The deadly Texas floods are drawing renewed scrutiny to Trump administration cuts at the nation's weather and climate research agencies.
A flash flood on Friday unleashed water from the Guadalupe River in Central Texas, killing at least 90 people as of Monday afternoon.
The incident spurred questions about the preparedness of federal agencies such as the National Weather Service (NWS) and others like it as they face the administration’s crosshairs.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses NWS, lost hundreds of staffers to Trump administration cuts, and positions within the Weather Service were among them.
The Austin/San Antonio Weather Service office’s warning coordination meteorologist, who organizes alerting the outside world about agency forecasts, took a Trump administration buyout in April. The office’s Science Operations Officer, who implements new technology and data, also retired around the same time.
Rick Spinrad, who led the NOAA during the Biden administration, said that the office’s forecasters still did well, but that staffing-related issues could be causing communication problems.
“I do think the cuts are contributing to the inability of emergency managers to respond,” Spinrad said.
“The Weather Service did a really good job, actually, in getting watches and warnings and …wireless emergency alerts out,” he told The Hill on Monday. “It's really a little early to give a specific analysis of where things might have broken down, but from what I've seen, it seems like the communications breakdown in the last mile is where most of the problem was.”
He particularly pointed to the absence of a warning coordination meteorologist.
“Information went out with significant lead time of several hours, and yet no action was taken,” Spinrad said.
“When you send a message, there's no guarantee that it's received, so someone needs to follow up,” he said. “In the weather forecast offices, the one who follows up with that is the position called the warning coordination meteorologist. And guess what, there is no WCM in the San Antonio/Austin weather forecast office, because that's one of the positions that was lost in the cuts from this administration.”
The Austin/San Antonio Weather Service office issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon, saying that areas could get up to 5 to 7 inches of rainfall.
That night, at about 1 a.m. local time Friday, it posted on X that parts of the state were seeing a flash flood warning. Just after 3 a.m., it posted that “a very dangerous flash flooding event is ongoing.”
“Heavy rainfall continues in this area and a Flash Flood Warning is in effect. Turn Around, Don’t Drown!” the Weather Service said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for an investigation into “the scope, breadth, and ramifications of whether staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service (NWS) stations contributed to the catastrophic loss of life and property during the deadly flooding.”
President Trump said staffing cuts didn’t impact its handling of the incident.
“That was really the Biden setup…but I wouldn’t blame Biden for it, either,” he said. “This is a hundred-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”
Erica Grow Cei, a spokesperson for the NWS, said the Austin/San Antonio office as well as the San Angelo office “had additional forecasters on duty during the catastrophic flooding event in Texas’s Hill Country during the July 4 holiday weekend” in an email to The Hill.
“Extra staff members from both offices, in addition to the West Gulf River Forecast Center, had extra personnel on the night of Thursday, July 3 into the day on Friday, July 4. All forecasts and warnings were issued in a timely manner,” she said. “Additionally, these offices were able to provide decision support services to local partners, including those in the emergency management community. The NWS remains dedicated to our mission to serve the American public through our forecasts and decision support services.”
It is not the first time the administration’s buyouts and other mass firings have come under scrutiny. Earlier this year, the National Nuclear Security Administration rehired staff that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons after firing them en masse.
Following staffing cuts, the Weather Service indicated that it was looking to shuffle or hire employees to fill positions in some “critically understaffed” offices, though the Austin/San Antonio and San Angelo ones were not among them.
Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA climate scientist and public affairs specialist, told The Hill he believes that even with the staffing cuts, the administration should still be able to get the forecast out.
However, he warned that other functions that help NWS do its job such as building relationships could be diminished by the cuts.
“My big concern is, when it comes to the staffing shortages and the loss of expertise, that we've lost, not only their knowledge…knowledge of their regions — what areas flood, what areas are most of concern — but we also lost the relationships with existing partners and external partners,” Di Liberto said.
Staffing cuts are not the only potential headwind coming for the nation’s meteorologists. In its proposed budget, the Trump administration is calling for broader cuts to research.
This includes eliminating NOAA’s Office of Atmospheric Research and reducing the budget for the agency’s weather research program
It also includes closing the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma and other labs in places including New Jersey, Colorado and Hawaii.
Di Liberto said that such cuts would mean “that we don't have the data and resources that we need to be able to improve our ability to forecast and communicate these risks.”
Spinrad similarly expressed concerns that the cuts would hamper the administration’s ability to improve.
“The cuts, as proposed, to research guarantee that we will see no improvement to forecasts and services full stop,” he said.
He added that, typically, forecasts “improve by 24 hours every 10 years,” so a “72-hour forecast today is as good as the 48-hour forecast was 10 years ago and that’s because of the research.”
“If you turn off the research, that progress and improvement is going to stop, and you're going to see a degradation of capability,” Spinrad said.
Since the federal budget is handled by Congress and not the administration, it’s not clear how many of the newly anticipated cuts will actually stick.
But there are also staffing cuts happening broadly across the administration, including at other related agencies such as the National Science Foundation.
“Basic science research has been trimmed pretty dramatically,” said David Stensrud, president of the American Meteorological Society. “The scientific enterprise as a whole is being proposed for really large cuts. That could really hurt what we’re trying to do to improve these kinds of warnings.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also indicated that it wants to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps respond after disasters.
Asked over the weekend whether he still wanted to phase out FEMA, Trump said, “FEMA is something we can talk about later, but right now they’re busy working.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Monday that “the president wants to ensure American citizens always have what they need during times of need. Whether that assistance comes from states or the federal government, that's a policy discussion that will continue, and the president has always said he wants states to do as much as they can, if not more.”
—Brett Samuels contributed.
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