Even establishment media outlets like the Associated Press (AP) have reported on the weather community’s pushback on that narrative, while the Democratic National Committee (DNC) sent out memos arguing that the Trump administration “refused to backfill key roles … likely contributing to preventable deaths and worsened devastation.”
The AP cited NWS meteorologist Jason Runyen, who said the agency’s office in New Braunfels, serving Austin, San Antonio, and the surrounding areas, had more people on duty than normal just before the flash floods occurred before sunrise on Friday.
“There were extra people in here that night, 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,” Runyen said, explaining that the office had up to five people on staff, when they would typically have two.
Not only did the NWS issue “a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare alert notifying of imminent danger,” according to the AP’s Sean Murphy and Jim Vertuno, but they also put out the initial flood watch at 1:18 p.m. the day before.
The notices “grew increasingly ominous in the early morning hours of Friday,” culminating in a 4:03 a.m. warning for “the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life,” the AP added.
NOTUS, an outlet that characterized the NWS staffing cuts as “aggressive” moves by the Trump administration, even reported that the agency “did have extra staff on hand for the storm.”
“At the River Forecast Center, we usually close overnight unless there is a flood threat. We identified the threat and we increased overnight coverage and were staffed 24 during this event,” Greg Waller, the service coordination hydrologist at the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center, told the outlet.
The Austin/San Antonio and San Angelo offices had also beefed up their staffing prior to the storm, he explained.
Some of the areas hit by the flash floods, like the grounds occupied by Camp Mystic in Kerr County, may have been impacted by spotty cell service, so it is unclear if everyone who needed to evacuate received alerts.
Waller added in a statement to the Texas Tribune, “We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology. This was us doing our job to the best of our abilities.”
While NOTUS reported that the NWS forecast “did not definitively state that record-breaking rains were going to fall that night,” a former agency official told the outlet that the forecast was about as good as could be reasonably expected, based on the math they had.
“Bottom line, all need to work toward an improved alerting system,” the former official added.
“It’s pretty hard to forecast for these kinds of rainfall rates,” former NWS director Louis Uccellini told the New York Times.
Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, whose own property was among those damaged, said, “We know we get rains. We know the river rises. But nobody saw this coming.”
Kelly, the county’s top elected official, added that a flood warning siren system was in consideration to be placed along the now-devastated Guadalupe River before he was in office about six years ago, but it was never executed.
“We’ve looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost,” the judge told the AP.
Tom Fahy, legislative director for the NWS’s labor union, also told the outlet that the staffing levels were “adequate to issue timely forecasts and warnings before and during the emergency.”
Even meteorologist Matt Lanza, described by Politico as a “critic of the NWS/NOAA cuts,” wrote for his Substack blog, “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.”
He continued:
Anyone using this event to claim that is being dishonest. … In fact, weather balloon launches played a vital role in forecast messaging on Thursday night as the event was beginning to unfold. If you want to go that route, use this event as a symbol of the value NOAA and NWS bring to society, understanding that as horrific as this is, yes, it could always have been even worse.
Even with the evidence from those who understand the science behind the disaster — which caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than 26 feet in less than an hour and left at least 89 people dead as of Monday afternoon — left-wing ideologues continue to blame Trump.
Anti-Trump author Seth Abramson wrote on X that he has “no difficulty saying that Trump and Musk caused some of the 50+ flood deaths in Texas.”
“And here’s why: these two men with no expertise in disaster preparedness were told not to cut the positions they cut, and were told people would die if they did,” he argued. “And then people died.”
Harvard President Larry Summers, who served as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, also politicized the flood during a Sunday appearance on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos.
According to Summers, Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will lead to “2,000 days of death like we’ve seen in Texas this weekend.”
Over on CNN, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) said the Trump administration’s cuts to the NWS should be “investigated” in response to the deadly weather event.
Actress Rosie O’Donnell, who notoriously moved to Ireland in protest of Trump becoming president once again, also blamed Trump for gutting “all of the early warning systems and the weathering forecast abilities of the government,” in a TikTok video:
@rosie tennis is on #wimbledon #ireland #commonknowledge #sunday #edinburghscotland #fringefestival aug1-10 #txfloods
O’Donnell went on to claim that Trump’s policies have put the United States “in so much danger,” arguing that more “people will die as a result.”
Even Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on X, Grok, joined in on pushing the fake narrative, Breitbart News’s Alana Mastrangelo reported.
“Trump’s 2025 cuts slashed NOAA/NWS funding by [approximately] 30% and staff by 17%, impairing forecast accuracy,” Grok claimed, adding, “Warnings underestimated rainfall, contributing to inadequate alerts for the flash floods that killed 24 and left [approximately] 24 Camp Mystic girls missing, presumed dead in ongoing searches.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published the timeline of the NWS’s actions on X, stating that “the mainstream media is deliberately lying about the events leading up to the catastrophic flooding in Texas.”
“The National Weather Service executed timely, precise forecasting and warnings, despite unprecedented rainfall overwhelming the region,” the agency wrote, along with timestamps showing that the NWS provided over 12 hours of advance notice with escalated alerts as the storm intensified.
Even still, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledged that the NWS needed technology upgrades for better forecasts and warnings during a Saturday press conference with Texas leaders.
“We know that everyone wants more warning time, and that’s why we’re working to upgrade the technology that’s been neglected for far too long to make sure families have as much advance notice as possible,” she said, noting that the NWS is not under her purview as Homeland Security secretary.
The evidence available from NWS points to warnings going out on time — warnings that unfortunately went unheeded by many.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) denounced the partisan blame game in a Sunday appearance on Fox and Friends:
“In classic Washington D.C. fashion, everybody wants to politicize everything. Forty-eight hours after a flood came through here and ravaged our community, where we’re still trying to heal and talk to the parents who have lost loved ones, still trying to find little girls, still trying to find adults out here,” the Texas congressman said.
“Don’t point fingers. Maybe there were Democrats that were involved in not doing something, maybe there were Republicans involved in not doing something,” he added.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
Breitbart News
Read the full article .
