And now, even as the search continues, it is starting to become clear that the federal response to the flooding has been scandalously poor. At The Handbasket, Marisa Kabas has reported on the preposterously slow Federal Emergency Management Agency response, which somehow had only 86 total staff deployed to Texas in the first few days following the disaster where they would normally have “hundreds.”
CNN, meanwhile, has four FEMA sources saying that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s policy instituted only weeks ago that requires her sign-off on every contract or grant over $100,000 definitively slowed the response. FEMA staff apparently hesitated at pre-positioning search and rescue crews in relevant places because they realized they needed Noem’s approval. Per CNN, that approval didn’t arrive until Monday, as long as three days since the flooding started.
Meanwhile, again per Kabas at The Handbasket, FEMA’s acting director David Richardson — who was installed after the previous director was fired probably for saying FEMA should exist and who did not know until arriving that there is such a thing as “hurricane season” — has been largely missing from the entire response. He has yet to be seen on the ground in Texas, has skipped staff meetings at the Washington DC office, and has apparently sent only three staff-wide emails since taking over in early May.
Officials in Texas and in the federal government have been largely defensive about suggestions that mistakes were made to lead to such a deadly catastrophe, but they are starting to acknowledge that there is room for improvement. The governor and lieutenant governor have now both said that better emergency communication and early warning systems are likely needed. There has been talk that while the National Weather Service forecasts were likely as good as they would have been before the DOGE-led destruction across government, there may have been gaps in “last-mile” communications due to unnecessary vacancies; true to form, as reported by Talking Points Memo, as rescue workers were finding bodies on Tuesday, Noem’s DHS canceled a $3 million grant for improving exactly that sort of communications.
Details of what could have been done differently will continue to trickle out in the wake of the flood, but the tragedy in Texas is more or less exactly what a cacophony of voices warned about cuts to FEMA, NOAA and NWS, and other critical pieces of government. In making those widespread, largely arbitrary, capricious cuts, tragedies like this are, essentially, what they asked for.
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