July 12, 2025

The Texas Floods and FEMA

 


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.

  • Eight-year-old girls at sleep-away camp; families crammed into riverside R.V.s; residents asleep in their beds. These are the lives lost to the Texas floods.
  • The Camp Mystic cabins were in an “extremely hazardous” area for floods. A recent expansion built new cabins in the flood zone. See maps.
  • Along the Guadalupe River, the rising floodwaters quickly engulfed a 60-room inn. Watch a video.

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.

On July 5, the day after the Texas floods hit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received 3,027 calls from survivors and answered 3,018 of them, about 99.7%, according to Maxine Joselow of the New York Times. But that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or about 35.8%. On Monday, July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, around 15.9%.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”

Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel notes that one reason Noem has been cutting so ferociously at FEMA is because she has run through the money Congress allocated for HHS with her single-minded focus on immigration.