Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely

When it comes to disasters, accountability delayed is accountability denied

Whenever natural disaster — like the flash flood that just killed large numbers of people, many of them children, in Texas — strikes, we can count on a quick response from officials, both federal and state, who arguably could or should have done something to avert or minimize the disaster. Namely, there will be self-righteous denunciations of anyone trying to assign responsibility: “Now is not the time to politicize this tragedy.”

In fact, now is exactly the time to put officials on the spot and ask how much responsibility they bear for the horror. Because the reality of America today is that if we don’t make an issue of how this happened within the next few days, nothing will be learned and nothing will change.

OK, you could make a case for putting off hard questions if you believed two things. First, you would have to believe that the relevant officials are well-intentioned and open-minded, that they will make a good faith effort to learn from the disaster. Second, you would have to believe that the news media will stay on the story, as opposed to quickly dropping it in favor of more pressing topics like Zohran Mamdani’s college application.

And you might believe these two things if you’ve spent the past 40 years in suspended animation.

The reality is that the people now on the spot are right-wing hard-liners, who are the opposite of open-minded. Their mindset was perfectly captured by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who denounced efforts to politicize the disaster, then suggested that the problem may be that we have too many federal bureaucrats.

It also more or less goes without saying that there’s massive hypocrisy involved. Trump officials are reacting with rage to any suggestion that their policies may have contributed to the Texas disaster, but Trump was quick to make completely false attacks on the Biden administration’s responses to natural disasters on its watch.

So let me offer some suggestions about the lesson we should be learning from the Texas tragedy.

The specifics are still coming into focus. We know that thanks to payroll cuts, the National Weather Service was short-staffed. Its forecasting was fine, but the official in charge of “warning coordination” — basically, getting the message from the forecasts to the relevant local officials — had taken the DOGE buyout and hadn’t been replaced.

We also know that local officials had been told repeatedly over the years that the affected area needed a better warning system, including sirens, but refused to raise taxes to pay for it and were denied a grant from the state.

We’ll probably learn more about failures to prepare for floods in a river plain that was known to present major risks, and perhaps about the failures in officials’ real-time response. We may never know how many lives might have been saved if Elon Musk hadn’t taken his chainsaw to the National Weather Service or if local officials had been more responsible. But we don’t need specific numbers to understand that this kind of tragedy is only to be expected after politicians have spent decades denigrating government and degrading its effectiveness.

There was a crucial turning point in both attitudes toward government and the resources devoted to public goods — basically, goods we can’t expect the private sector to provide, like, say, weather prediction and flood protection — in 1980. That was when Ronald Reagan, who insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, took office, and this attitude has been pervasive in U.S. politics ever since.

Overall government spending continued to rise despite political hostility, because federal civilian spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the combination of an aging population with rising health care costs made these programs ever more expensive. But other forms of government spending were cut back sharply under Reagan, and much of our government was understaffed and underfunded, in effect held together with paper clips and rubber bands, even before Elon Musk came along with his chainsaw.

Anyone who has worked in American government or has friends there knows how much of a shoestring operation it has become. Here’s one measure, nondefense discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP, which bumped up briefly after the 2008 financial crisis and Covid, but has remained low and gradually declining otherwise:

Source: Congressional Budget Office

In a way, Musk’s disastrous attempt to eliminate government waste proved that the government is in fact underfunded. He assumed that the budget was full of fat that could be cut away without doing any harm but immediately found himself cutting deep into muscle. As the Washington Post reported,

Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.

So what is a thinly stretched government, asked to do too much with too little, going to do? It’s going to make more mistakes than it would if it had adequate resources. Mistakes will always happen, of course, and it may be impossible to prove that any given mistake was the result of reduced spending and staffing. But there will be more and bigger mistakes than would have happened if anti-government ideology hadn’t taken its toll.

Actually, the relationship between under-resourced government and natural disasters is a lot like the relationship between climate change and such disasters. You can’t prove that climate change “caused” any particular disaster — extreme weather and hundred-year floods have always happened. At most you can say that a warming planet made that disaster more likely. But climate change is raising the risks of disaster — a fact acknowledged by the insurance industry, whatever politicians may say.

Which brings us back to why we absolutely should politicize the tragedy in Texas. It illustrates the kind of disaster that will happen with increasing frequency if we keep depriving government of the resources and respect it needs to do its job.

MUSICAL CODA