Project 2025: NOAA ‘should be broken up and downsized’

By Herbert Rothschild

The Texas Hill Country, which starts just west of I-35 as it runs between San Antonio and Austin, was not much longer than a three hours’ drive from Houston. When Deborah and I lived in that sprawling city, so unlike Ashland in both appealing and unappealing ways, we often spent a few days at year’s end out there.

In the late afternoon on New Year’s Eve we’d drink beer and two-step to the country-western songs on the jukebox at Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar Saloon in Bandera, “The Cowboy Capital of the World.” Then we’d go back to our rented lodgings at places like La Luna Linda in Comfort, Texas, sit outside by a fire and look up into a sky filled with stars before we went to bed.

It’s a lovely landscape out there, all limestone, dotted with Ashe juniper and Texas sage and madrone, mostly a dry surface cut by a few rivers like the Guadalupe and innumerable dry creek beds. As the county roads dip down and cross them, there are gauges warning of sudden rains and rising water. The area is known as Flash Flood Alley. 

That didn’t stop President Donald Trump from calling the flood that took at least 95 lives in central Texas last Friday “a 100-year catastrophe.” It was the last thing he said when reporters asked him Monday whether recent personnel cuts to the National Weather Service were responsible for the death toll.

Trump’s first impulse was to blame the deaths on Biden: “I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation, that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup.” Then, perhaps realizing how stupid he sounded, Trump tacked: “But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”

Before a day had passed, questions about the adequacy of the flood warnings arose. On Saturday both the Texas Tribune and The New York Times ran stories based on interviews with various officials as well as independent meteorologists. The answers they received require some parsing.

Weather service spokespersons asserted that everything that could have been done was done. Greg Waller, the service coordination hydrologist with the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth, said the agency’s forecasting offices were operating normally at the time of the disaster. “We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology. This was us doing our job to the best of our abilities.”

It’s incontrovertible, however, that staffing at the weather service offices most responsible for central Texas had been reduced. Tom Fahy, legislative director for the union representing weather service employees, said the San Angelo office was missing a senior hydrologist, a staff forecaster and a meteorologist in charge. The San Antonio office was missing a warning coordination meteorologist. At both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Trump returned to the White House in January. Nationally, the service has lost nearly 600 people from a work force that until recently numbered 4,000.

Matt Lanza, an independent meteorologist based in Houston who runs a blog on Substack named The Eyewall, on July 5 ran an extensive piece on how the storm was forecast and reported. He concluded, “We have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) and the NWS played any role at all in this event. Anyone using this event to claim that is being dishonest.”

But although the staffing shortages didn’t detract from the forecasting, they may very well have impaired the communication of the rapidly evolving forecasts to local officials. Lanza wrote, “I think we need to focus our attention on how people in these types of locations receive warnings. This seems to be where the breakdown occurred.”

AccuWeather chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter shared Lanza’s take. “The heartbreaking catastrophe that occurred in central Texas is a tragedy of the worst sort because it appears evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities had the organizers of impacted camps and local officials heeded the warnings of the government and private weather sources, including AccuWeather.”

The New York Times article highlighted faulty communications and suggested that the staff shortages in the weather service offices were partly to blame. According to the Times, “former weather service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected. . . . The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”

It’s illuminating to read the section of Project 2025, playbook of the Trump administration, that deals with NOAA, of which the weather service is a part (see Pages 674-677). It begins, “Break Up NOAA. . . . NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the (Commerce Department’s) $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal census years.”

What primarily underlies the analyses and recommendations in this section is a determination to repress any evidence of climate change. “NOAA consists of six main offices. . . . Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future USS. (sic) prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

I wonder if it’s a “fatal conceit” for a people’s government to try to give them sufficient warning of a flash flood that’s about to sweep them away. It was certainly fatal when, last Friday, our government, for one reason or another, couldn’t.

The devastating consequences of disbanding the U.S. Agency for International Development haven’t merited much media attention here. It was from the BBC I learned that 80% of the emergency kitchens feeding people left destitute by Sudan’s civil war have closed. What does it matter to us that thousands of black Muslim children in Africa die? Perhaps the deaths of some 30 white Christian girls in Texas, however, will force us to reconsider our collective priorities.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].