Last week, as the country gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July, several communities in central Texas were devastated by flash floods. For about a week, a series of meteorological factors converged over Texas, resulting in an overnight rainstorm from Thursday to Friday that raised the water level of the Guadalupe River by an astounding thirty-four feet in about ninety minutes.
Neighborhoods and campgrounds on the river’s edge were devastated by the flash floods. Tragically, twenty-seven young campers from a nearby all-girls Christian summer camp lost their lives. In total, at the time of writing, 109 deaths have been confirmed so far, with many still missing.
But of course, as rescuers dug through the wreckage and traversed the ongoing flood waters to rescue survivors and recover victims, politicians in DC rushed to find a way to use this tragedy to notch a political win over their rivals.
On the forefront of that effort was Senator Chuck Schumer, who decided that all these deaths provided a great opportunity to attack President Trump. On Monday, Schumer wrote a letter suggesting that the high death toll from these flash floods was caused by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s cuts to the National Weather Service. Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro pushed this narrative too in a CNN interview.
Now, in the wake of disasters like this, it is absolutely appropriate—even necessary—to closely examine what happened to determine what changes are needed to prevent something like that from happening again. That is the right thing to do. But that is not what Schumer and Castro are doing.
What they are doing is twisting the facts about a very real catastrophe that has taken the lives of over a hundred people—including many young children—while permanently altering the lives of many more, in a disgusting attempt to support a separate argument they’ve been making for months.
It is not clear how much money the current administration has cut from the NWS, but it does not appear to have been much. The two NWS offices overseeing the affected region are reported to have a combined total of ten vacancies. However, it’s not clear how many of these are due to recent cuts (only one is confirmed to have taken an early paid retirement package from one of the president’s programs).
The day after the storm, and two days before Schumer sent his letter, officials from those NWS offices dispelled the rumors circulating online that DOGE staff cuts at NWS had hampered the agency’s ability to warn residents about the rising river. One NWS hydrologist said they had “adequate staffing” and “adequate technology” to monitor the storm and issue timely warnings. Matt Lanza—a huge critic of Trump’s cuts who writes a popular meteorology Substack—argued that there is “absolutely nothing” to suggest the NWS and NOAA cuts played any role in this disaster. Even the National Weather Service’s union—perhaps the group most incentivized to drum up the danger of staffing cuts—said that the staffing levels were not the problem.
Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be any issue with the timing of flash flood warnings sent out to all wireless phones in and around the floodplain. A flood watch was issued in the early afternoon on July 3, hours before the river began to rise. The first flash flood alert was issued at 1:14 AM, when the river had only risen two feet. When the flooding got significantly more serious later in the morning, a “flash flood emergency” was issued at 4:03 AM, urging everyone in the floodplain to immediately evacuate and seek higher ground.
The reason this flooding event appears to have been so deadly is that many people in the floodplain either ignored or did not notice the NWS alerts. That is where the proper discussion about how this may have been avoided is focused.
This region of Texas is particularly prone to severe flooding. Some have argued that measures beyond phone notifications are needed to ensure everyone in danger is alerted when a flash flood is headed their way. But that isn’t easy. The most commonly floated idea is a siren system similar to tornado sirens. But tornado sirens are designed to reach people outside, not at home asleep. And many of the riverside campgrounds where these victims were staying are rather remote and, therefore, hard to reach unless a very expensive siren system is installed across the entire area. Of course, after last week’s disaster, anything that may have helped more people get out seems worth it. (The NWS itself recommends that each household buy a simple weather radio).
However, that’s assuming the sole problem here was that people didn’t hear the NWS alerts. But we know that at least some of the people who survived ignored the phone notifications. That suggests the problem may be the opposite of what Schumer and Castro are suggesting—there may be too many alerts. The NWS is, after all, a government monopoly. And government monopolies tend to be overly conservative.
The FDA, for example, is cautious to a destructive degree because it only faces scrutiny when a drug it has approved turns out to be unsafe. The NWS, similarly, would face heavy scrutiny if it failed to issue an alert before a deadly storm broke out. And, because they’re a monopoly, they don’t need to worry about losing customers if they’re always blowing up phones with false alarms. It is possible that the NWS’s frequent and excessively cautious flood alerts desensitized people to them, leading some who were in real danger last week to ignore the official warnings.
Beyond that, it’s always worth taking a step back and asking why so many neighborhoods, RV parks, and sleepaway camps were located in such a dangerous and active floodplain in the first place. And whether that was made worse by the federal program that subsidizes flood insurance, which makes it artificially cheap to build or develop things in floodplains.
The point is, even though it is early and there is a lot more we will learn with time, it is absolutely worth examining what went wrong here to figure out how floods this deadly can be prevented in the future. But that involves wrestling with the actual facts. Not deliberately ignoring important details that had been out for days to misrepresent the situation in a politically convenient way, as Chuck Schumer did Monday.
