Texas flash floods: What Trump’s job cuts mean for weather forecasting in the US

Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Democrat), in a statement, said, “If Trump continues to push expert NOAA… staff out the door through payoffs and forced retirements, people will needlessly die.”

President Donald Trump, however, said on Sunday that the job cuts did not affect weather forecasting. Flash floods, he said, were “a thing that happened in seconds. No one expected it. Nobody saw it.”

What were these job cuts? Did they affect forecasts before flash floods hit Texas? What could be their impact in the future?

What were Trump’s job cuts to NOAA staff?

In May, the Trump administration proposed a 25% cut to the NOAA’s current annual budget of $6.1 billion. This will be implemented in the financial year 2026, which starts in October of this year.

However, the administration has already reduced the number of staff members at the National Weather Service (NWS), which is part of the NOAA and is responsible for providing weather forecasts and warnings of hazardous weather among other things.

Around 200 people at the NWS have so far taken voluntary redundancies (known as buyouts), and 300 opted for early retirement, Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organisation union, told the BBC. About a 100 more people were fired from the service.

“In total, the NWS lost 600 of its approximately 4,200 staff, says Mr Fahy, causing several offices across the country to operate without the necessary staffing,” the BBC report said. As of April, 122 forecast offices of NWS had lost nearly 20% of their staff since Trump returned to the White House this year.

So did the job cuts affect forecasting before Texas flash floods?

Independent experts have said that despite the job cuts, the NWS forecasts and warnings in the lead-up to flash floods in Texas were adequate. The NWS office in New Braunfels, Texas, which is responsible for issuing warnings had “surge staffing” for the event, with five forecasters instead of the usual two working, according to the Associated Press.

One of the first “Flood Watch” warnings was issued on July 3, more than 15 hours before the disaster, by the NWS, for parts of eight counties, including the worst hit Kerr County. On July 4, another Flood Watch warning went out in parts of counties such as Kerr which warned of “life-threatening flash flooding”.

Avantika Gori, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University (Texas), told the BBC, “The forecasts and warnings all played out in a normal manner. The challenge with this event was that it is very difficult to forecast this type of extreme, localised rainfall.”

Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist based in Wisconsin, told CNBC that he did not think better staffing at the New Braunfels NWS office could have averted the tragedy — key positions such as that of a meteorologist and a science officer remained vacant even two days after flash floods occurred.

“Those are important positions that do need to be filled,” he said, but he added that it “probably wasn’t a significant contributor to what happened”.

What can be the impact of job cuts in the future?

Although the shortage of staff did not directly contribute to the Texas flash floods, the issue could certainly lead to disastrous consequences soon. Experts suggest that NWS staff members are currently overworked as they have to work both night and day shifts due to short staffing. This could result in a situation in which important elements of forecasts and warnings are missed.

Shortage of staff has also reduced the number of weather balloon launches across the US. These balloons are crucial for weather forecasts, and help anticipate extreme weather events such as floods. Fewer launches could lead to a decline in the quality of forecasts.

This would put millions of lives at risk, especially when climate change hazards are becoming more frequent and more intense with rising global warming.