Officials in Texas are casting blame on the National Weather Service (NWS) for failing to forecast catastrophic flooding that has killed 24 people.
NWS was among the government agencies targeted by the Trump administration in its effort to gut the federal bureaucracy, losing approximately 600 staffers.
After the cuts, the agency—which was already understaffed—began to prepare to offer “degraded” forecasting services, facing “severe shortages” of meteorologists, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times in April.
That was faster than expected.
Unfortunately, being Texas I don’t know if they are suing to restore the NWS or use this as an excuse to get rid of it altogether since the article doesn’t clarify their desired outcome.
They’re using it as a way to divert blame
They don’t care. They had a press conference where they spent the whole beginning jerking off trump and cracking jokes. They gutted funding to act like they care about spending and now they’ll just congratulate each other while 32 are dead and more are missing.
Knowing Texas, they’ll probably try to privatize it
Everything trump and republicans have been doing is with the goal to privatize as much of the government as possible, to funnel taxpayer money directly into private pockets. The oligarchs want that money! They hate seeing it spent on the poors.
They want to decimate agencies until they can’t function, then use their inability to provide adequate services as the excuse to privatize, then either pay twice as much taxpayer money for the same or worse service from for-profit companies, or in some cases get rid of the services and let people fend for themselves.
You know those morons are going to ask to abolish it altogether…
I’ve been following the NOAA situation and I don’t think this was fast in the slightest. Trump and DOGE went through there like a hurricane.
I think the “Trump lead NWS” was implied. They hate science and weather people. Probably were still working for Obama anyway.