Democrats Should​ Say Who’s Really to Blame for the ​Flooding in Texas

In just 45 minutes early Friday morning, intense rain caused sections of the Guadalupe River in Central Texas to rise by nearly 26 feet. Four months worth of rain dropped within hours. More than 100 people had been confirmed dead as of late Monday afternoon, including more than two dozen campers and counselors at a riverside Christian summer camp. As the search for victims and survivors continues, more heavy rain is expected this week.

When a tragedy of such proportions occurs, the temptation to point fingers is strong. Some Republican officials in Texas have found their scapegoat in the National Weather Service, or NWS, which they’ve accused of failing to predict the storm’s full intensity. They’ve got the wrong guys; despite grappling with deep cuts imposed by the Trump administration, the NWS put out early and increasingly urgent warnings about the coming deluge. There’s plenty of blame to go around, though. Democrats, accordingly, should do a lot more than call for investigations into how White House attacks on the NWS might have hampered preparedness efforts. They should connect the dots, again and again, between Republican policy and its lethal consequences. Democrats should hammer them not just for undermining Texas and the United States’ disaster preparedness and response infrastructure, but for having spent decades blocking efforts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. GOP lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. The more say the Republican Party has over governing a climate-changed world, the more people will die.

The NWS is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where the Trump administration has aimed to reduce personnel by 20 percent and axe climate-related work, in particular. The White House’s 2026 budget proposal aspires to eliminate all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs, and shut down research and development of new forecasting technologies. The two Texas NWS offices most directly responsible for forecasting and warning about extreme weather along the Guadalupe River now lack key staff, including a warning coordination meteorologist tasked with facilitating communication between forecasters and emergency managers. Despite these challenges, the NWS issued a series of dire warnings about “life-threatening flooding” beginning on Thursday morning, and in the hours leading up to the deluge. Its ability to do that, meanwhile, is being actively threatened by Republicans’ efforts to defund the agency.

The Texas Tribune further reports that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature rejected a bill that would have established a statewide plan to improve Texas’ disaster response infrastructure, upgrading alert systems and providing grants for counties to buy new emergency communication equipment, including “outdoor warning sirens” that could have saved lives lost over the weekend. State Representative Wes Virdill—whose district includes the worst-hit areas, in Kerr County—voted against the bill. He told the Tribune that he couldn’t recall the specifics of the bill or why he opposed it, guessing that it “had to do with how much funding” was tied to the measure.

Researchers with ClimaMeter—a project funded by the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research—have found that human-caused climate change has made these types of storms in the Texas Hill Country wetter and warmer than they would be otherwise. “Natural variability alone,” they wrote, “cannot explain the increase in precipitation associated with Texas floods.”

Attribution studies generally use well-established, peer-reviewed research to compare today’s weather conditions against those that would exist in a world that hasn’t been altered by global warming. By narrowing in on specific locations and meteorological patterns, researchers can assess how likely a given event would be to occur in a climate that hasn’t been altered by excess greenhouse gas emissions. In the ClimaMeter study, researchers compared meteorological conditions in the Texas Hill Country from 1950 through 1986 to those observed from 1987 through 2023. They found that rain storms like the one that occurred in Central Texas over the weekend now produce roughly 7 percent more water per day, and are 1.5 degrees warmer as a result of human-induced climate change.

Report co-author Dr. Mireia Ginesta—a research associate at the Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment—emphasized that additional studies will be needed over the coming months to assess precisely what effect climate change had on the weekend’s storm, involving time-intensive, “high resolution” models that offer insights into factors like circulation patterns over a larger geographic area. These initial findings, though, are in line with peer-reviewed climate research compiled and analyzed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report finds that—in areas impacted by the storm—higher atmospheric temperatures “mean that the atmosphere can hold more moisture. This increase in moisture feeds, fuels and triggers rapid precipitation events, which, in turn, leads to these flash floods that we are experiencing world wide,” Ginesta said. Other studies indicate that rising temperatures are likely to increase what’s known as hydroclimate volatility, meaning “large and/or frequent transitions between very dry and very wet conditions.”

Ginesta added that her own research is already being impacted by cuts to the NWS and NOAA. She’s had trouble locating certain data sets, and seen a decrease in the amount of observations being collected by federal weather balloons. “It’s important now more than ever to have good observations and good forecasts,” she said. “The cuts are already noticeable.”

The methods for attributing climate destruction to Republicans aren’t nearly as exact as those that attribute extreme weather to human-induced climate change, of course. But Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to name names. How many more lives might have been saved if Texas Republicans hadn’t stopped their state from improving its emergency alert systems, and if the Trump administration hadn’t ordered drastic cuts to the National Weather Service? How many will be killed by those cuts moving forward? How many fewer homes would have been destroyed if Congressional Republicans hadn’t spent decades stopping bills to reduce planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions on behalf of their donors in the fossil fuel industry like ExxonMobil? How many more people will face homelessness or financial ruin because the Trump administration is gutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Rather than just ordering investigations, Democrats should state the obvious: Climate change is killing people and destroying communities across the United States, and Republicans at every level of government are making life here more dangerous.