Experts raise alarm as Trump plans further cuts despite ‘above-average’ hurricane season
The devastation and growing death toll from catastrophic flooding in central Texas has left communities and officials reeling.
At least 104 people have died, including 28 children, after the Guadalupe River broke its banks on Friday, unleashing a torrent of water into an area known as “flash flood alley”.
Around 24 people remain unaccounted for as search and rescue efforts involving hundreds of volunteers and over 20 state agencies continue.
As the storms that battered Kerr County for the past four days begin to clear up, calls for accountability are growing.
President Donald Trump is facing scrutiny over his decision to implement deep cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS), which the agency oversees.
The Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), previously run by Elon Musk, has already removed 600 staff from the payroll at the NWS through offers of voluntary redundancies and early retirements.
And Trump is proposing a further 25 per cent cut to NOAA’s current annual budget of $6.1bn (about £4.4bn), taking effect in the 2026 fiscal year, which starts in October.
It’s unclear at this stage whether Doge’s efficiency drive affected the NWS response in Texas, but experts fear that the agency could fail to cope with future disasters, with an “above-average” hurricane season forecast this year.
‘Cutbacks at a level never seen before’
The Trump administration has denied that NWS service was understaffed, noting that additional forecasters had been deployed to the San Antonio and San Angelo field offices.
Current and former NWS officials have also defended the agency, pointing to urgent flash flood warnings issued in the pre-dawn hours before the river rose.
The employees’ union agreed that overall staffing levels were sufficient, but emphasised that critical roles — such as a meteorologist responsible for coordinating with local emergency managers — remain unfilled.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that any blame placed upon Trump for flood forecasting was a “depraved lie”.
However, former NOAA officials are sounding the alarm, warning that the agency is ill-equipped to handle a string of severe weather events.
The official NOAA outlook for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which began last month and runs until December, predicts between 13 and 19 named storms – compared with the typical seven – including up to five major hurricanes.
Experts fear that the Doge-driven restructuring has gutted critical weather prediction and emergency readiness infrastructure, just as climate-driven disasters are accelerating in frequency and intensity.
“The cutbacks were at a level never seen before,” John Cortinas, former deputy assistant administrator for science within NOAA’s research centre, said.
The NOAA has said that its leadership team “is taking steps to address those who took a voluntary early retirement option,” and will be filling additional roles at “locations with the greatest operational need”.
It stated that a select number of permanent, essential field roles will soon be posted for recruitment, despite the department-wide hiring freeze, “to help strengthen frontline operations.”
In May, over 40 per cent of weather forecasting offices across the US reported vacancy rates exceeding 20 per cent.
The situation was serious enough that all living former directors of the NWS signed a letter voicing concern about the staffing shortages and the prospect of further budget reductions.
“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life. We know that’s a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines — and by the people who depend on their efforts,” they wrote.
Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA administrator under former President Joe Biden, told Politico that the budget cuts would lead to less accurate future forecasts and potentially more severe consequences. “Lives are going to be lost, property is going to be damaged,” he said.
“If you have a problem with the quality of that forecast, then you want to have a real problem with eliminating the National Severe Storms Laboratory,” Spinrad said, referring to one of the NOAA’s research facilities that Trump wants to slash.
“Our ability to improve the forecast, the understanding and the guidance with respect to responding to events like this is only going to degrade, not improve, and this is after decades and decades of improvement in all of these forecasts.”
Could cuts cost more than they save?
NOAA research states that cuts not only endanger the public but also weaken response efforts, leading to billions of dollars in unnecessary losses.
Forecast research improvements have contributed to a 79 per cent reduction in track errors since 1990 and a 50 per cent drop in errors for the 3-day hurricane intensity forecasts since 2007, according to NOAA.
“Improving hurricane forecasts can have huge economic impacts for the nation. Recent research shows that since 2007, improvements to forecasts have saved the US an average of $5bn (about £3.6bn) per hurricane,” according to a statement on the agency’s website.
Cortinas – who joined other forecasters last month in Miami, Florida, to protest staffing cuts – cautioned that reduced staffing levels could cause delays in producing accurate hurricane models.
“You don’t have as accurate a model as you could,” he said. “So when it comes to something like evacuations on the coast with a more precise model, it’s much less costly if you evacuate five miles of coast instead of ten miles.”
Evacuating 417 miles of coastline for each hurricane warning could cost around $1.5bn (about £1.1bn) annually, according to NOAA. However, hurricane-force winds usually affect only about a quarter of the warning area.
Improving forecast accuracy allows for more targeted warnings and evacuations, potentially saving billions in unnecessary costs, the agency notes.
