More Floods Like the Deadly One in Texas Are Inevitable Thanks to Project 2025
I can’t stop thinking about the devastating flash flood in Texas.
On a day that was supposed to mark our nation’s independence, Central Texas was met with unbearable tragedy. I grew up about three hours away from Kerrville, one of the hardest hit areas. My family has floated the Guadalupe River on vacation. I know people who went to Camp Mystic, the all-girls Christian camp where 15 students have died and 27 are still missing.
As a kid, my brother and I got trapped in a flash flood with our grandparents. We were in my grandfather’s old yellow pick up truck. I held a tiny kitten in my lap who climbed me as the brown river water circled our ankles, then our knees. My grandmother screamed for help. I’m sure she worried about how she would save us — my brother and I were in elementary school, too young to be much help, and my grandfather had to walk with crutches after a stroke.
Fortunately, someone heard my grandmother’s cry. Emergency responders pulled us through the window and carried us to safety. The kitten’s claws pierced my shoulder. The water stained the truck’s interior. But we were fine. Everything dried. We lived.
At least 51 people in Texas weren’t so lucky.
I also grew up going to church camp. My favorite was Lake Cisco Christian Camp in West Texas. It’s where I got baptized at 12, where I met Jeremiah Gibson (of the Sexvangelicals), where I worked as a camp counselor, where I learned who I am and how I want to navigate the world.
Lake Cisco is grafted on my bones. I’m sure Camp Mystic’s alumni feel the same way. The camp has been around 100 years. Now it’s a den of tragedy.
"The camp was completely destroyed," Elinor Lester, 13, one of hundreds of campers at Camp Mystic, told the AP. "A helicopter landed and started taking people away. It was really scary."
No words are sufficient for the devastation this flood has caused. Daughters stolen from a place of happiness and safety. Families suddenly homeless. Floodlights panning floodwaters, searching for bodies.
How does something like this happen?
Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it was weather modification.
Texas officials claimed they didn’t get sufficient warning from the National Weather Service (NWS) to warn the public about the overnight rains.
“There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing and a lot of second guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking,” said Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican.
Meanwhile Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says Trump is “heartbroken” about the flood.
“The loss of life is absolutely devastating to him and Melania," Noem said at a press conference.
Tragedies like this are wholly predictable thanks to Trump’s efforts to gut the NWS, a critical arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Those of us who read Project 2025 and have been paying attention to the drastic and dangerous reduction of staff do not have the luxury of surprise.
Project 2025 called for the NWS to be “broken up and downsized,” with many functions transferred, privatized, or shifted to states/other agencies.
After Trump’s election, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wasted no time carrying out this mission, first offering early retirement to anyone who would take it and then telling NOAA administrators to eliminate 10 percent of the department's workforce as it made moves to eliminate the agency. NOAA has lost nearly 600 experts dedicated to tracking, notifying, and preparing for weather disasters like the Texas flood. After another round of layoffs in May, about one-in-four jobs have been lost since Trump took office in January.
Like other government departments, this was part of Donald Trump’s aggressive crusade to hollow out the federal government. But the attacks on the NOAA and the scientific community weren’t just about trimming bureaucratic fat.
Alan Gerard, a 35+ year NWS meteorologist who took the early retirement buyout, speculates that much of Project 2025’s ire with NOAA is “because most of NOAA’s climate research is done by this line office and clearly the administration is targeting anything with the word ‘climate’ in it, i.e., weather research is just collateral damage.”
He also thinks Trump’s actions are retribution for Sharpie-gate, or the time Trump used a Sharpie to alter a hurricane-impact map, demonstrating that Hurricane Dorian would miss Alabama as it moved up the Atlantic coast, contradicting and embarrassing the thin-skinned president.
Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same: Scaling back weather research and mechanisms to warn the public about impending disasters puts all of us in danger. Whether we live in the pathway of hurricanes, or flash floods, or wildfires, or earthquakes, or tornadoes, or volcanoes, these decisions are a direct assault on our ability to prepare for increasingly deadly weather disasters.
“This is not government efficiency,” said former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad. “It is the first steps toward eradication. There is no way to make these kinds of cuts without removing or strongly compromising mission capabilities.”
I learned to respect the power of nature that day the waters surged my grandfather’s pick up. The time to act is as early as possible. The water leaves few choices. Once you’re overwhelmed by it, it’s too late. It pushes you with unimaginable force — out of your control.
That’s what happened during yesterday’s storm. The Guadalupe River surged by more than 20-26 feet within 90 minutes, washing out roads and bridges and upending homes and RVs. Too late to turn back or make any changes.
Let’s act now to keep our country from being overrun by the kind of devastation the flood caused.
Onward, Democracy Defenders.
These poor girls and their families, along with the others that lost their lives in the flash floods.This is the prologue of tragic events to come with the destruction of the NWS and NOAA.
Of course. Reducing the population to “manageable numbers” was carved into the Georgia Guidestones. They were mysteriously vandalized then destroyed during Dumbo’s approach to the highest of offices. No update on whether there is or isn’t an ongoing investigation. Same as it applies to the culprit(s) who planted bombs as Dem and GOP headquarters. Inside job? Probably—just as JAN6 was an inside job IMHO.