The deadly consequences of Trump’s National Weather Service budget cuts.
“There will be people who die.” That stark warning was issued in February by Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, after US president Donald Trump sought to fire more than 800 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service. “Going into the severe weather and hurricane season, this cannot be good,” Al Roker, the chief meteorologist for NBC News, said later that month in a social media post. In May, five former directors of the National Weather Service wrote that the budget cuts could leave weather forecast offices “so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
Now, the heartbreaking news from Texas, where at least 27 children died in flash flooding as several months’ worth of rain fell in just a few hours, provides bitter confirmation of these unheeded warnings. The budget cuts Trump and his erstwhile ally Elon Musk insisted would eliminate only waste, fraud, and abuse have indeed contributed to needless loss of life.
She “was having the time of her life,” the grieving uncle of 8-year-old Renee Smajstrla posted on social media after her body was recovered near Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River in central Texas. Almost a foot of rain fell there last Friday, causing the river to rise a staggering 26 feet in 45 minutes. The floodwaters quickly engulfed the camp; Renee was one of 27 young campers and counselors who lost their lives. A total of 89 deaths connected to the flooding have been confirmed thus far; searches continue for dozens of people still missing.
The National Weather Service, which has lost 500 staff positions since the Trump-Musk budget cuts, provides the data and analysis that inform virtually all of the weather forecasts Americans receive, whether via TV or radio broadcasts or their cell phone apps. Warnings to campers about an impending flash flood? Emergency alerts to coastal residents as a hurricane approaches? A winter weather advisory for mountain-bound ski vacationers? These and countless other lifesaving services were put at risk by Trump’s illegal executive order slashing the NOAA workforce.
Early reports indicate that the problem in Texas was that the budget cuts crippled the National Weather Service’s ability to warn residents about the oncoming flash floods. It’s not that the service’s scientists didn’t forecast the potential flooding accurately enough; it’s that the service’s communications staff had been so shrunk that the forecasts were not shared promptly with the public and emergency managers. Only hours after NWS issued its storm and flood warning did safety officials pass that warning on to the general public, Molly Taft reported in Wired. “Clearly there was a breakdown between when the warning was issued and how people got it, and I think that’s really what has to be talked about,” the Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza told Taft.
As climate change drives increasingly volatile and destructive weather across the US and around the world, understanding and communicating the climate-weather connection to the public is critical to saving lives and ensuring that society can continue to function. But science can only help save lives if government officials take that science seriously. And Trump and nearly all of his fellow Republicans continue to deny the ultimate cause of the extreme weather devastating more and more people and communities: the overheating of the planet caused by burning oil, gas, and coal.
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Trump denies any responsibility, acknowledging only that “it’s just so horrible to watch” the tragedy in Texas. But Project 2025, the blueprint for cutting government spending prepared by top Trump advisers and reflected in the tax and spending bill he signed into law on the very day of the Texas flooding, explicitly urged massive cuts at NOAA, including elimination of the National Weather Service. Project 2025’s rationale? NOAA was “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity.”
Tell that to the parents now submerged in bottomless grief over the 27 girls and counselors whose lives were cut short last Friday night. Posting a photo of his niece with her beaming, gap-toothed smile, Renee Smajstrla’s uncle took comfort in his Christian faith, writing that their family is “thankful she was with her friends” when death took her and that “she will forever be living her best life at Camp Mystic.” But Renee could have had many more years of life on earth first if her government had not betrayed her.
