There’s No Evidence To Suggest DOGE Cuts Caused Texas Flood Devastation, Meteorologists Say

As Texas battled floods over the weekend, some politicians and commentators rushed to blame the Trump administration for the ensuing devastation.

Around 1:00 p.m. CT Thursday, a flash flood watch was issued for Kerr County. At approximately 4:00 a.m. CT Friday, the warning level was elevated to a flash flood emergency, according to the Associated Press.

The death toll from the floods, which began Thursday night, has risen to at least 82 people. The search continues for 10 girls still missing from Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ summer camp that was at the center of the flooding.

In a post on X, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) suggested that President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency could have exacerbated the crisis in Texas by cutting staff and funding from federal weather agencies.

“Accurate weather forecasting helps avoid fatal disasters,” Murphy wrote. “There are consequences to Trump’s brainless attacks on public workers, like meteorologists.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) echoed Murphy’s claims in a letter urging the Commerce Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether staffing shortages hindered local officials’ response times. CNN host Dana Bash suggested the same in an interview with Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), who said, “I don’t think it’s helpful to have missing key personnel from the National Weather Service not in place to help prevent these tragedies.”

But meteorologists have largely concluded that local officials performed their jobs to the best of their ability, and that they were not hindered by federal cuts. They say the floods were simply the result of a rare confluence of circumstances — a true worst-case scenario.

“There is little evidence that any of the recent cuts to NOAA/NWS negatively impacted services for this event, regardless of what may be being said on social media,” Alan Gerard, a former director of the Analysis and Understanding Branch in the National Severe Storms Laboratory at NOAA, said.

“Obviously, having both of these positions vacant for a prolonged time is not optimal, and certainly could have had negative impacts at some level,” Gerard said. “However, just looking at the actual warning services that NWS provided during the event, they were solid and provided the level of warning and alerts that the public should expect to receive for an event such as this.”

Matt Lanza, a Houston-based meteorologist, wrote in a blog post, “In this particular case, we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event. Anyone using this event to claim that is being dishonest.”

In response to the claim that staffing vacancies at the National Weather Service’s local Weather Forecast Offices exacerbated the disaster, Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the agency’s labor union, noted that there were employees acting in vacant leadership roles.

“The WFOs [weather forecasting offices] had adequate staffing and resources as they issued timely forecasts and warnings leading up to the storm,” Fahy said on Saturday, per NBC News.

Rather than blaming DOGE cuts, most meteorologists say the devastation can be explained by the difficulties of predicting flash flooding in such a specific area.

Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist from Wisconsin, noted that “Quantitative precipitation forecasting, called QPF, is one of the hardest things meteorologists have to do.”

“The reality is that the state of the science does not allow us to know that a small location like the south fork of the Guadalupe River is going to get 8″ of rain in a 3 hour period even a couple of hours ahead of time,” Gerard continued.

“This was truly a low probability, worst case scenario where the absolute maximum in rainfall happened to coincide with the headwaters of a particularly flash flood prone river with a lot of human beings along it. In this case it also happened in the middle of the night on the 4th of July, exacerbating the human toll.”

At Camp Mystic, campers likely wouldn’t have seen the warnings to move to higher ground, since the program did not allow them to bring their electronic devices, KXAN reported.