WASHINGTON — Members of the same congressional delegation that spent the last eighteen months gutting the National Weather Service’s budget, slashing NOAA staffing by 17%, and openly mocking a colleague for calling river gauges ‘critical infrastructure’ announced Wednesday they will convene an emergency oversight hearing to determine why, exactly, the warnings ahead of this month’s Texas floods were not better.
The hearing, titled ‘Forecasting Failure: A Crisis of Federal Competence,’ will reportedly probe whether forecasters in the understaffed Austin/San Antonio office did everything humanly possible during the four-hour window between the storm intensifying and the first cabin being torn off its foundation, given that two of the three meteorologist positions on the overnight shift had been left vacant after a hiring freeze the panel itself voted for in March.
‘The American people deserve answers,’ said one Texas senator who in February held up a printed copy of the NOAA budget on the chamber floor and called it ‘bloat written by people who have never been outside.’ He confirmed he would be calling the acting NOAA administrator to testify, then pausing to ask why the agency was being run by an acting administrator.
According to a staffer in the office of a Hill Climate Caucus Republican, the working theory among members is that the forecast existed, was accurate, was issued in time, and was correctly escalated, but failed in some other unspecified federal way that can be litigated for the cameras without naming the warning coordination meteorologist whose position was eliminated in May.
Sources at the agency itself were less generous. ‘They cut the balloon launches,’ said a forecaster at a Gulf Coast field office who asked to be identified only as someone who has not slept since July 4. ‘You can’t run the model without the data, and you can’t get the data without the balloons, and you can’t launch the balloons without the guy, and they fired the guy. Then they sent us a tote bag that says RESILIENCE on it.’
The hearing is expected to feature a multimedia presentation in which committee members display screenshots of the actual flash flood warnings — issued in correct sequence, in correct language, at correct hours — while asking witnesses to explain why those warnings were not, somehow, more.
One representative whose district lost forty-two homes told reporters he intends to ask whether the Weather Service had considered using ‘all caps,’ a tool he described as ‘on every phone in America’ and ‘free, unlike whatever they’re spending the money on.’ Asked what they were spending the money on, he said he had not been briefed but assumed diversity.
The administration, for its part, has indicated full cooperation with the probe. A White House spokesperson said the President is ‘deeply concerned’ about forecast quality and is considering an executive order requiring meteorologists to express confidence intervals ‘more confidently.’ He added that FEMA will continue operating in Texas at whatever capacity is possible given that its acting deputy director is currently also the acting director, the acting chief of staff, and, as of Tuesday, the acting press office.
Survivors in Kerr County, reached by phone, declined to weigh in on the hearing. One, a retired schoolteacher whose mother-in-law’s house is now in a tree, said she had not been following Washington this week and did not plan to start.