Sen. Ted Cruz Stripped Weather Forecasting Funds From Trump’s Megabill. Then Texas Was Devastated by Floods.

Among other things, he removed $150 million slated to improve modeling, predictions, and public communications.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz speaks during the debate with U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, in Dallas. Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune via POOL

Just days after Sen. Ted Cruz stripped $150 million in funding meant to bolster weather forecasting and emergency communication from the massive Republican spending package, catastrophic flooding hit Texas, raising questions about whether those cuts contributed to the deadly outcome.

Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, has once again landed in hot water. On Tuesday, he championed sweeping spending cuts to federal weather programs as part of a broader GOP budget bill. By Saturday, he was sightseeing with his wife, Heidi, at the Parthenon in Athens, Greece—while his home state was reeling from one of the deadliest natural disasters in its recent history.

A flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas has killed over 100 people, many of them children and camp counselors caught in the middle of the night. As rescue crews scrambled and families mourned, Cruz was thousands of miles away on vacation. His absence, combined with his recent legislative maneuvering, drew widespread condemnation.

“Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful,” said Cassidy DiPaola of Fossil Free Media.

By Monday, Cruz was back on Texas soil and attempting damage control. Speaking to Fox News from the flood site, he said a full investigation was needed. “There’s no doubt we’re going to have a serious retrospective after this,” Cruz stated. “The fact that kids were sleeping in cabins when the floodwaters rose shows a failure somewhere. We have to figure out how to provide better warnings and get people to safety sooner.”

Critics say the very systems that should’ve warned Texans were the ones Cruz helped undermine.

In the days before his Grecian getaway, Cruz inserted language into the Trump "big beautiful bill" that eliminated a $150 million allocation to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That funding had been designated to improve research, monitoring, forecasting, and public alert systems for severe weather events.

Another $50 million in NOAA grants for studying climate impacts on oceans and weather patterns was also axed.

Asked by the Guardian about the timing of these cuts and his foreign trip, Cruz declined to comment.

The funding reductions come at a perilous moment for federal forecasting agencies. NOAA and the National Weather Service (NWS) have been grappling with a shrinking workforce and strained resources under Trump-era efforts to slash government spending. Over 600 staffers have departed the NWS recently, including meteorologists and technical personnel vital to real-time weather alerts. FEMA, the federal disaster response agency, is also reportedly losing roughly 20% of its full-time staff.

With record temperatures, rising seas, and stronger storms fueled by climate change, experts warn that this erosion of America’s disaster-preparedness infrastructure is increasingly dangerous.

“This is the direct result of years of sabotage,” said DiPaola. “Ted Cruz has spent his career gutting climate science, kneecapping NOAA, and doing the fossil fuel industry’s dirty work. And now Texans are paying the price.”

Despite his history of climate denial and skepticism toward environmental regulation, Cruz pushed back on the idea that his budget cuts played any role in the flood’s devastation. At a press conference, he dismissed the criticism as “partisan finger-pointing.”

“Yes, the warnings could’ve been better. But claims that funding decisions caused this tragedy are not backed by the facts,” Cruz argued. “The alerts went out hours before the waters hit. It’s not fair to scapegoat the National Weather Service.”

Yet internal accounts paint a more complicated picture. While the NWS did issue late-night flood alerts, coordination with local authorities was reportedly hampered by missing personnel and outdated systems. According to the union representing NWS employees, field offices in San Antonio and San Angelo were operating without key specialists, such as meteorologists tasked with liaising directly with emergency responders.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attacked a CNN reporter during the press briefing on Thursday (AP)

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the disaster as unavoidable. “People were asleep when the floodwaters surged,” she said. “That was an act of God—not a failure of the administration or its policies.” She added that blaming Trump for flood forecasting failures was “a depraved lie.”

Still, climate scientists and policy analysts say the writing is on the wall.

The Trump administration’s 2026 budget calls for the elimination of NOAA’s entire climate and weather research division. This would effectively halt government investment in developing new forecasting technologies, data modeling, and predictive tools, at a time when extreme weather is becoming more frequent and severe.

“We’re heading in exactly the wrong direction,” said Dr. Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “We’ve pumped a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere, and that energy is disrupting the climate system. Every storm, every flood now carries the fingerprint of climate change.”

While it may take months for researchers to perform a full attribution study on the Texas flood, Dessler said basic physics already provides enough insight.

“Climate change very likely made this event more intense,” he said. “The only question is how much.”

As Texans begin the long recovery, many are left wondering what could’ve been done differently—and whether the next disaster will strike while lawmakers are on vacation.

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