It's always possible for politics to go lower…

In the wake of the horrible flash floods in Texas that have killed so many people, including children at a Summer camp, too many Democrats have jumped on the opportunity to blame the Trump Administration, and specifically DOGE's cuts to the National Weather Service. To his shame, Senator Schumer has called for an investigation.

A close analysis of the facts, however, shows that it's simply not true.

Fact 1: These flash floods were a very rare type of event that are very hard to track in advance. As PBS journalist Ali Rogin (presumably not a MAGA stooge) reported: "These types of 'convective extremes' are very different than the types of large systems that you can easily track over long periods of time. It’s hard to be able to predict very far in advance where these storms will hit and how much."

Fact 2: Federal weather officials reported the progress of the storm in real time as best they could. This is also corroborated by Rogin's reporting: "the NWS did everything it could, in a textbook fashion, in terms of prediction. They continually upgraded their messaging as the severity of the storm came into focus."

The Department of Homeland Security published a detailed timeline reports, which shows that the National Weather Service provided extensive advance warning of the dangerous conditions. The warning sequence began on July 3rd and escalated appropriately as the threat intensified:

• July 3, 1:18 PM: NWS issued a Flood Watch for Kerr County

• July 3, 6:22 PM: National Water Center warned of considerable flooding risks for Kerrville

• July 4, 1:14 AM: Flash Flood Warning with "Considerable" tag issued, triggering wireless emergency alerts

• July 4, 4:03 AM: Flash Flood Warning upgraded to Flash Flood Emergency

• July 4, 5:34 AM: Flash Flood Emergency issued for Guadalupe River

This represents over 12 hours of advance notice via the Flood Watch and over 3 hours of Flash Flood Warnings before the catastrophic flooding occurred. The escalation pattern follows textbook severe weather protocols, with increasingly urgent warnings as conditions deteriorated.

The weather service successfully identified the threat, issued appropriate warnings, and escalated them as conditions worsened—exactly as their protocols dictate. The forecasting was accurate; the challenge was communicating those warnings effectively at the local level.

Fact 3: DOGE cuts did not impact operational readiness. Most of the DOGE cuts, across the Federal government as well as at NWS, affected probationary employees who hadn't yet proven their value, administrative positions rather than operational forecasters, duplicative roles that modern technology has made redundant, and DEI-related positions that don't directly contribute to weather forecasting.

From an article in the Texas Tribune: “The NWS forecasting offices were operating normally at the time of the disaster, said Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth. ‘We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology,’ Waller said. ‘This was us doing our job to the best of our abilities.’” Fahy also told the Tribune that the current staffing levels were “adequate to issue timely forecasts and warnings before and during the emergency.”

Meteorologist Matt Lanza, who has been critical of DOGE's cuts to the NWS in the past, wrote: "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 fact, you could easily read the sequence of events as a vindication for DOGE: DOGE did make cuts, deep cuts even, at NWS, and yet everything worked as it was supposed to have worked. Which does suggest that DOGE was right that there was plenty of "fat" to cut in the Federal government, and that they did cut fat, not muscle.

Fact 4: There seems to have been a breakdown in communications at the local level. It's too early to know for sure, but according to brilliant reporting by Jesus Jiménez, Margarita Birnbaum, Danny Hakim and Mike Baker of the New York Times, as well as other experts, the problem was in the "last mile" of getting the warnings from NWS to local areas, which is not a Federal responsibility. According to the Times' reporting, Kerr County lacked a comprehensive flood warning system, despite years of discussion following previous floods. The county relied on text message alerts but, tragically, text alerts proved inadequate in a rural area with spotty cell coverage and during overnight hours when many were asleep. Some residents received alerts too late or dismissed them as routine flood warnings common in the region.

The bottomline is that DOGE and Trump Administration cuts are not to blame here, this is just what the facts indicate, and it's frankly shameful to policitize such a tragedy so early.