Three Big Questions After the Texas Floods

On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump turned a big storm — Hurricane Helene, which battered a swath of the South including North Carolina and Georgia — into a political cudgel, repeatedly slamming the Biden administration’s federal government for what he described as failures of its response and recovery operation.

Today, with desperate search-and-rescue operations still underway in Central Texas, it is Trump’s federal government that will face scrutiny after flash floods killed more than 100 people.

Accountability rests with any leader at the helm during a disaster. Usually, a president’s first reaction is to promise the full support of the federal government. But Trump’s past and proposed cuts to pillars of the federal disaster-response system make this moment more complicated for him.

Democrats are already seeking to turn those cuts into immediate fodder for political attacks. But it’s too early to say with certainty whether the Trump administration or its predecessors shaped the disaster response in Texas. What we have right now are a lot of questions. Getting answers will be critical as storms like the one in Texas get stronger and more frequent because of climate change.

I’m usually in the business of telling you what we do know. But today, I want to do something a little different and lay out what we still hope to learn. I reached out to my colleague Christopher Flavelle to ask him what he thinks we need to understand about the floods and the federal government. Chris has deep experience covering climate and disaster management, and over the weekend he reported that when the floods hit, key roles were vacant at the National Weather Service’s offices in Texas. Here are the three questions we discussed.

Did staffing cuts at the National Weather Service affect the forecast?

The National Weather Service has been targeted for the staffing cuts pushed across the government by the Department of Government Efficiency. By this spring, a work force that had recently been as large as 4,000 people had lost nearly 600 of those workers. Chris reported that the Weather Service’s office in San Angelo, Texas, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by the flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, a staff forecaster and a meteorologist in charge. Its nearby San Antonio office, which forecasts the weather in other areas hit by the floods, was missing a science officer as well as a warning coordination meteorologist, who retired on April 30 after taking an early retirement package that the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees.

Right now, we don’t know if those vacancies contributed to difficulties in forecasting a storm that escalated abruptly overnight. But that’s something Chris and our other colleagues want to find out, he told me.

Did it affect perhaps the ability or the bandwidth of the National Weather Service to predict and communicate these warnings? Did it affect its ability to coordinate with local officials? Would the outcome have been different if those positions had been filled? That’s a hard question to answer, but we’ve got to try.

What is FEMA’s role?

Trump has suggested “phasing out” the Federal Emergency Management Agency and handing its authority to states. He has also warned states to expect less money for disaster recovery. The storm in Texas could put a spotlight on the agency at a moment of great uncertainty about its future.

There’s a lot to unpack there, Chris told me, and it starts with the basics. We need to understand what role FEMA has played, and will play, on the ground.

We’ve got to find out more about what FEMA is doing. How does it compare to what FEMA did when you compare it to similarly severe floods in places like Tennessee and Kentucky? This is the kind of large-scale event where, in the past, FEMA has played a role, because you want as much help as you can get.

We’ll also watch how Texas’ emergency management operation — among the strongest at the state level — handles its part of the response.

Have other parts of the nation’s disaster response machinery been impaired by cuts?

The U.S. doesn’t have just one agency to plan for and respond to natural disasters. That responsibility is split among a bevy of agencies, from the U.S. Geological Survey, which helps maintain stream gauges that monitor changes in water flow, to the Small Business Administration, which puts up loans for rebuilding after storm damage, to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which pays out billions for rebuilding and repairs. And many of those agencies are reeling from cuts of their own, Chris explained.

In a moment like this, where almost every agency has fewer staff members than it did six months ago, it raises the question: To what degree does that impede the response capability?

If you have information you want to share about any of these issues, you can reach Chris at [email protected].

We don’t yet know what we’ll find as we seek to understand these questions. That’s why independent-minded investigative reporting is so important. But we do know that a storm like this — or even more powerful storms, like hurricanes — will happen again, and soon.

Got a tip?

The Times offers several ways to send important information confidentially.

In One QUIZ

What could Trump’s big domestic policy law mean for your pocketbook? My colleague Ashley Wu created a quiz with 33 yes-or-no questions to help you figure out some of the personal impacts.

One example: We ask if you take the standard deduction when filing your tax returns. If you do (as most Americans do), you’ll get a bonus this year: an additional $750 ($1,500 for couples).

The parts of the bill covered in the quiz range from those that may affect most Americans to some that may affect smaller numbers of people.

ONE LAST THING

R.F.K. vs. M&M

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has made big strides in his war on synthetic food dye — to the surprise of industry experts who thought his reliance on voluntary compliance wouldn’t work.

The makers of a rainbow of foods, like Jell-O, Kool-Aid and Lucky Charms, have all promised to remove synthetic dyes from their foods by 2027.

But there’s one big obstacle still standing in Kennedy’s way, according to my colleagues Sheryl Stolberg and Julie Creswell. Well, actually, it’s a physically small obstacle, but it looms large in the world of candy: the M&M. Candy manufacturers, which lean on artificial colorings for the bright treats they market to children, are still holding out.

“I think R.F.K. and his team are learning the limits of their power to persuade,” said Scott Faber, a lawyer with the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization.

Read more here.

Ashley Wu and Christopher Flavelle contributed to this newsletter.

Jess Bidgood is a managing correspondent for The Times and writes the On Politics newsletter, a guide to how President Trump is changing Washington, the country and its politics.

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