of Emergency Management chief W. Nim Kidd, who said that the forecast predicted less rainfall than actually occurred, and Kerrville, Texas, City Manager Dalton Rice, who said “there wasn’t a lot of time” between the warnings and the devastating flooding. Along with the video, Filipkowski wrote in the tweet, “After media reports & experts warned for months that drastic & sudden cuts at the Nat Weather Service by Trump could impair their forecasting ability & endanger lives during the storm season, TX officials blame an inaccurate forecast by NWS for the deadly results of the flood.”
Others directly blamed the Trump administration for actions they claimed made NOAA and NWS inadequately prepared to forecast and prepare for the central Texas floods. “I have no difficulty saying that Trump and [Elon] Musk caused some of the 50+ flood deaths in Texas,” Sam Abramson, a left-wing political commentator, tweeted Sunday. “And here’s why: these two men with no expertise in disaster preparedness were told not to cut the positions they cut, and were told people would die if they did. And then people died.”
Meanwhile, Majid Padellan—a progressive internet personality known as “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” on his social media accounts—tweeted Sunday, “The devastating DOGE cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service left them incapable of accurately predicting the terrible floods that hit Texas. This tragedy was preventable. And I blame ONE person: trump.” He added, “He has BLOOD on his hands.”
Claims that the Trump administration made changes to NOAA or NWS that left the federal agencies inadequately prepared to forecast or warn of the flash flood event are misleading or missing context. The administration has proposed budget cuts for NOAA, but those would not kick in until October. As for staffing levels, the administration did offer some employees buyouts and dismissed probationary workers. But after the NWS lost 600 employees nationwide through layoffs and buyouts, the agency was also granted an exemption from Trump’s hiring freeze and authorization to hire 126 positions around the country thanks to the work of Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska and other U.S. representatives who were concerned about what the NWS and NOAA cuts.
A White House deputy press secretary told The Dispatch Fact Check in an email that there was “ample funding to staff positions” that were left vacant, and that the Office of Personnel Management had previously “considered and approved an exception to the hiring freeze for NWS positions,” she said.
The White House has proposed a $4.5 billion budget for NOAA in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1—a substantial decrease from the $6.1 billion that Congress appropriated to NOAA through the continuing resolution bill passed in March. This includes the proposed elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, a NOAA division specializing in climate-related research, which would see some of its research reassigned to NWS. However, for any of these changes to take effect come October, Congress will need to first vote to approve the NOAA budget. The budget reconciliation bill Trump signed into law on July 4 included a cut of $150 million in NOAA funding, but that also does not take effect until October.
Staffing reductions did not play a role in the NWS weather forecasts for central Texas this weekend, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the labor union representing NWS employees. “There are indeed critical [NWS] staffing shortages across the country,” Fahy said, but he added that was not a factor in NWS preparation for this weekend. There were “minor positions missing, but that did not impact the quality of the work that was done by the people that were there.”
Fahy said the local NWS offices in San Antonio and San Angelo, Texas, were adequately staffed, and duties handled by positions left vacant—three major roles and a handful of minor roles—were reassigned to other employees: “All those roles got picked up by other people. … Between the San Antonio and San Angelo offices, there was 23 meteorologists,” which he described as an “all hands-on deck situation.”
While the NWS forecast on July 2 did not anticipate the amount of rain central Texas experienced early on July 4, the service did properly forecast the potential for flash flooding about 12 hours before it arrived. Bruce Jones, the chief meteorologist at Midland Radio Corporation, a radio manufacturing company that makes NOAA weather radios, said NOAA and NWS followed standard procedures and didn’t fail to sufficiently warn of flash flood risks. “I don’t think there was anything unusual about the way they warned for this event,” he told The Dispatch Fact Check. “Several days in advance, they highlighted the potential for heavy rain and flooding. The flash flood watch was issued a good 12 hours before the flooding began. The flash flood warning was issued early in the morning, indicating that flash flooding was underway or expected to happen soon. He added that “the warnings were disseminated by a NOAA weather radio and by cell phone alerts.”
A challenging component to this disaster was the terrain. “Texas Hill Country, unfortunately, is a prime location for flash floods because there’s very little topsoil on top of those limestone hills,” Jones said, explaining that, without the topsoil to absorb the runoff water, “any rainfall runs off fairly rapidly.” This creates the perfect recipe for flash floods to form, he added. “Hilly terrain is going to feed all the water down into the streams and gullies, and the streams feed the rivers, and the rivers are what caused the flooding in Texas.”
Edward Vizy, a research scientist associate at the University of Texas–Austin, also pointed to the limestone floor of many waterways, which not only is unable to absorb water, but causes rushing waters to flow faster. According to analysis from the New York Times, the flow rate for central Texas’ Guadalupe River exceeded the average for Niagara Falls early Friday morning. Just 10 hours earlier, its flow rate was similar to that of a small stream.
Vizy told The Dispatch Fact Check that “a copious amount of moisture” made bad weather conditions worse. He pointed to Tropical Storm Barry, which hit the east coast of Mexico on June 29 and brought unprecedented levels of moisture to the area. The system would have passed through if it were winter because the cold weather would move it along, Vizy said. But “in the summertime, those jet streams and those flow patterns are much farther north … and there was nothing to move the moisture away from the particular area.”
He further emphasized the irregularity of heavy moisture in the hill country, stating. “This is the largest rainfall rates I’ve seen,” since he moved there in 2008, he said.
Vizy also pointed to the lack of a flood control system on the Guadalupe River. About 20 percent of dams in the United States are built with flood protection as one of their main purposes, according to the National Inventory for Dams, but not the Guadalupe. “There wasn’t a dam or lake control and so there was a huge wall of water that increased very rapidly,” Vizy said.
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