Have the US government cuts contributed to the Texas tragedy?

In the aftermath of Texas’ deadly floods, some Democrats warned against the “consequences” of the Trump administration cuts on the workforce of the federal government, including meteorologists, senator Chris Murphy saying: “precise weather forecasts help avoid fatal disasters”.

The suggestion is that the cuts may have hampered the capacity of the National Weather Service (NWS) – the government agency which provides meteorological forecasts in the United States – to properly predict floods and increase the alarm.

But the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday: “These offices [of the NWS] were well equipped … so all the contrary claims are completely false. “”

The BBC VERIFY examined the impact of the cuts under President Trump in this area and although there was a reduction in the workforce at the NWS, experts to whom we spoke said that the staff at hand for the floods of Texas seems to have been adequate.

The Trump administration proposed a 25% reduction in the current annual budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of $ 6.1 billion (4.4 billion pounds Sterling). The Noaa is the agency that oversees the NWS.

This would take effect during the 2026 fiscal year which will start in October this year – these special cuts would therefore not have contributed to the Texas tragedy.

However, NWS staff levels have already been reduced separately by the Trump administration efficiency campaign since January.

The Ministry of Government (DOGE), previously managed by Elon Musk, offered voluntary layoffs, called buybacks, as well as anticipated pensions to workers in the federal government. He also ended contracts for most of those who were in probation.

Consequently, around 200 people in the NWS have taken on a voluntary redundancy and 300 opted for an early retirement, according to Tom Fahy, director of the NWS Union. 100 other people were finally dismissed from the service, he said.

In total, the NWS lost 600 of its 4,200 employees, explains Mr. Fahy, causing the operation of several offices across the country without the necessary staff.

In April 2025, the Associated Press news agency said it had seen data compiled by NWS employees showing that half of its offices had a 20% vacuration rate – double the rate a decade earlier.

Despite this, climate experts told BBC verification that NWS forecasts and flood warnings last week in Texas were as adequate that you would expect.

“The forecasts and warnings all took place in a normal way. The challenge with this event was that it is very difficult to predict this type of extreme and localized precipitation,” explains Avantika Gori, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University in Texas.

And Andy Hazelton, an air conditioning that modeled the hurricane paths for the NOAA until it was dismissed during the layoffs in February, said: “I do not think that the endowment problems contributed directly to this event. They obtained watches and warnings.”

However, some experts have suggested that endowment cuts may have hampered the capacity of local NWS in Texas to coordinate effectively with local emergency services.

“There is a real question about the question of whether the communication of weather information occurred in a way that was sub-optimal,” said Daniel Swain, air conditioner of the University of California in Los Angeles.

“The impact could have been partially avoided if some of the people in the meteorological service responsible for these communications were still used-which they were not in some of these local offices,” he adds.

The offices of San Angelo and San Antonio, which cover the areas affected by the floods, would have had existing vacancies.

For example, the San Antonio office website lists several positions as vacant, including two meteorologists.

The director of the Southern South Wales union told BBC verify that the San Angelo office was missing a main hydrologist, a scientist specializing in flooding events.

The San Antonio office also had no “warning meteorologist”, which coordinates communications between local forecast offices and emergency management services, said Fahy.

However, he noted that the two offices had temporarily increased their staff in anticipation of a dangerous meteorological event, which is typical in these circumstances.

“The NWS weather offices in Austin / San Antonio and San Angelo, Texas, had additional forecasters in service at the catastrophic flood event,” said NWS spokesperson Erica Growing CEI, in a statement to BBC Verify. “All forecasts and warnings have been issued in a timely manner,” she added.

NWS meteorologist, Jason Runyen, who covers the San Antonio region, also said in a statement when the office generally would have two forecastists in a clear day, they had “up to five staff.”

When asked on Sunday if the government cuts had left key positions without being filled at the NWS, President Trump told journalists: “No, they did not do it.”

In a shared video of thousands of times on social networks, the American meteorologist John Morales said: “There was a 20% reduction in weather outputs, launches … What we are starting to see is that the quality of forecasts is degraded.”

Some social media users have underlined Mr. Morales’ words as proof that budget cuts have a capacity for forecasters limited to anticipating extreme meteorological events such as the floods of the county of Kerr, Texas.

Meteorological balloons are an important tool used by meteorologists to collect meteorological data – temperatures, humidity, pressure or wind speed – upper atmosphere.

In the United States, NWS stations would generally launch them twice a day.

In a series of public statements published since February, the NWS has confirmed that it has suspended or reduced the launches of weather balloons in at least 11 locations across the country, which it has attributed to a lack of staff in the offices of local weather forecasts.

However, there is no evidence suggesting that one of these changes was directly affected the meteorological balloon launches in the areas affected by the floods in Texas.

The data accessible to the public show that, in the floods, the launches of meteorological balloons were carried out as planned in Del Rio, the launch station closest to the epicenter of the floods, collecting data which lit up the meteorological forecasts which, according to the experts, were as sufficient as they could be.