EDITORIAL: In a weather disaster, tragedy and a warning

The death toll in the Texas flood tragedy was still rising when the blaming began. Some called it a blame game, but a human event as horrific as this—those young girls at their summer camp and more than 100 other victims swept away—cannot be the subject of game. Nonetheless, it was an excuse for the standard social media vituperation, digital loudmouths laying blame for the deaths with malice and ignorance.

More serious fault-finding followed, indicting the National Weather Service, the Trump administration and Texas government officials, among others. Much of this could be dismissed as political opportunism, but there was one takeaway that has merit and cannot be ignored:

The Texas calamity was a clear warning—a particularly impressive one in a horrible way—that extremely dangerous weather events powered by a super-heated atmosphere are facts of life in the era of climate change and that the government people depend on for whatever protection humans are capable of is not prepared.

Early analysis suggests the National Weather Service forecasting of the weather that caused the Texas flash flooding was done right and short staffing did not have a direct effect on the agency’s performance in this instance. That doesn’t change the reality that the disaster is a blaring wake-up alarm.

More than 1,000 members of the workforce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, home of the National Weather Service, the agency charged with the responsibility of tracking weather threats and warning people in their paths, were fired by the Trump administration in February. 

The firings, carried out in the purge by Elon Musk’s DOGE squad, were indiscriminate, with no effort to understand what the fired workers’ responsibilities were and how their loss affected NOAA’s mission. 

This is not the federal government the people of America deserve. This is a government shirking its responsibility to provide a service that is crucial to its citizens’ well-being. No sense can be made of the timing. At the very moment the threat of deadly natural disasters is greater than ever, the agency that exists to help people survive them is weakened to support a boast of cutting government waste.

The NWS, along with the rest of NOAA and its essential weather science work, was weakened. Among the 26 staff positions at the Austin/San Antonio office, which dealt with the Texas forecasting, six were vacant, including that of the official in charge of “warning coordination.” Other staff tried to fill in, but that is not how one of the agency’s most essential services should be handled.

Jeff Masters, the founder of the Weather Underground, a respected private-sector forecasting service, told USA Today: “We are pushing our luck if we think the cuts at NOAA won’t cause a breakdown in our ability to get people out of harm’s way in the future.”

Cuts affecting weather preparedness aren’t over. The Trump administration recently submitted a document to Congress calling for all funding for all climate research to be eliminated by 2026. Previous actions have limited access to existing climate science.

The worn-out rationale for diminishing government’s ability to provide services is that the federal government is a burden on citizens, as expressed in the slogan “government is the problem, not the solution.”

There is no doubt that some of the functioning pieces of the elaborate structure of the federal government could, and should, be made more efficient, but when it comes to services like those that are NOAA’s responsibility, government is exactly the solution, the only solution, because the private sector cannot provide them. 

Even though the same is certainly true of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, President Trump had said FEMA should be eliminated. It turned out that part of the agency had already been eliminated just before the calamitous rains hit Texas when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fired hundreds of phone center contractors. As a result, more than 10,000 calls from people seeking FEMA’s help after the flooding went unanswered.

In the aftermath of the Texas disaster, however, the president changed his mind about FEMA and, according to administration officials, abolishing the agency is no longer on his agenda.

If the Texas disaster opened his eyes to that, the hope should be that it also moves him to restore NOAA to its full staffing and funding.