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disasters
Dems Call for Investigation Into Trump NWS-FEMA Cuts After Texas Flood
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Jul 09, 2025
With at least 111 people confirmed dead and more than 150 still missing in Texas' catastrophic flooding as of Wednesday, Democrats in Congress are demanding answers about whether the Trump administration's cuts to federal weather monitoring and emergency management agencies may have hampered the response.
Since President Donald Trump retook office, his administration has unilaterally introduced cuts that have substantially reduced the number of employees at the National Weather Service (NWS) and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which forecast weather and collect environmental data. It has done the same to the Federal Emergency Management System (FEMA), which coordinates responses to natural disasters.
And following the passage of the GOP budget reconciliation package last week, further cuts to these agencies are in the works.
As the death count has climbed, Democrats in both the House and Senate have issued calls to investigate whether these cuts may have played a role in making the horrific situation in Texas worse.
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in a video posted to X Tuesday night. "We aren't doing our job if we aren't seeking answers to these questions."
Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut NOAA staff by 11% through a combination of terminations and buyouts. According to The Associated Press, this included "hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day."
FEMA, meanwhile has shed around 2,000 permanent employees, around a third of its permanent workforce.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed what she called "false claims" that Trump's cuts affected Texas' disaster response. Jackson said the National Weather Service "did their job, even issuing a flood watch more than 12 hours in advance." Jason Runyen, a meteorologist with the NWS, also told the AP that the NWS handling Austin and San Antonio had more forecasters on duty than normal.
However, questions still remain about how cuts may have affected other parts of the emergency response.
According to former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, who spoke to CNN on Tuesday, the problem was not the NWS forecasting, but the failure to disseminate warnings about the floods to the public.
"We need to understand why that last mile is where the problem was in terms of getting alerts out," Spinrad said.
According to the AP, the NWS office for Austin-San Antonio had six vacancies, including "a key manager responsible for issuing warnings and coordinating with local emergency management officials." That official, who'd held the position for 17 years, left in April after one of DOGE's mass emails urging federal workers to take early retirements.
In a Monday letter to Roderick Anderson, the Commerce Department's acting inspector general, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted reporting from The New York Times Saturday, which quoted several former NWS officials who said the response suffered from "the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight."
"The roles left unfilled are not marginal, they're critical," Schumer said. "These are the experts responsible for modeling storm impacts, monitoring rising water levels, issuing flood warnings, and coordinating directly with local emergency managers about when to warn the public and issue evacuation orders."
Schumer called on the inspector general to begin investigating why these positions were vacant and whether it affected the emergency response or forecasting.
In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) urged against jumping to hasty conclusions with the search for victims still on, but agreed there should be an investigation.
"When you have flash flooding, there's a risk that you won't have the personnel to make that—do that analysis, do the predictions in the best way," Castro said. "And it could lead to tragedy. So, I don’t want to sit here and say conclusively that that was the case, but I do think that it should be investigated."
Other Democrats have raised the possibility that cuts to FEMA may have played a role. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over FEMA, called for hearings on the agency's capacity to respond.
He noted that Trump has said he wants to eliminate FEMA altogether and "bring it down to the state level," a decision Thompson said is more dangerous than ever as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent.
DOGE also canceled $880 million worth of funding for FEMA's BRIC program, which focused on pre-disaster planning. In Kerr County, one of the hardest hit by the storm, the flood system has been described as "antiquated," lacking "basic components like sirens and river gauges." The county applied for pre-disaster mitigation funding from FEMA to upgrade their system in 2017 and 2018, during the first Trump administration, but was denied.
"This administration cannot pretend that disasters like this are happening in a vacuum. They cannot ignore the fact that natural disasters are becoming more severe and more frequent due to climate change," Thompson said.
On the storm response, he added: "The federal government—as well as state and local governments—all have a role to play. We must also determine if any budget cuts or staffing shortages at the federal level—of any kind—made matters worse."
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When the Levees Break: Disasters Converging on a Finite Planet
Oct 02, 2013
The 19th century novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates by American author Mary Mapes Dodge features a brief story-within-the-story that has become better known in popular culture than the book itself. It's the tale of a Dutch boy (in the novel he's called simply "The Hero of Haarlem") who saves his community by jamming his finger into a leaking levee. The boy stays all night, despite the cold, until village adults find him and repair the leak. His courageous action in holding back potential floodwaters has become celebrated in children's literature and art, to the point where it serves as a convenient metaphor.
Here in early 21st century there are three dams about to break, and in each case a calamity is being postponed--though not, in these cases, by the heroic digits of fictitious Dutch children.
A grasp of the status of these three delayed disasters, and what's putting them off, can be helpful in navigating waters that now rise slowly, though soon perhaps in torrents.
1. Unconventional fuels and production methods
I've written so much on the subject of peak oil, and some of it so recently, that it would be redundant to go into much detail here on that score. Suffice it to say that world conventional crude oil production has been flat-to-declining for eight years now. Declines of the world's supergiant oilfields will steepen in the years ahead. Petroleum is essential to the world economy and there is no ready and sufficient substitute. The potential consequences of peak oil include prolonged economic crisis and resource wars.
Producers of unconventional liquid fuels--tar sands, tight oil, and deepwater oil--are playing the role of Dutch boy in the energy world, though their motives may not be quite so altruistic. With unconventional sources included in the total, world petroleum production has grown somewhat in recent years, but oil prices are hovering at near-record levels (that's because unconventionals are expensive to produce). The oil industry has successfully used this meager success as a public relations tool, arguing that it can continue pulling rabbits out of hats for as long as needed and that policy makers therefore need do nothing to prepare society for a peak-oil future. In fact, world oil markets are depending almost entirely on continued increasing production from the US--all of which must come from fracked, horizontally drilled wells that decline rapidly--to keep supplies steady.
Even the US Energy Information Administration recognizes that the US tight oil boom will be history by the end of the current decade--though the official forecast shows production levels gently drifting thereafter when in all likelihood they will plummet, given the spectacular per-well decline rates of the Bakken and Eagle Ford formations. Is there another Dutch boy waiting, finger ready? Tight oil deposits in other countries will take longer to develop and will present more technical challenges. Other unconventionals, like extra-heavy oil in Venezuela and kerogen deposits in the American West, will be even slower and more expensive to produce--if they're ever tapped to any significant extent (Shell just abandoned its kerogen research operations without any prospect of eventual profitability)
"The dam is weakening. Have your hip boots and waders ready."
Bottom line: the recent, ongoing "new normal" of high but stable oil prices may last another few years; after that, oil supplies will become much more problematic, and prices are anybody's guess. The dam is weakening. Have your hip boots and waders ready.
2. Quantitative easing
The crash of 2008, bad as it was, should really be thought of as merely a symptom of a more pervasive, profound, and ongoing shift in the entire global economy. Our growth-based, fossil-fueled economic system is colliding with foreseeable energy and debt limits. We constructed our existing financial system during a historic period of anomalous rapid growth; without further growth in manufacturing, transport, and trade, the pyramid of credit and leverage built by investors during recent decades is likely to implode. We got just a taste of what might be in store with the Lehman and AIG failures.
Some who understood the system's vulnerability early on, and who warned that a crash was imminent, forecast a rapid collapse of the entire economy. Each year from 2008 up to the present, these commentators have insisted that in a matter of months we'll see bread lines, shuttered banks, and riots in the streets. Riots and bank failures have indeed shown up in Greece, but here in the US (and Britain, Germany, China, Canada, Australia . . . the list continues) economic life goes on. In the US, pre-crash norms in employment, household income, and house values have not returned, but neither has the sky fallen. Most economists say the nation is in the midst of a "fragile recovery."
Why no collapse? Governments and central banks have inserted fingers in financial levees. Most notably, the Federal Reserve keeps crisis at bay by purchasing $85 billion in US Treasury bonds each month, using money created out of thin air at the moment of purchase. This enables the Federal government to borrow at low interest rates, and also props up the American financial industry. Virtually all of the Fed's money stays within financial circles--mostly the "shadow banking system"; that's a big reason why the richest Americans have gotten much richer in the past few years, while most regular folks are treading water at best (pdf).
Quantitative easing is poorly understood by the general public and provokes strong reactions from many economists. Some think QE must lead to hyperinflation (it hasn't so far, and it's been going on for nearly five years). Others think that, in principle, it could be used (if differently organized and applied) to solve all our debt problems.
Be that as it may, what has the too-big-to-fail, too-greedy-not-to shadow banking system done with the Fed's trillions in free money? Blown another asset bubble and piled up more leveraged bets. No one knows when the latest bubble will pop, but when it does the ensuing crisis will likely be worse than that of 2008. Will central banks then be able to jam more fingers into the leaky levee? Will they have enough fingers?
3. Global warming "pause"
The threat of climate change needs no introduction--it's the mother of all impending environmental crises. And we are already seeing serious impacts, including superstorms, droughts, and the melting of the north polar ice cap. Nevertheless, it's all not as bad as it might be, were it not for the fact that the warming of Earth's surface air temperatures has slowed since 1998 (which was an anomalously hot year).
"Global warming hasn't really 'paused'; it's just gone to the depths."
Climate change deniers have seized upon evidence of this "pause" to argue that global warming has essentially stopped. After all, if the greenhouse-gas-laden atmosphere were in fact trapping more heat, where could all that heat be hiding?
Turns out, very little of Earth's trapped heat warms the atmosphere and land surface; most of it (over 90 percent) is absorbed by the oceans. Part of the explanation for the slowdown in surface warming lies in the heating of deep ocean waters. Global warming hasn't really "paused"; it's just gone to the depths. At the same time, there has been a downswing in the Pacific Ocean's natural temperature cycle, which has also correlated with a cluster of La Nina years (usually associated with a cooling of ocean surface waters). This temperature cycle masks the underlying warming trend. So it appears that, for now at least, Mother Earth herself is playing "The Hero of Haarlem."
There's no way to know how long this current cool cycle will last, though the previous Pacific cool phase, which started in the 1940s, continued for about 30 years. If the present cycle is of the same duration, then in about 15 years much of the heat currently being dumped in deep oceans may begin instead to remain in the atmosphere. At that point we will likely see unprecedented rates of climate warming, and far worse episodes of extreme weather.
The fact that climate change is complex and non-linear makes it hard to communicate the urgency of the problem even to scientifically literate audiences. Prof. Arthur Petersen, chief scientist at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and part of the Dutch delegation that reviewed the latest IPCC report (pdf) was quoted by BBC as saying: "It is a major feat that we have been able to produce such a document which is such an adequate assessment of the science. That being said, it is virtually unreadable!"
Making the most of borrowed time
In the story of the Dutch boy, adults in the village eventually find the brave child and make necessary repairs to the dike. But for the three leaky systems discussed above, necessary repairs aren't being made. Most governments aren't rapidly developing renewable energy and public transport infrastructure; instead, they're spending their money on building more roads. The shadow banking system is not being downsized and regulated; it's being propped up and inflated. Fossil fuel use is not being discouraged with meaningful carbon taxes (except in a very few countries); instead, oil and gas industries are subsidized.
The folks in charge will probably continue to buy as much time as they can, for as long as they can, even if doing so makes the situation worse in the long run. Nature is less predictable: humans cannot control the duration of the global warming "pause."
The phrase "living on borrowed time" inevitably comes to mind, with its implication of impending doom. Yet we simply don't know how serious the impacts of these delayed crises will be within a humanly meaningful timeframe--say, the next ten or twenty years. Doom is possible, but it may be that nature, central banks, and crafty drillers conspire to maintain the appearance of normalcy in the eyes of at least a substantial portion of the population even as the waters rise around our ankles. No collapse here, folks; just keep shopping.
"How about using whatever interval we have--whether it turns out to be weeks or decades--to build community resilience?"
It's hard to know what attitude to adopt with regard to these things. Given that delays will likely make matters worse when the dam does break, and that repairs aren't being undertaken, should we therefore say, "Bring on the crisis, let's get it over with?" If that is our stance, then what might be done to accelerate events? Our oil-supply situation could be hastened slightly toward crisis by a decision against the Keystone XL pipeline, which would discourage further expansion of tar sands mining (there's no "bring-on-the-crisis" upside to a decision in favor of the pipeline--that would worsen the climate dilemma without doing anything to end the global warming "pause"). Maybe causing a US government default would usher in the next chapter of global financial Armageddon: that's entirely within the capabilities of at least a few people, and they seem to be doing a very good job of marching us toward the brink. Perhaps we'll all be over the edge in just a few weeks.
Or shall we simply enjoy our remaining days of "normal" life? Spend time at the beach. Learn to play a musical instrument. See friends and family. Those are perfectly understandable and legitimate ways of whiling away borrowed time.
Here's a thought: How about using whatever interval we have--whether it turns out to be weeks or decades--to build community resilience? Get to know your neighbors. Plan next season's garden. Join efforts to create a community-run renewable energy utility company. Buy from local farmers. Put your savings in the local credit union. Take a Transition Launch! training course.
If we do these things now, then when fingers can no longer plug leaks the ensuing mess may be far less daunting. Meanwhile there may be some substantial psychological benefits from living in a way that's more localized and communitarian.
If that's your choice, you'd better get going. There's no telling how much time we have.
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