As Climate Disasters Worsen, We Need More, Competent Government
New reporting shows Texas floods worsened by Republican suspicion and sabotage of government
The flooding in Texas has reached a death toll of 129 lives. Flash floods, that President Trump called a one-in-1,000-year event,1 struck Kerr County and nearby areas in the early morning hours of July 4.
New reporting from outlets like The New York Times and The Texas Tribune has revealed that the floods’ damaging effects were worsened by government failings, which were caused in large part by unfounded suspicion towards government action by local communities as well as failure to act by the Trump administration.
The Federal Failure
Towards 2030 has previously examined the role that the National Weather Service (NWS) played in sending out predictions and warnings ahead of the flooding. Long story short, the NWS (and its parent agency, NOAA) have experienced drastic funding and staffing cuts by the Trump Administration. This led to the local branch stations in Texas being short-staffed, including for critical leadership positions.
Some observers believe that the Texas NWS stations still delivered accurate reporting and predictions despite the lack of staffing; however, it is hard to believe that the rapid, destructive cuts to the Service have had no effect on the local stations’ ability to communicate the most up-to-date information to the widest audience.
Unfortunately, issues with the government’s handling of this climate disaster do not stop with the NWS. The most obvious failing was on part of the federal response. Normally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is crucial in responding to emergencies that occur across the nation, from hurricanes to wildfires, helping coordinate large-scale relief efforts.
In response to the Texas flooding, FEMA was fielding calls from survivors, assisting and providing emergency loans for those affected. According to The New York Times, FEMA received thousands of calls on July 5 and answered “roughly 99.7%,” an impressively high response rate.
However, by July 6, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, whose department includes FEMA, had not approved extensions to the contracts of the call centers which FEMA used to answer survivors’ calls. The people picking up the phones for FEMA were laid off. Unsurprisingly, survivors stopped getting answered.
From the NYT:
The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent... And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent...
While the contracts did eventually get reinstated, they were expired for five days, an eternity in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Undoubtedly, thousands of people missed out on getting immediate help from FEMA.
This was completely avoidable. If it struck you as odd that the head of the DHS was responsible for approving call center contract extensions for a FEMA flood response, you have decent common sense. The only reason that such a decision was stalled by someone so far up the chain of command was because Secretary Noem has “instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000.” Ostensibly, this is to limit waste. But any business person or anyone who has worked in an organization with any sort of hierarchy could tell you that going to the CEO for approval of minor expenses is wildly inefficient.
$100,000 might not seem minor, but the DHS just requested a budget of $115.6 billion for 2026. If Noem had to approve every $100,000 expenditure in that budget, she would have to approve an expenditure every minute of every day for over two years.
And it wasn’t just calls. Noem’s lack of approval meant days went by before FEMA search-and-rescue teams were able to deploy to Texas to assist in finding and saving survivors. That is very tangibly putting lives at risk. It is no large claim to say that there were people who may not have been saved because these teams were not able to prepare and deploy sooner. This Noem restriction, rather than reducing waste, has generated inefficiency and potentially cost lives in central Texas.
The Local Loss
The hardships Texas is now facing are compounded by a lack of preparation on the local level. Kerr County had the opportunity to better prepare for future disasters like floods, but vocal residents, beset by baseless government suspicion, opted not to.
The Texas Tribune details well how Kerr County failed to install flood protections, like a siren warning system that would have helped during the recent middle-of-the-night flooding, even when given ample opportunity to do so.
Spurred on by past floods, the Trump-voting community had noted the need for better disaster services, “including a $1 million flood warning system that would better alert the public to emergencies.” While a number of news articles have detailed the struggle the county endured trying to get funding for better systems, few have highlighted, as the Tribune does, that the county was given funding through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021.
This Biden-era Act passed through Congress on fiercely partisan lines; not a single Republican voted in favor of it in either the House or the Senate. Despite this one-sidedness, the Act, which aimed to support the country’s recovery from the Covid-19 Pandemic, benefitted Americans from coast to coast, including in Texas’ starkly red Kerr County.
The county received $10.2 million from the Act, along with flexibility to use the money in ways that the county itself deemed best. Despite this substantial no-strings-attached recovery stimulus, residents of the county were not happy. A survey “showed that 42% of the 180 responses wanted to reject the $10 million bonus altogether.”
What, you may ask, could possibly constitute a sensible reason to reject aid from one’s own government? To a vocal section of Kerr County, the reason was simply that it came from a bill signed by President Biden.
From the Tribune:
“I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
“We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
These statements are the result of a decades long attack on government by Republicans. Starting, at least, with Reagan’s idiotic nine most terrifying words, and culminating in Trump’s current wonton destruction of the federal government, the American right has sewn a deep, unfounded mistrust of the government in large swathes of our population.
This mistrust is turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy when Trump decimates FEMA’s ability to respond to disasters or when local municipalities reject funding to better prepare for climate disasters, which will likely worsen due to climate change.
Trump says the government doesn’t work, so he cuts staff and funding. Then, when communities feel the negative effects of the cuts, they believe that the government doesn’t work and greenlight Trump/Republicans to destroy more.
It’s important to note, though, that Kerr County did end up taking the money. But instead of using one-tenth of the total funding to build their needed warning system, they spent it on a police and fire services radio communications system ($5-7 million), county positions ($600,000), and stipends and raises to sheriff employees to the tune over $1 million.
Almost all of the money that it would have taken to create a flood warning system that would have likely saved lives in this disaster went to raises for local police.
The Climate Continues to Change
The result of Republican hyper-partisanship made this crisis worse than it otherwise would have been. And despite Trump claiming this was a one-in-1,000-year event, disasters like this are only becoming more and more common.
Climate change leads to volatility. The climate that humanity developed in is what we are adapted to. As that climate changes, the patterns and natural phenomena we have come to expect change, too. More intense wildfires, more erratic rainfall, and more destructive hurricanes are just some of the symptoms.
This is all fueled by our use of greenhouse gas producing energy sources. The more we emit, the more the planet warms and the climate changes. Unfortunately, we have not yet begun to globally bring down emissions, which means we have not yet started to significantly limit climate change. And Trump, a denier of the scientific reality of climate change, is actively making things worse.
He praises dirty coal while his government silences its own research. Outreach about climate change is being purged.
And who suffers the most? Well, the global poor and those living in climate-impacted regions, like island communities, are feeling the effects of climate change the most on an absolute scale. But in America, it is often the Trump voters living in rural, poorer, or climate-sensitive regions that are most devastated by climate disasters.
And even when government action from Democrats, like from Biden and a blue Congress,2 try to support these communities, the suspicion drummed up by decades of Republican fear-mongering results in the communities continuing to suffer, often at their own will.
To properly prepare for these disasters, we need more, not less, government, but we also need that government to govern competently. On the local level, that is city and county officials being willing to tell their constituents when they are endangering themselves (and it also means not spending disaster funds on police raises). On the federal level, that is coordinated, efficient responses by teams of equipped and prepared employees/contractors. It is not the stripping of services to leave communities on their own to deal with globally-shifting disasters.
And on the press level, that is accurately calling out the issues which make disasters like the Texas flooding worse. Trump wanting to destroy the NWS and FEMA has hurt this response, but so too has local Republicans wasting funds because of political boogeymen.
We need to 180 if we are going to prepare and limit future disasters, especially if they get worse. And, sadly, all signs point to things getting worse.
They weren’t.
Bro Biden was literally out here trying to double FEMA’s ability to help the country prepare for disasters and Trump out here trying to gut it.