Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don't know

The Guardian

12 hours ago

Why exactly so many people drowned in the terrible Independence Day floods that swept through Texas's Hill Country will probably have multiple explanations that take a while to obtain. But it's 2025, and people want answers immediately, and lots of people seized on stories blaming the National Weather Service (NWS).
There were two opposing reasons to blame this vital government service. For local and state authorities, blaming a branch of the federal government was a way of avoiding culpability themselves. And for a whole lot of people who deplore the Trump/Doge cuts to federal services, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the idea that the NWS failed served to underscore how destructive those cuts are.
Many of them found confirmation in a New York Times story that ran with the sub-headline: Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters' ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials. Might have is not did. Complicated is not failed. It's a speculative piece easily mistaken for a report, and its opening sentence is: 'Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.'
A casual reader could come away thinking that staffing shortages had had consequences. But if you give the airily innuendo-packed sentence more attention, you might want to ask who exactly the anonymous experts were and whether there's an answer to their questions. Did it actually make it harder, and did they actually manage to do this thing even though it was harder, or not? Did they coordinate with local emergency managers?
The piece continues: 'The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said,' and 'suggested' sounds like we're getting an interpretation of what these anonymous sources think might have happened or been likely to happen, rather than what actually did. Suggestions are not facts. Likelihoods are not actualities. Eventually we get to a named source: 'A spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, Erica Grow Cei, did not answer questions from The New York Times about the Texas vacancies, including how long those positions had been open and whether those vacancies had contributed to the damage caused by the flooding.'
In other words, there's no answer to the suggestions and questions and intimations. Nevertheless, a lot of readers gathered the impression that this was not speculation aired by unnamed experts but confirmation that the NWS had failed. One prominent public figure with three quarters of a million BlueSky followers shared the New York Times piece with this note: 'The United States government is no longer able to protect us from real hazards, such as flash floods, because it's shifting funds to fake hazards, such as a non-existent immigrant crime wave.'
If you read down a couple of dozen paragraphs in this New York Times piece, you get to the former NWS director of Congressional Affairs saying 'that the local Weather Service offices appeared to have sent out the correct warnings. He said the challenge was getting people to receive those warnings, and then take action.' Nevertheless, the idea the NWS failed became so widespread that Wired magazine published a report specifically to counter it: 'Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.'
They link to the pundit with almost a million followers, who had posted on Twitter: 'Now TX officials are blaming a faulty forecast by NWS for the deadly impact of a storm.' Those officials are, but why would we believe them? Wired continues: 'But meteorologists who spoke to Wired say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm.' With that, we're onto another piece of the picture: the difference between accurately predicting a risk and knowing exactly how severe it will be.
Climate change, which some reports mentioned and others did not, is both a contributing factor for specific weather disasters and a reason why the future will not necessarily look like the past. For both fires and floods, the old rules about how fast they'll move and how big they'll get have expired. Hotter air holds more moisture, and that can and does lead to more torrential downpours and worse flooding. On the other hand, as local newspaper the Kerrville Daily Times reported, Kerr county has a history of extremely heavy rainfall leading to rapid river rise and devastating floods.
The Washington Post had a better assessment of what went right and what went wrong: 'But even as weather forecasts began to hint at the potential for heavy rain on Thursday, the response exposed a disconnect: few, including local authorities, prepared for anything but their normal Fourth of July. When the precipitation intensified in the early morning hours Friday, many people failed to receive or respond to flood warnings at riverside campsites and cabins that were known to be in the floodplain.' The county, in this report, did not send its first cell-phone alert until Sunday, while 'most cellphone alerts were coming from the National Weather Service's Austin/San Antonio station. But some alerts about life-threatening flooding didn't come until the predawn hours, and to areas where cellular reception may have been spotty.'
It seems like the National Weather Service did its duty despite the cuts, but more are coming. Fossil Free Memo reports: 'Just days before the flood, Texas Senator Ted Cruz helped pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping fossil fuel giveaway that also slashed $200 million from Noaa's weather forecasting and public alert programs. The money was meant to improve early warnings for exactly the kind of fast-moving, deadly flooding that just hit his own state. The cuts weren't in the House version. Cruz added them in the Senate, behind closed doors, as chair of the committee that oversees Noaa.' The impact of cuts to vital services is going to degrade everyday life and add to the dangers we face, and as far as politicians like Ted Cruz are concerned, that's the plan. It will be important to connect cause and effect, when there is a connection.
The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one's politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. But knowing we don't know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist