Ted Cruz just made life more dangerous for fellow Texans — here’s how

09 July

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at the CPAC Texas 2022 conference in Dallas on August 5, 2022 (Lev Radin/Shutterstock.com)

According to the Washington Post, the death count from the flash floods that ravaged Central Texas over the 4th of July Weekend has reached 109. But 161 people are missing, which, the Post reports, is "raising the possibility that the death toll could surpass 200."

During the flooding, Texans in the area were warned to "move to higher ground." But The Atlantic's Zoë Schlanger, in an article published on July 8, stressed that the flooding came so rapidly that many people didn't have time to heed that warning.

Scientists and environmentalists are stressing that the tragedy in Texas not only underscores the dangers of climate change, but also, the need for aggressively funding the National Weather Service (NWS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — both of which the Trump Administration is defunding. But according to journalist Oliver Milman, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) pushed for defunding weather forecasting in the days before part of his state suffered deadly flooding.

In an article originally published by The Guardian and republished by Mother Jones on July 9, Milman "ensured" that President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" spending bill "slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding — a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting."

"Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, (July 5) — a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in Central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp," Milman explains. "The Greece trip, first reported by the Daily Beast, ended in time for Cruz to appear at the site of the disaster on Monday morning, (July 7) to decry the tragedy and promise a response from lawmakers."

The NWS, Milman notes, is facing "scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon Central Texas."

"Before his Grecian holiday," Milman reports, "Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis. Cruz inserted language into the Republicans' 'big beautiful' reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, (July 4), that eliminates a $150 million fund to 'accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public' around weather forecasting."

Milman adds, "A further $50 million in NOAA grants to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems, and coastal ecosystems was also removed.

According to Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Fossil Free Media, Cruz "has spent years doing Big Oil's bidding, gutting climate research, defunding NOAA, and weakening the very systems meant to warn and protect the public."

DiPaola told The Guardian, "That's made disasters like this weekend's flood in Texas even more deadly. Now, he's doubling down, pushing through even more cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill. Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the people he's supposed to represent. It's disgraceful."

Read Oliver Milman's full article at this Guardian link or on Mother Jones' website.

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