Democrats Should Say Who’s Really to Blame for the Flooding in Texas
In just 45 minutes early Friday morning, intense rain caused sections of the Guadalupe River in Central Texas to rise by nearly 26 feet. Four months worth of rain dropped within hours. More than 100 people had been confirmed dead as of late Monday afternoon, including more than two dozen campers and counselors at a riverside Christian summer camp. As the search for victims and survivors continues, more heavy rain is expected this week.
When a tragedy of such proportions occurs, the temptation to point fingers is strong. Some Republican officials in Texas have found their scapegoat in the National Weather Service, or NWS, which they’ve accused of failing to predict the storm’s full intensity. They’ve got the wrong guys; despite grappling with deep cuts imposed by the Trump administration, the NWS put out early and increasingly urgent warnings about the coming deluge. There’s plenty of blame to go around, though. Democrats, accordingly, should do a lot more than call for investigations into how White House attacks on the NWS might have hampered preparedness efforts. They should connect the dots, again and again, between Republican policy and its lethal consequences. Democrats should hammer them not just for undermining Texas and the United States’ disaster preparedness and response infrastructure, but for having spent decades blocking efforts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. GOP lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. The more say the Republican Party has over governing a climate-changed world, the more people will die.
The NWS is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where the Trump administration has aimed to reduce personnel by 20 percent and axe climate-related work, in particular. The White House’s 2026 budget proposal aspires to eliminate all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs, and shut down research and development of new forecasting technologies. The two Texas NWS offices most directly responsible for forecasting and warning about extreme weather along the Guadalupe River now lack key staff, including a warning coordination meteorologist tasked with facilitating communication between forecasters and emergency managers. Despite these challenges, the NWS issued a series of dire warnings about “life-threatening flooding” beginning on Thursday morning, and in the hours leading up to the deluge. Its ability to do that, meanwhile, is being actively threatened by Republicans’ efforts to defund the agency.
The Texas Tribune further reports that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature rejected a bill that would have established a statewide plan to improve Texas’ disaster response infrastructure, upgrading alert systems and providing grants for counties to buy new emergency communication equipment, including “outdoor warning sirens” that could have saved lives lost over the weekend. State Representative Wes Virdill—whose district includes the worst-hit areas, in Kerr County—voted against the bill. He told the Tribune that he couldn’t recall the specifics of the bill or why he opposed it, guessing that it “had to do with how much funding” was tied to the measure.
