Did Trump’s Hiring Freeze Raise the Death Toll in Texas Floods? by Diane Ravitch

Friends:

Great question that many of us have asked. Diane Ravitch explores this on her blog in a recent post, highlighting a Texas Monthly report about the Trump administration’s hiring freeze—and its possible role in Texas’s deadly July floods. The National Weather Service had planned to embed an emergency response specialist in the Texas Division of Emergency Management to ensure that extreme-weather warnings were not just issued, but understood and acted upon. That hire was weeks away from starting when Trump froze all federal hiring on his first day in office. The position was never filled.

In Kerr County and across Central Texas, at least 135 people died. While meteorologists insist their forecasts were accurate, some experts question whether the missing liaison might have pushed messaging hard enough to save lives. As Victor Murphy, a veteran climate-service manager, put it: “Lives may have been saved or could have been saved, but we’ll never know.”

This is what happens when political posturing overrides public safety. Cutting or freezing critical positions might sound like “draining the swamp,” but it can drain away the very capacity we need to respond to crisis. Texas lost up to 30 weather service employees during the freeze and related attrition—crippling its ability to translate forecasts into life-saving action.

Disaster preparedness is not just about predicting the storm; it’s about ensuring the right people, in the right places, have the authority and capacity to sound the alarm and guide the response. The “arbitrariness and capriciousness” Murphy describes is not some abstract flaw in governance—it is measured in human lives. 

After 45 years with the National Weather Service, Murphy took early retirement, a loss of deep institutional knowledge driven in part by the very staffing cuts and hiring freezes he condemned. 

History, and lived experience, teach us that when decisions are made on impulse, without expertise, planning, or accountability, the outcome is almost always the same: things go wrong, people suffer, and preventable tragedies become inevitable. It's hard to argue with this, my friends.

In emergency management, you don’t get do-overs. When leadership treats expert staffing as expendable, the cost is paid in grief. And when ideology floods the forecast, the casualties will not be confined to the storm’s path.

Thanks, Diane, for putting this out there. So many Texans are searching for answers and accountability to the terrible tragedy that befell us recently. Remembering this tragedy should mean more than memorials—it should mean changing the systems that failed to protect us.

-Angela Valenzuela

Did Trump’s Hiring Freeze Raise the Death Toll in Texas Floods?


By dianeravitch on August 12, 2025

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The Texas Monthly points out that the state was supposed to get an emergency coordinator for its weather service. But that person was never hired because Trump ordered a freeze on all federal hiring the day he took office.

Texas Monthly reported:

The prospective hire was meant to help solve a persistent problem in dealing with Texas’s many natural disasters: translating warnings about extreme weather into appropriate action. By late January, the National Weather Service’s Fort Worth office had selected a meteorologist to serve as an “emergency response specialist” within the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which coordinates the state’s emergency-management program. The new hire, part of a nationwide reorganization of the National Weather Service, would have “embedded” at the TDEM to help decision-makers prepare for and respond to extreme weather. If all had gone according to plan, the federal meteorologist would have been working elbow to elbow with state emergency responders during the July flooding in Central Texas that killed at least 135.

But when Donald Trump took office on January 20 and announced a federal hiring freeze that day, the new hire hadn’t yet started. The role was left unfilled. “We just couldn’t quite dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s before the federal hiring freeze hit,” said Victor Murphy, the climate-service program manager in the Fort Worth office who took early retirement in April after 45 years with the NWS. “Lives may have been saved or could have been saved, but we’ll never know.”

In the aftermath of the floods in Kerr County and others parts of Central Texas, officials questioned whether staffing shortages in the National Weather Service—the result of the hiring freeze as well as DOGE-led early retirements and firings—had damaged the federal agency’s ability to accurately forecast the extreme rainfall and warn about the extraordinary flooding that would quickly follow. Many meteorologists pushed backhard on this narrative. They said the Austin/San Antonio office, which covers much of the Hill Country, performed adequately despite the cuts, with reasonably accurate forecasting and timely flood watches and warnings. Still, others have asked whether the NWS’s messaging to the public and to emergency responders could have been more aggressive.

The axed TDEM role would have worked to make sure the NWS’s forecasts and warnings were understood and heeded, serving as a liaison between the local, state, and federal governments, according to a job description and interviews with those involved in the hiring process. The emergency specialist would’ve “provided TDEM with eye-to-eye, one-on-one expert analysis,” including during weather emergencies, Murphy said. Texas gets a lot of wild weather. Residents and even decision-makers may need help distinguishing between a typical gully washer and extremely dangerous flooding, between a hard freeze and a life-threatening winter storm.

The TDEM job was part of a sweeping reorganization of the National Weather Service that began under the Biden administration. As part of the modernization effort, NWS officials were in the process of placing meteorologists in each state emergency-management office to help decision-makers. But the Trump administration effectively scuttled the project and decimated the agency’s existing workforce. NWS staffing levels were reduced by roughly 600 employees, to fewer than 4,000, in just a few months, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a labor union. Texas weather offices lost between 25 and 30 employees—a count that doesn’t include positions left unfilled because of the hiring freeze. “The arbitrariness and capriciousness of it is just really, really sad,” said Murphy. “This TDEM job getting axed is an example of that.”

This week, media outlets reported that the Trump administration is planning to fill up to 450 jobs at the federal agency. It’s unclear whether the TDEM position is included.

Hindsight is 20/20. We will never know.