How many people do you have to kill before you’re not pro life anymore?
Texas got hit with flash flooding yesterday. Twenty-seven people died, including 9 children..
Local authorities are blaming faulty flood warnings that were issued by the National Weather Service for the deaths.
News reports are linking this failure directly to the cuts that Trump has made to the weather service.
Trump has also cut FEMA, the disaster aid program that helps devastated communities get back on track their feet after hurricanes, tornadoes, massive fires, etc. His “plan” is that local cities and states should take over funding disaster relief.
That is an impossibility for most “red” states, which actually receive far more in federal money than they give to the government in taxes. I spent 18 years doing the budget for a red state, and I can tell you that if you remove federal money from red state budgets, most of those states will flounder and fail in a big disaster. What that means to you is that if your whole town is wiped out by an F5 tornado or a hurricane, you may be on your own. You will suddenly be living in a third world country where people die and nobody cares.
Twenty-seven Texans may be dead today because of cuts to the National Weather Service. But, you know, billionaires need their $30 million weddings, and their yachts and private islands. Stacked up against billionaire greed and Trump’s Republican’s indifference to the lives of the people they have a trust and a duty before God to represent and care for, those 9 children just … don’t matter.
From Forbes:
Some NWS field offices have reported the loss of around-the-clock staffing and reductions in weather balloon launches, which are crucial in collecting data on humidity, pressure, temperature and more elements needed to produce forecasts. The NWS office overseeing Kerr County, where at least 24 people have died in the floods, is the Austin/San Antonio Weather Forecast Office. Longtime meteorologist Troy Kimmel, who leads his own meteorological services company, told CBS Austin in May that local Texas offices such as the Austin/San Antonio office experienced some staffing shortages. The Austin/San Antonio office’s website shows a total of six vacancies across its meteorological, management, observations and technician teams, though it is not clear how many of the vacancies are a direct result of cuts engineered by the Department of Government Efficiency.
… Trump has insisted states should play a larger role in handling their own weather disasters, saying last month his administration intends to “wean” states off help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency following this year’s hurricane season. FEMA has lost hundreds of employees since Trump took office and ended its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which awarded around $4.6 billion to communities throughout the U.S. in an effort to prepare them for future weather disasters.
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