‘Now Is Not the Time for Finger-Pointing’: Cruz Decries Partisan Attacks on Weather Service Following Deadly Texas Floods

The junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, is refuting claims that recent staffing cuts at the National Weather Service led to a lack of preparedness for this weekend’s deadly flash floods in the state’s Hill Country region that killed dozens, saying that “the facts” show otherwise.During a press conference on Monday morning at Kerrville, Mr. Cruz said that warnings were issued hours before the floodwaters rose and that local NWS offices in the San Antonio area had additional staff working that night.“I think there have been some eager to point at the National Weather Service and say cuts there led to a lack of warning. I think that’s contradicted by the facts,” he said. “I also think it’s worth noting that the National Weather Service Union, which has been very critical of DOGE’s cuts, has publicly said that they don’t believe that the reduction in staffing had any impact whatsoever on their ability to warn of this event.”“Immediately trying to use it for either side to attack their political opponents, I think that’s cynical and not the right approach, particularly at a time when we’re dealing with a crisis and we’re dealing with grief,” Mr. Cruz added. “Now is not the time for finger-pointing.”White House officials echoed his comments Monday, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggesting that Democratic partisans were behind the effort to pin blame for the disaster on the Trump administration.Faulting “President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie,” Ms. Leavitt said. The National Weather Service “did its job” in sending out flooding warnings, she added.When asked if the president would delay plans to reorganize the Federal Emergency Management Agency and shift more responsibility to the states, Ms. Leavitt said, “The president has always said he wants states to do as much as they can,” and added that Texas is doing a “tremendous job” in its response.The legislative director for the NWS employees’ union, Tom Fahy, told CNN that he considers the National Weather Service’s Austin-San Antonio office to have “adequate staffing and resources,” but pointed out that the facility does not currently have a warning coordination meteorologist, which would normally connect forecasters with emergency managers.Meteorologists have publicly said that the Austin-San Antonio office accurately predicted that flooding would occur as the storms formed over central Texas but could not have predicted their severity.Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” an American Meteorological Society-certified digital meteorologist based in Wisconsin, Chris Vagasky, said to Wired. “The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event.”“But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that,” he added.Mr. Cruz also pointed out that the timing of the alerts was a likely factor in preventing adequate evacuations throughout the region. “Most people at 1:00 AM and 4:00 AM are asleep. And so, I think we will have a reasonable conversation about — are there any ways to have earlier detection?” he said.“The limits of a flash flood they’re very difficult because they can arise so quickly,” Mr. Cruz said. “But everyone would agree, in hindsight, if we could go back and do it again, we would evacuate, particularly those in the most vulnerable areas. The young children in the cabins closest to the water.”

‘Now Is Not the Time for Finger-Pointing’: Cruz Decries Partisan Attacks on Weather Service Following Deadly Texas Floods

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