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Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, a deluge of rain caused Texas’ Guadalupe River to rise more than 26 feet in 45 minutes. The floodwaters swept away people, including children at summer camps, homes, and businesses. A week later, some 120 people have been confirmed killed, with nearly 200 still missing.
But as families picked through the rubble and emergency workers searched for bodies, the Trump administration’s response signaled that they don’t seem to feel any particular sense of urgency when it comes to helping the victims recover.
Typically, the Federal Emergency Management Administration deploys a myriad of resources to disaster zones, including search and rescue teams, aid workers who go door-to-door to assist victims, and staff who can set up semi-permanent locations where individuals and businesses impacted by a storm or flood can also figure out next steps. It’s a marathon, and getting off the starting line with urgency is crucial.
“These [disasters] are a very long-haul type of thing,” Margaret Cooney, a senior staffer at the Center for American Progress who focuses on climate disasters, told HuffPost. “And one of the things that helps folks in these communities get through it is FEMA.”
But in Texas, FEMA’s search and rescue teams were not deployed until Monday, more than three days after the flooding started, per a report from CNN. Plus, Sec. Kristi Noem, whose Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, reportedly recently started requiring any expenditure over $100,000 to be approved first by her, so when Texas needed immediate help, FEMA officials were bogged down by paperwork. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
Some Democrats are already saying Noem’s actions cost lives.
“Kids in Texas died as a direct result of Kristi Noem’s negligence,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said on BlueSky on Thursday. “She should be removed from office before her incompetence gets Oregonians killed in a wildfire.”
But writ large, the response to the Texas floods largely encapsulates what the Trump administration has been aiming towards since January — decimating and undermining the programs that warn of impending disaster, coordinate the response, and work to minimize harm. And it’s a terrifying warning of what’s to come.
“I can’t tell you how bad their treatment of FEMA has been,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who studies effective public management, told HuffPost. “It’s shortsighted and naive.”
In 2024, President Donald Trump campaigned in part on sending disaster relief “back to the states,” meaning that states should shoulder more of the costs for disasters.
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” he told reporters during a White House briefing as recently as last month. “A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor,” Trump added later.
But that was also before the Texas floods. On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the White House was backtracking on its plans to eliminate the agency.
But in a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told HuffPost the Washington Post’s headline “did not accurately characterize the Trump Administration’s continued efforts to overhaul FEMA,” while also calling FEMA “a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience.”
“President Trump is committed to right-sizing the Federal government while empowering State and local governments by enabling them to better understand, plan for, and ultimately address the needs of their citizens,” Jackson said.
The administration has said it plans on increasing the amount of damage a storm has to do before the federal government will declare a disaster, making it more difficult for a state to be eligible for FEMA funds. Under the new plan, states would be forced to cover more of their own recovery costs, and that the response can mostly be handled by local first responders.
Kamarck says that plan is key to its own destruction. “The fundamental fact that the Trump administration doesn’t get is that the bigger the catastrophe, the more the first responders there are [also] victims,” she said.
Significant damage has already been done. As part of an effort led by Elon Musk earlier in the year, civil servants have been laid off en masse, including at FEMA, which has seen some 25% of staff leave the agency since Trump returned to power. For a department that has historically been underfundedand understaffed, it is devastating.
The reasoning behind the cuts was that these jobs were supposedly a waste of taxpayer dollars even though officials at FEMA and NOAA, which provides resources for forecasting and warning of disasters, said many of those positions were critical — and cutting them could lead to tragedies.
“It’s terrifying because these organizations keep us safe,” Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist at NOAA who was fired by Trump, told PBS in March. “They still have that job but now they will have to do it with less people.”
The National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA and plays a crucial role in forecasting dangerous weather and communicating to the public, has lost 600 employees since January. The Trump administration has also made it harder for states and localities to get money for warning systems and has cut contracts intended for disaster preparedness.
“Not fully funding FEMA and NOAA is going to devastate communities,” Cooney said. “These agencies give communities a fighting chance.”
To add to the disorganization, as of July FEMA is now on its second director in six months: Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, was abruptly fired in May and replaced by David Richardson, who previously worked in an anti-terrorism unit at DHS. Neither man has any experience in emergency management. Richardson has yet to make any public statements about the Texas flooding.
Put together, and it looks almost like the Trump administration is doing everything it can to make disasters like the flood in Texas even worse.
“There will be more natural disasters,” Kamarck said. “So they’ve got to get their act straight.”
There is general consensus that natural disasters are getting worse. An analysis released by NOAA in early 2025 noted that each year was breaking records: “In 2024, there were 27 individual weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages, trailing only the record-setting 28 events analyzed in 2023,” the report said. And the World Meteorological Association found in a 2021 review that the rate of natural disasters had increased fivefold over the previous 50 years: “A disaster related to a weather, climate or water hazard occurred every day on average over the past 50 years.”
It bodes ill for the future.A May 2025 report from the Urban Institute found that if the Trump administration’s new disaster funding calculations were in place between 2008-2024, 71% of storms and floods would not have met the threshold for a presidential declared disaster.
States with large populations, like Florida, Texas, California and New York — all of which have faced major catastrophes in that period — would have lost millions of dollars, and local governments would be facing severe financial shortfalls if they were no longer able to rely on the federal government for resources, leaving states and their residents in the lurch.
The Trump administration has been claiming that recent cuts did not impact the tragedy in Texas. But either way, the situation offers a glimpse of what letting states handle their own disaster response looks like, particularly when short of funds.
In Kerr County, where the worst of the flooding occurred, local officials had been trying to get FEMA funding for a flood warning system for years. But, according to NPR, their funding application had been turned down by the state of Texas, which was responsible for administering the funds. Nor could they get funds via a state-level grant program.
So when the flood came earlier this month, local officials were unprepared. Some were even stranded themselves.
In the aftermath, Texas officials were quick to point the finger at the federal government, saying weather forecasters didn’t send out sufficient warnings, although the National Weather Service, which is administered by NOAA, sent out several warnings before the catastrophic flooding began.
Cooney says the real issue was the level of coordination between NWS and local authorities on the ground. “Coordination just wasn’t there because positions haven’t been filled,” she said.
It is unclear if they ever will be.
CORRECTION: This story has been amended to accurately reflect how much the Guadalupe River rose and to clarify where it is in the state.