Texas horrific floods raise serious questions about U.S. governance

Editor's note: William Jones, a special commentator for CGTN, is a former Washington bureau chief for Executive Intelligence Review News Service and a non-resident fellow of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The nation mourns as more than 100 people have perished in major flash floods in the state of Texas, including, most tragically, 27 young girls attending a popular summer camp, many of whom were simply washed away in the flooding. While the intense efforts are now being made to find survivors – or the remains of victims – and the general population is also in grief and concentrating primarily on aiding the survivors and repairing the damage, the tragic loss of young life has brought to the fore the dilapidated state of U.S. infrastructure in dealing with these unexpected 100-year floods.

Some of the immediate focus is on the major cuts of the Trump administration due to the massive Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) layoffs, which have affected both the National Weather Service (NWS) as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is largely responsible for the meteorological predictions. In the aftermath of the flooding, we will no doubt see more mistakes being made given the major cuts in the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which normally would take the point on disaster relief. The Trump administration has also cut their budget and intends to transfer primary responsibility for disaster relief to the individual cash-strapped states.

The White House, of course, is pushing back on the criticism. "This was an act of God," White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said, "it is not the administration's fault that the flood hit when it did. But there were early and consistent warnings, and again, the National Weather Service did its job." This will not, however, allay the suspicion that mistakes have been made in leaving the general public unaware of the real extent of the danger.

From the beginning of the year the NWS have lost 500 people. There was at least one important NWS individual, the warning coordination meteorologist and a 32-year veteran of the agency, in the local Austin/San Antonio office who left the Agency early because of the cuts. One of his jobs was to act as a liaison to the public authorities and give them a clear indication of what to expect. There are presently also six other vacancies in the Austin/San Antonio office alone, which is responsible for that part of Texas.

NOAA has also lost a good number of personnel and is now threatened with reductions of up to 20 percent of its workforce. Among the important NOAA projects that are slated for extinction are funding for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and funding for the National Severe Storms Lab, two offices that would play a vital function in preventing these types of catastrophes.

More will no doubt be coming with the passage of U.S. President Donald Trump's much touted "one big, beautiful bill." This aspect of the de facto dismantling of the U.S. scientific capabilities is just the tip of the iceberg, however. More significant is the downsizing of Federal spending on science and technology generally.

The U.S. as a nation could take pride in its scientific capabilities thanks to the fact that the Federal government since the beginning of the 1800s has played a major role in promoting science in the country. One of the first major institutions responsible for scientific innovation and for weather predictions was the U.S. Coastal Survey, under the leadership of Benjamin Franklin's nephew Alexander Dallas Bache. One could also point to the early creation of West Point and the Army Corps of Engineers, which has played such a vital role in the expansion of the nation through the management of the nation's rivers.

Much of this will be dismantled by a combination of the DOGE cuts and the new bill passed by the Republican Congress, as well as the prevailing notion that scientific progress can be maintained merely through the efforts of private enterprise, which dominates the thinking of the present Trump administration.

This fiction is belied by the realization among most of our scientific elite that in the global arena, the U.S. is no longer the leading factor in most scientific fields. There is presently only one U.S. university that has made the list of the top 10 universities in the world, and that is Harvard University, which is now under attack by the Trump administration.

Science and technology are now the driver for major economies such as China and Russia, while our political elites have left scientific development in the hands of private companies interested primarily in their personal profits or the price of their stocks rather than the good of the nation. In such a situation, whatever disasters may face us in the future, like the unprecedented flooding in Texas, we will find ourselves increasingly without the means of predicting or preventing them.

The cuts in the NASA budget, in the National Science Foundation budget and many other Federal agencies responsible for the general welfare of the American people have crippled out ability to deal with "the unexpected" in the service of our citizenry.

The severe loss of life, and particularly, that of the children at Camp Mystic in Kerrville, Texas, must serve as a wake-up call to the American people that something is seriously wrong with the way Washington works, and it must change if we are to survive as a nation.

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