
In Flooded Texas, Questions About FEMA’s Role and Fate
“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”
Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”
Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.
President Trump wants to shutter the agency and shift responsibility and costs of emergency management to the states. In Texas, that process appears to already be underway.
Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott said that rescuers would continue to search for those affected by the floods: “We will not stop until we identify, recover every single body.” At least 173 people remain missing.
Under fire, Texas officials can’t answer why the Texas Hill Country flood victims didn’t get more notice of the impending catastrophe. The National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m July 4 of a “catastrophic” potential for loss of life, and questions are intensifying about what local officials were doing during those hours after the warning. Kerr County County Sheriff Larry Leitha acknowledged that he wasn’t notified about the flooding until between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m.—by which point the river had already risen as much as 26 feet near Camp Mystic.
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While inflation remained relatively muted through May, consumer spending, which is the primary driver of U.S. economic growth, has started to sputter, as Americans pull back on purchases after months of stockpiling to get ahead of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
David Kelly, the chief global strategist for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, still described the U.S. economy as a “relatively healthy tortoise,” resilient and expanding, slowly but surely. He projected that the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its total output, would grow about 1 percent by the end of 2025 compared with the year prior.
But, he added, the economy has reached a “bit of a diversion in the road,” as some of Mr. Trump’s new policies start to take effect.
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The Collapse of the F.D.A.: Since R.F.K. Jr. was confirmed as Trump’s health secretary, the Food and Drug Administration has been buffeted by staff cuts that have crippled divisions and gutted the agency. Thousands of scientists and other experts have left or been let go, putting the storied agency’s mission at risk.
The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes "unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.
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While inflation remained relatively muted through May, consumer spending, which is the primary driver of U.S. economic growth, has started to sputter, as Americans pull back on purchases after months of stockpiling to get ahead of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
David Kelly, the chief global strategist for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, still described the U.S. economy as a “relatively healthy tortoise,” resilient and expanding, slowly but surely. He projected that the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its total output, would grow about 1 percent by the end of 2025 compared with the year prior.
But, he added, the economy has reached a “bit of a diversion in the road,” as some of Mr. Trump’s new policies start to take effect.