National Review Online
Monday, July 07, 2025
While most Americans celebrated Independence Day, a
tragedy unfolded in Central Texas.
There, a freak storm system described by meteorologists
as a combination of rare factors conspired to dump billions of gallons of water
over just a handful of Texas communities for hours on end.
That’s no exaggeration. The forecaster Ryan
Maue indicated that about 120 billion gallons of rain fell on Kerr County
alone — rain that followed several days of showers, which had already saturated
the ground. The Austin-based meteorologist Adaleigh Rowe said the system produced “training
thunderstorms” — a system that is blocked from moving off by high-pressure
boundaries — resulting in downpours that “hit the same areas over and over.”
There was too much water and not enough time for the
ground to absorb it. The result was a “flood wave” that transformed the placid
Guadalupe River into a rushing, miles-wide torrent. The river surged by up to
26 feet in places in just about 90 minutes — too fast for many to escape. At
least 89 people across five Texas counties have been killed in the floods, with
many others still missing. The most horrifying feature of this cataclysm occurred
at a girls’ summer camp, where 27 children and counselors are confirmed to have
died.
It was a disaster. For some, however, it could not be just
a disaster. There had to be some human hand at work engineering this great
misfortune — even if only through negligence. Within this cohort, Donald Trump
and Elon Musk fast became the most likely culprits.
A cadre of “experts” fast emerged to blame the severity
of the storm’s impact on the president and his DOGE commission, which were
alleged to have gutted the National Weather Service.
“A lot of the weather forecast offices now are not
operating at [a] full complement of staff, which means that you’re really
putting an extra burden on these folks,” said the former administrator of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Rick Spinrad. “Without research, without staff to do the
work, we can assume that the predictions are undoubtedly going to degrade, and
that means that people’s ability to prepare for these storms will be
compromised.”
What Spinrad admitted was only an assumption fast became
a fact.
“I do think that it should be investigated,” said Texas
Democrat Joaquin Castro of NWS staffing. Professional Trump critic
Seth Abramson went further still. “I have no difficulty saying that Trump and
Musk caused some of the 50+ flood deaths in Texas,” he
wrote. They “were told not to cut the positions they cut and were told
people would die if they did. And then people died.”
The presumption that this administration was indirectly
responsible for the deaths in Texas soon congealed into a consensus in online
forums. You can guess at the tenor of that discussion, but we’ll give you a taste of
it via Rosie O’Donnell: “It’s because he put this country in so
much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral
bill that he just signed into law,” the performer said from self-imposed exile
in Ireland of the GOP reconciliation bill that Trump signed into law on the day
of the floods. “As Republicans cheered, people will die as a result, and
they’ve started already.”
Cathartic though these outbursts may have been, they were
not predicated on a realistic assessment of the situation in central Texas.
In anticipation of this deadly system, the National
Weather Service “had extra staff on duty during the storms,” according to the Associated Press. “There were extra people in here that
night,” NWS meteorologist Jason Runyen told AP reporters, “and that’s typical
in every weather service office — you staff up for an event and bring people in
on overtime and hold people over.”
Although the scale of this event was not precisely
forecast, the storm was anticipated, and warnings about it were disseminated
well before its impacts were felt by local residents. “The National Weather
Service issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the
catastrophic flood,” CBS Austin meteorologist Avery
Tomasco wrote. “A flash flood warning was issued for Hunt and Ingram three
hours before the Guadalupe started to climb. They did their job, and they did
it well.”
“It’s pretty hard to forecast for these kinds of rainfall
rates,” onetime NWS director Louis Uccellini told the Times. That does
not mean there is no basis to question the local officials’ preparedness for
and response to this event. The decision to not preemptively evacuate the low-lying girls’ camp
“despite the warning days earlier that a storm could occur” now seems horribly
ill-considered. The warnings may have gone unheeded, but they were produced.
The discrepancy between the meteorological community’s
circumspection and the political class’s eagerness to assign blame for a
natural disaster to the executive branch is stark. We can understand why bitter
tragedy inspires its helpless observers to grasp for agency. And yet, far too
many visible public figures raced to establish a causal link between the
storm’s deadly effects and the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back the
executive branch’s footprint long before such a link could even be assumed,
much less proven.
It was an embarrassing episode, but it will teach those
who succumbed to that indiscretion no lessons. There is just too much market
demand for evidence that Trump and his works are wholly malignant. So long as
there is an audience for agitprop like this, there will be purveyors of it.
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