More than 100 killed in Texas floods, with 11 still missing from Camp Mystic

Image source, Getty Images

By Ben Chu, Jake Horton, Kayla Epstein & Marco Silva

In the aftermath of the fatal Texas floods, some have hit out at the Trump administration’s spending and staffing cuts may have impeded the ability of the National Weather Service (NWS) to adequately predict the floods and raise the alarm.

But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said: “These offices [of the NWS] were well staffed../ so any claims to the contrary are completely false.”

BBC Verify has examined the impact of cuts under Trump, and while there has been a reduction in the workforce at the NWS, experts who we spoke to said the staffing on hand for the Texas floods appears to have been adequate.

The Trump administration has proposed a 25% cut, external to the $6.1bn (£4.4bn) budget at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA), the agency which oversees the NWS, though these cuts do not take effect until October.

Staffing levels at the NWS have already been separately reduced by the Trump administration’s wider personnel cuts, which began in January.

In total, the NWS lost 600 of its 4,200 staff, says Tom Fahy, the director of the NWS union, causing several offices across the country to operate without the necessary staffing.

But Andy Hazelton, a climate scientist who modelled hurricane paths for the NOAA until he was fired during the layoffs in February, says of the Texas floods: “I don’t think the staffing issues contributed directly to this event. They got the watches and the warnings out.”

Among the current NWS job vacancies in Texas is a senior hydrologist, a scientist who specialises in flooding events, in the San Angelo office, NSW union director Fahy tells BBC Verify.

The San Antonio office also lacks a “warning coordinating meteorologist”, who coordinates communications between local forecasting offices and emergency management services in communities, Fahy says.

However, he notes that both offices had temporarily upped their staffing in anticipation of a dangerous weather event, which is typical in these circumstances.

Read BBC Verify’s investigation into whether spending cuts played a role in the flooding disaster: Did US government cuts contribute to the Texas tragedy?