"While Texas drowned, he danced.
With people still missing, he golfed.
He gutted the weather service. Slashed NOAA’s budget. As a result, the alerts came too late. 78 people died, including 28 children, with 41 more missing."
~ From Letters from God at Substack, in an email to subscribers
Either drastic cuts to NWS and NOAA budgets play a role — for weal or woe — in how those services function, or they don't. We can't have it both ways.
This past May, Juliette Kayyem issued the following warning:
"Preparing for emergencies is always difficult; extreme climate events can overwhelm even the best-laid plans. But this challenge has been exacerbated by major staffing cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s and President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency."
"Today, about 40 percent of the 122 local forecasting offices of the NWS have significant staffing gaps. More than 10 percent of its 4,800 employees have left in recent months—either dismissed, retired, or bought out. Some of the usual predictive measures, such as the deployment of weather balloons and Doppler radar, many of whose experts and technicians have been fired or laid off, are now not available."
"Staffing data provided by the NWS’s labor union showed the San Angelo forecasting office currently has four vacancies out of 23 positions and San Antonio has six vacancies out of 26."
~ Paul Cobler
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/05/texas-hill-country-floods-warning-forecast-nws/
"Trump’s attack on forecasting capability is unprecedented and inexcusable. He fired 24,000 employees at NOAA (they were reinstated — then re-fired). The budget for 2026 cuts more than a quarter of the agency’s funding, including all of it for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which conducts weather and climate research."
~ Noah Berlatsky
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/guadalupe-river-texas-flooding-trump-cuts
"There’s a similar story at the NWS. Former NWS meteorologist Brian Lamarre explained to NPR in May that the NWS had 5,000-6,000 employees 30 years ago. That has gradually whittled down to 4,500 — and then another 550 were cut by DOGE or quit without being replaced. As a result, “for the first time in the history of the National Weather Service, the agency is below 4,000 people.”
"All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts '[leave] the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.'"
~ Heather Cox Richardson
"Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service—"
Get out of the USA now! This is going to be disasterous, and with climate events getting more extreme could be a matter of life and death for many at risk of being caught up in natural disasters.
