Blame Game on Killer Hill Country Floods
Could Shift to DOGE as Abbott Cites NWS
Capitol Inside
July 5, 2025
Governor Greg Abbott and local officials sought to deflect blame from themselves on Friday night when they claimed that the National Weather Service failed to provide sufficient warning for flash flooding that killed at least 32 people including some of 27 girls who were reported missing from a Christian camp on the Guadalupe River.
But the Republican governor didn't point the finger at President Donald Trump for defunding the federal weather agency with DOGE initiative cuts that experts warned would have deadly consequences in flood prone areas like the Texas Hill Country.
The president was busy at the White House celebrating the U.S. House passage of the GOP megabill on Friday when Abbott cut a trip to California short so he could attend a press conference in Kerrville late last night with updates on the state's response to the catastrophic developments. Kerr County officials waited until Abbott returned from Orange County before getting the news briefing under way after 9 p.m.
The NWS and the private firm Accuweather said state and local officials had more than enough information to get evacuations under way before the river turned into a torrential torrent of destruction in the area where the 99-year-old Camp Mystic is located about 20 miles from Kerrville. One official at the governor's press conference said the NWS warned on Wednesday that the Hill Country could see between 4 to 8 inches of rain from storms there. "Everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service," he said. "They did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.”
But local law enforcement and emergency workers are supposed to know that potentially deadly flash flooding can occur along rivers and creeks that lace the Hill Country with 6 inches of rain or less. The apparent complacency made the possibility for disaster at Camp Mystic all the more likely in light of its emphasis on camping in an environment with minimal technology and a ban on campers have cell phones, tablets and other communication devices.
The international news service Reuters reported earlier this week on a bipartisan move in Congress to restore funding and staff at the NWS in the aftermath of the DOGE cutbacks. “In May, every living former director of the NWS signed on to an open letter with a warning that, if continued, Trump’s cuts to federal weather forecasting would create ‘needless loss of life’," according to the Reuters story.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick held a press conference on the horror show in the Hill Country on Friday afternoon in Austin as the acting governor while Abbott traveled to the west coast for reasons that have yet to be revealed. Patrick were forced to direct the state response to Hurricane Beryl in July last year when the governor left Texas for a trade mission in Asia on the day after the storm made landfall and left lingering power outages and some fatalities in the Houston area.
But Abbott set himself up for added criticism when he got the blame game in motion by calling out the NWS for the disaster in the Hill Country at a time when the federal weather agency has been hamstrung by the Department of Government Efficiency that Trump initiated with Elon Musk as the titular leader.
Newsweek reported in June that the National Weather Service was scrambling to restore stability by hiring meteorologists and other specialists after losing nearly 600 through layoffs and early retirements as a product of the DOGE effort. An Associated Press reported in April that an investigation found that almost half of the local NWS offices had vacancy rates in the 20 percent range. CBS News report in May revealed that the National Weather Service was forced to cut or eliminate at least 13 of almost 100 weather balloons as a consequence of DOGE reductions.
more to come ...
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