The Forecast Was Clear. The Cuts Were Deadly.

At least 95 people are dead after flash floods ripped through Kerr County, Texas over the Fourth of July weekend. Entire families were swept away. Children are still missing. The scale of the devastation is hard to fathom.

Communities were left underwater, grieving, and asking how this could happen with so little warning. The truth is, it didn’t have to.

This flood was caused by extreme weather. But the scale of the devastation was made worse by political decisions that left people less protected, less informed, and more at risk.

Just days before the flood, Texas Senator Ted Cruz helped pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping fossil fuel giveaway that also slashed $200 million from NOAA’s weather forecasting and public alert programs. The money was meant to improve early warnings for exactly the kind of fast-moving, deadly flooding that just hit his own state. The cuts weren’t in the House version. Cruz added them in the Senate, behind closed doors, as chair of the committee that oversees NOAA.

This is the same Cruz who’s spent years attacking the agencies tasked with keeping the public safe. And now that his own state is reeling from climate disaster, he’s letting people blame the very public servants he helped defund.

Across social media, on cable news, and from officials at every level, the finger-pointing has begun. Local leaders have claimed NOAA didn’t do enough to warn people. Trump himself called it “disgusting” to suggest that his own cuts to the National Weather Service played a role. But forecasters did issue warnings. Multiple alerts. On time. In the middle of the night. In some cases, hours in advance.

What they lacked wasn’t urgency. It was support.

The National Weather Service is operating with 600 fewer employees after Trump’s spring layoffs. Key leadership roles, including the warning coordination meteorologist responsible for liaising with emergency managers, remain unfilled in Texas offices. Hydrologists who track river rise and flood risk aren’t on staff. Weather balloon programs have been suspended. Local offices are stretched thin, and the ability to coordinate emergency responses has been eroded.

Independent meteorologists and even former NOAA staff are saying it plainly: the forecasts were solid. The alerts were sent. What’s breaking down is the infrastructure around them, and that’s what Cruz, Trump, and their fossil fuel allies have worked for years to dismantle.

This is what it looks like when polluters and politicians work hand in hand. The public gets stripped of early warning systems, emergency support, and critical safety programs, while Big Oil keeps raking in record profits. Trump wants to shut down FEMA, eliminate NOAA research labs, and pour billions more into fossil fuel subsidies. Cruz is cutting flood forecasting even as his own constituents drown. And now they want us to blame the civil servants still doing their jobs with one hand tied behind their backs.

We won’t let them rewrite this story.

This was a preventable tragedy. Not because we can control the rain, but because we could have had stronger systems in place; better alerts, more local coordination, more scientists in the room, more resources for the people most at risk. Instead, politicians like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump chose to defund those systems. They chose to take money out of public protection and shovel it into the pockets of oil executives.

We don’t need thoughts and prayers. We need accountability. We need to stop letting polluters write the rules, and we need to stop letting their political allies cut the programs that keep people alive.

We should be putting more resources into communities, not pulling them out. We should be funding early warnings, emergency preparedness, flood protections, and public science, not gutting them behind closed doors.

We need to Make Polluters Pay.