Jasper Chaplin, West London Socialist Party
The death count for the recent Texas floods has reached 120, including three dozen children, and Ted Cruz has blood on his hands. The Texan Republican senator, who slashed $150 million from weather forecasting just days before the disaster, was relaxing on holiday (again!) while working-class Americans faced a historic four days of flooding.
Cruz amended language in Trump’s reconciliation bill before it was signed, eliminating vital funding to improve weather-related research and forecasting. These are the same systems that could have saved lives over the 4 July weekend. In a blatant show of hypocrisy, Cruz, who was in Mexico during the 2021 winter storm crisis, returns from yet another holiday to preach about ‘better warning systems.’ But this concern was nowhere to be found when he was slicing up the National Weather Service budget and protecting fossil fuel profits over his constituents’ lives.
More than 600 meteorologists and support workers have already left the understaffed National Weather Service under Trump’s agenda. Cruz’s cuts removed another $50 million from climate research that could help predict these kinds of extreme weather events, with more cuts to climate agency NOAA planned under the Trump administration.
A spokesperson for Cruz denied any link between the cuts and the flood’s impact on Texas workers, saying that there are more productive ways to improve weather forecasting than ‘overfunding’ NOAA accounts. But it’s clear that wherever that money is going now, it won’t be funding public safety.
In areas with adequate warning systems and personnel, such as Comfort, Kendall County, the death toll is zero; that should be proof enough how vital these services are. Essential early warning systems that save lives shouldn’t be subject to the profit motives of big fossil fuel companies. The only way we can achieve that state-wide is by taking back profits from the fossil fuel companies and putting the funding of essential services under democratic workers’ control.
