Texas

Who’s to blame for Texas flooding tragedy? There is a lot of finger pointing.

Published

6 months ago

July 7, 2025

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Who’s to blame for Texas flooding tragedy? There is a lot of finger pointing.

The catastrophe was caused by a perfect storm of difficult-to-forecast rainfall and fast-moving water. Some wonder if budget cuts made things worse.

The Texas rains hadn’t even slowed before the debate began about why forecasts had underestimated the devastating flooding over Independence Day weekend.

Local and state officials, social media users and even the meteorology community raised questions. What were the National Weather Service forecasts? Why is it so hard to know where rain will fall? Did staff reductions at the weather service, and other budget cuts by the Trump administration contribute to the catastrophe? What role did weather balloons play in the storm forecasts?

Answers to some of these questions and many others may never be adequately answered, especially for the families of dozens of children swept away by floodwaters.

At least 81 people died between July 4 and 6 and dozens more were injured or remain missing, state officials said. On a weekend when families often celebrate with cookouts and fireworks, these families, overwhelmed with grief, were providing DNA samples so a state laboratory could rapidly identify victims.

A series of circumstances, colliding at the worst possible location and time, caused the tremendous flooding, several meteorologists told USA TODAY. During a July 6 news conference, Texas state officials said there would be much to discuss in the weeks ahead.

A few things are known, including how difficult it remains to pinpoint where thunderstorms will drop their heaviest rain, what the weather service said and when, and staffing levels at two local forecast offices.

The horrific tragedy arrived in the midst of a maelstrom already brewing over the National Weather Service, its parent agency and the Trump administration’s budget cuts.

It’s “clear that many people are allowing their desire to score political points to color their insights and opinions on this tragedy,” Alan Gerard, who retired earlier this year from the National Severe Storms Laboratory, wrote in his Substack blog on July 6.

“The National Weather Service office did everything they should do from everything I can tell,” said Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground, a commercial forecasting agency, and a former hurricane scientist with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters.

Despite the recent cuts to NOAA, the National Weather Service performed well in the Texas tragedy and in the recent deadly flooding in Kentucky, Masters said. “It reminds us how important it is to have talented, experienced people at a well-funded National Weather Service.”

“But we are pushing our luck,” he noted,” if we think the cuts at NOAA won’t cause a breakdown in our ability to get people out of harm’s way in the future.”

Were weather forecasts wrong?

Although the warnings arrived less than 24 hours before the flooding started, long-time weather service veterans and regional experts say that’s not all that unusual in this region. It’s a known shortcoming of the localized rain models forecasters use. They can’t yet pinpoint exactly where intense rain might fall and when on an individual community.

One expert, Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, said it appears the weather service employees in Austin/San Antonio did what they could, based on the available information.

“From what I saw, the warnings were pretty timely,” said Nielsen-Gammon, a meteorology professor at Texas A&M University,

The weather service office first advised on July 1 and 2 that a very moist air mass was moving in that would increase rain chances across south-central Texas with heavy rain at times that could lead to minor local flooding.An early morning forecast on July 3 by the NWS Weather Prediction Center said the region should expect “unseasonably moist” air that could bring 1 to 2 inches of rain an hour and lead to flooding, with approaching storms tapping into abundant tropical moisture.

As the day progressed, a clearer picture emerged of how weather systems were interacting above Texas to form storms. An “urgent” flood watch at 1:18 p.m. July 3 warned heavy rain, with isolated amounts of 5 to 7 inches, could cause flash flooding and “excessive” runoff that could flood rivers and streams. The watch covered eight counties, including Kerr and Bandera where some of the heaviest flooding occurred.

By 7:02 p.m., the weather prediction center warned leftover bits of Tropical Storm Barry, near-record moisture and an unstable atmosphere meant any storms that formed could be self-sustaining, with a potential for rain rates of more than 3 inches an hour, and they could rain over the same area again and again. It stated: “Considerable flash flooding this evening is possible.”

A flurry of forecast updates continued.

At 1:14 a.m. on July 4, the weather service issued a “Flash Flood Warning” for central Kerr County and northwestern Bandera County. Almost simultaneously, water flow began increasing dramatically on the Guadalupe River at Hunt, Texas.

“This pleasing stream had a flow rate of 53 gallons per second at midnight on July 4,” said Nielsen-Gammon. At 3 a.m., it was flowing at 264 gallons per second. Between 3 a.m. and 3:30 am., the water flow jumped to 125,000 gallons per second. Within four hours of the initial rise, the river level jumped 21.8 feet and was flowing at 900,000 gallons per second.

Did weather service cuts have an impact?

President Donald Trump campaigned on cutting the federal bureaucracy and reducing the budget. His administration, including the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Governmental Efficiency, has been mission-focused on doing so.

The sweeping cuts left many federal offices short-staffed and demoralized, according to recent retirees.

Many remaining employees, including those who declined to speak on the record for fear of retribution, say employees still fear more jobs will be lost in a reduction in force. Federal agencies were required to prepare a plan for making further reductions, but a federal judge in California ruled in May that the job cuts could not move forward.

The weather service office in Austin/San Antonio oversees much of the Hill Country area where the flooding took place. Of the 26 staff positions in that office, six are vacant at the moment, including two senior members, said Victor Murphy, a recently retired National Weather Service meteorologist in Texas. One of those is the warning coordination meteorologist who oversees emergency warnings and working with local officials on communicating around such events.

The Austin office also is short two forecasters.

Did the cuts play any role in the recent tragedy? Murphy wondered out loud. “I don’t know … The fact is that the office had record flooding two days in a row.”

The San Angelo, Texas office is down four positions, including a staff forecaster, a lead hydrologist and its meteorologist in charge, said Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

Weather service forecasters often become “an easy target for people’s wrath,” when people are looking for someone to blame, Fahy said.

“The real blame is the Trump Administration budget cuts to NWS and FEMA that cut off coordination planning with local emergency management officials,” he said. “Even during Trump’s 1st term, NWS managers would plan, practice and train their combined teams for increased cooperation. All that ended when Trump was inaugurated in 2025.”

President Trump said July 6 that he doesn’t think the federal government needs to rehire weather service meteorologists in the wake of catastrophic Texas flooding.

“I would think not,” Trump told reporters when asked about rehiring weather forecasters, adding that flooding “happened in seconds. Nobody expected it.”

When asked if he would investigate whether the cuts left key vacancies in the weather service or emergency coordination, Trump said he “wouldn’t blame (former President Joe) Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe, and it’s just so horrible for all.”

Why is it so hard to know where rain will fall?

At a news conference on July 5, Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said: “The original forecast that we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3 to 6 inches of rain in the Concho valley and 4 to 8 inches in the Hill Country.”

“The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” Kidd said.

Rainfall estimates in these extreme rainfall events have fallen short before, frustrating emergency managers, forecasters and even members of Congress, who approved measures in 2021 and 2022 to improve rainfall modeling and estimates of maximum possible precipitation within any given time frame.

As the weather service looked at their computers on July 3, the models they use for forecasting thunderstorms wouldn’t come together with a consensus on where the greatest rain would fall, according to their discussions. Many showed the potential for extreme rainfall somewhere in central Texas, while others showed almost nothing happening, Nielsen-Gammon said. “Where it was going to develop would depend on the details of the individual thunderstorms that popped up.”

Pinpointing localized extreme rain remains “a very difficult challenge,” said Gerard. Any time you have this type of environment, there’s going to be a chance that local areas are going to get more rain than anticipated.”

Rainfall in a storm is “controlled by very small-scale processes that are happening within the storm,” said Gerard, now CEO of weather consulting company Balanced Weather. “We don’t have the resolution of modeling to be able to forecast that yet.”

The storms laboratory is working to develop higher resolution modeling, he said, but it’s on the chopping block in the president’s proposed budget.

Did weather service balloon launches play a role?

Weather balloon launches measure moisture up through the atmosphere to help predict how much is available for rain. The better the data, the better the outcome, said Murphy, the recently retired Texas meteorologist. “You find out from a sounding what’s up 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 feet. The only way to measure that is with a balloon.”

However, staffing shortages at local weather service offices across the U.S. has forced the limiting or cancelation of numerous weather balloon launches. Of 11 locations in Texas and surrounding states that were launching in the early spring, only six of the sites now launch balloons on any given morning, Murphy said.

There was only one weather balloon launch within 200 miles of the flooded area, Nielsen-Gammon said.

However, that one weather balloon proved its worth, the experts said, providing essential information that helped weather service forecasters see the increased chances for rain.

Launched remotely from an automated site in Del Rio, Texas, Murphy said it’s “the only one of its kind in the region.”

But the federal cutbacks and rising number of climate disasters mean the public is likely to blame someone for every botched forecast and missed opportunity to warn ‒ whether deservedly or not.

On July 7, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the president and the National Weather Service’s performance.

“Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning,” Leavitt said. “The National Weather Service did its job.”

Contributing: Zac Anderson and Joey Garrison, USA TODAY

Dinah Voyles Pulver, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, writes about climate change, violent weather and other news. Reach her at dpulver@usatoday.com or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X or dinahvp.77 on Signal.

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Texas

John Cornyn makes campaign stop at Texas-Mexico border

Published

2 minutes ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

John Cornyn makes campaign stop at Texas-Mexico border

HIDALGO — During a visit to the border Friday, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said changes in immigration laws should wait until the border is completely secure, a contrast from Republican lawmakers who are willing to explore legal status for immigrant workers to address labor shortages prompted by enforcement efforts at work sites.

Cornyn was part of a group of Republican U.S. senators and Senate hopefuls who flocked to the Rio Grande Valley to praise President Donald Trump’s border policies as they attempt to promote their achievements and shape political narratives ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Aggressive enforcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has prompted some unauthorized workers to stay clear of job sites, leading to labor shortages in construction and restaurants. The Valley has been among the areas hardest hit by the worker shortage, prompting a group of local builders to call for solutions to economic struggles in their industry.

U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, an Edinburg Republican, met with the group and expressed support for a visa program for construction workers, akin to the H-2A visa program that allows foreign nationals to work in the agriculture sector.

Cornyn, though, said it was too early to consider such an option.

“The first thing we need to do is secure the border,” Coryn said during a news conference along the border in the city of Hidalgo. “There is no way that the American people, and certainly my constituents in Texas, would allow us to take another stab at reforming our immigration laws until we’ve got the border secure.”

After securing the border, he said, the next step would be to remove people who “never should have been here in the first place.” Only after that had been accomplished, Cornyn said, should lawmakers delve into changing immigration laws.

Much of Trump’s border policy has been set by executive action. The Republican Congress passed $170 billion in funding for immigration and border enforcement through 2029, making ICE the best-funded law enforcement agency in the country and giving the agency unprecedented recruitment, enforcement, deportation and detention powers. But the effort did not codify many of Trump’s changes to border practices.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who stood beside Cornyn during Friday’s news conference, said he was open to legislation that would address the need for qualified workers but also said the first priority was to secure the border.

“I think we can work in a constructive way on how we come up with a mechanism whereby people who come to this country legally can contribute and be members of our work force,” said Thune, R-South Dakota.

ICE activity at construction sites has intimidated workers — those unauthorized to live in the U.S. and those with legal authorization — from accepting work, builders say. This labor shortage has prompted construction delays that economists suggest will drive up housing costs.

Absent a change in immigration laws, Cornyn suggested job sectors would benefit from cuts to assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, saying it would encourage people to work.

“If you are an able-bodied young adult, you can’t qualify for food stamps, you can’t qualify for welfare benefits like Medicaid and the like, in order to encourage more people to get off the couch,” Cornyn said. “That’s good for them, good for their families, good for their communities.”

For Cornyn, who is locked in an expensive primary race with Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston, the news conference was also an opportunity to tout a major provision from Republicans’ 2025 mega-bill — reimbursement for Operation Lone Star.

Cornyn publicly stated during spring negotiations that his vote in support of the package was contingent on reimbursing Texas for Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative. Ultimately, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July with support from nearly all Republicans and no Democrats, included $13.5 billion in two funds to reimburse states for border security spending.

Abbott had requested $11.1 billion, and the vast majority of the bill’s money is expected to go to Texas. But six months after the bill’s passage, the Trump administration has yet to allocate funding. State Republicans, led by Cornyn, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. August Pfluger, sent a December letter asking the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to prioritize Texas in the disbursement.

“That money will now soon be flowing into the coffers of the state of Texas, to the tune of roughly $11 billion, to do justice — which is to reimburse Texas taxpayers for stepping up and filling the gap when the federal government simply refused to do so,” Cornyn said Friday. “That would not have happened without the leadership of the majority leader and the whip and the direction of the president of the United States, to whom I am very grateful.”

The Cornyn campaign and allied groups have spent more than $40 million in advertising, helping to close Paxton’s initial polling lead. Polls have shown no candidate close to the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff in the March 3 primary.

Cornyn has the backing of Thune and OneNation, a group aligned with the Senate Republican leader that organized Friday’s border trip after spending millions in pro-Cornyn advertising.

Thune on Friday praised Cornyn, whom he beat out to become majority leader in 2024.

“He has been such an advocate through the years on the issue of border security — foremost expert on it,” Thune said. “Most of us, what we know about the border, we know from him.”

Part of Cornyn’s campaign strategy has been to emphasize his support for Trump in ads and on social media. Thune, Cornyn, other Republican senators and Senate hopeful Michael Whatley, former chair of the Republican National Committee from North Carolina, praised Trump’s border actions, with Cornyn expressing his gratitude for Trump’s leadership in getting the One Big Beautiful Bill passed and for his Border Patrol leadership appointments.

The president’s endorsement — or lack of, thus far — has factored heavily into the state’s Senate primary. It is one of a handful of Republican contests for Senate where Trump has yet to put his thumb on the scale, and the president has said that he likes both Cornyn and Paxton.

Cornyn and Thune have appealed to Trump for his endorsement.

The border trip was also an opportunity for Cornyn’s opponents to press their cases.

Paxton preemptively criticized Cornyn’s visit in a Thursday statement that noted the senator said a border wall “makes no sense” in a February 2017 speech in Weslaco, among other instances of wall skepticism in early 2017. At the time, Cornyn said technology and personnel are more effective than physical barriers in some areas. On Friday, Cornyn praised the border wall and its outfitting with cameras, sensors and other technology.

“His 40-plus year career has been spent fighting for amnesty for illegals, cutting deals with Democrats, trying to stop President Trump, and standing in the way of building the wall,” Paxton said in the statement. “Texans aren’t going to forget how Cornyn’s betrayed our country, and no last minute trip to the border to try and act tough is going to change that.”

Hunt posted an ad on X criticizing Cornyn’s previous apprehension for a border wall.

“Now that Trump’s secured our border, John Cornyn wants to take the credit for the wall he tried to block,” the ad said.

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

Disclosure: Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc. has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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SMU secures commitment from Texas A&M transfer TE Theo Melin Öhrström

Published

12 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

SMU secures commitment from Texas A&M transfer TE Theo Melin Öhrström

One of the biggest questions facing Rhett Lashlee and his SMU football program this offseason is how the Mustangs will replenish the tight end position.

Not only did SMU’s tight ends coach leave, but the Mustangs are losing their top four tight ends from the 2025 roster. RJ Maryland, Matthew Hibner and Stone Eby all graduated and redshirt sophomore Adam Moore entered the transfer portal.

SMU began its rebuild of the tight ends room with a commitment from Texas A&M transfer Theo Melin Öhrström.

Melin Öhrström entered the portal on Dec. 26 after four years with the Aggies. The Stockholm, Sweden native appeared in 40 games for Texas A&M, catching 29 balls for 352 yards and three touchdowns. In 2025, the 6-foot-6, 257-pound tight end made four starts and caught 19 passes for 168 yards and a touchdown.

Melin Öhrström redshirted in 2022, so he has one year of eligibility remaining and will have a chance to secure a bigger role during his final collegiate season. He chose the Mustangs over Houston, Kansas State and Auburn

Find more college sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.

Find more SMU coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.

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Arizona State transfer RB Raleek Brown commits to Texas

Published

1 day ago

January 8, 2026

Press Room

Arizona State transfer RB Raleek Brown commits to Texas

Recruiting a running back out of the NCAA transfer portal wasn’t clean and simple after the winter window opened last week, but the Texas Longhorns were able to land a huge commitment from Arizona State transfer Raleek Brown on Thursday.

The 5’9, 196-pounder has one season of eligibility remaining.

Texas offered Brown out of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana (Calif.) when he was a top-100 prospect in the 2022 recruiting class. A consensus four-star prospect ranked as the No. 3 running back nationally in the 247Sports Composite rankings, Brown committed to home-state USC without taking any other official visits.

Brown’s career with the Trojans didn’t go as planned, however — after flashing as a freshman with 227 yards on 42 carries (5.4 avg) with three touchdowns and 16 receptions for 175 yards (10.97 avg) and three touchdowns, Brown moved to wide receiver as a sophomore and only appeared in two games, recording three catches for 16 yards and a touchdown.

Wanting to play running back again, Brown transferred to Arizona State in 2024, but was limited by a hamstring injury to 48 yards of total offense.

In 2025, though, Brown finally had his breakout season with 186 carries for 1,141 yards and four touchdowns, adding 34 receptions for 239 yards and two touchdowns. Brown forced 53 missed tackles last season, 67 percent of the total missed tackles forced by Texas running backs, and more than half of his rushing yardage came after contact.

Brown ran a sub 4.5 40-yard dash and sub-11 100-meter dash in high school and flashed that explosiveness with runs of 75 yards and 88 yards in 2025, so Brown brings the speed that the Longhorns need with 31 yards over 10 yards, as well as proven route-running and pass-catching ability.

At Arizona State, the scheme leaned towards gap runs, but Brown has the skill set to be an excellent outsize zone back if Texas head coach Steve Sarksian decides that he wants to major in that scheme once again.

With one running back secured from the portal, the question becomes whether Sarkisian and new running backs coach Jabbar Juluke want to add a big-bodied back to the roster or are comfortable with rising redshirt sophomore Christian Clark and incoming freshman Derrek Cooper handling that role.

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