Weather reporting is something that I suspect much of America takes for granted—myself included. I click into the weather app on my phone and get hour-by-hour forecasts that tend to be more or less accurate. A few days ago in New York City, I received an alert that severe flash floods were underway. Within a few hours, subways and highways were flooded, and at least two people were killed.
But having accurate and timely weather reporting is actually far more complicated than it appears.
After catastrophic floods in Central Texas killed at least 134 people, including 36 children, and left over 100 missing earlier this month, questions remain about whether the tragedy could’ve been mitigated.
“Devastation on this scale demands accountability,” wrote former DA and SDNY prosecutor Mimi Rocah in her recent article for Stay Tuned. “If I were a local prosecutor in this area of Texas, I would absolutely use the power of the grand jury to explore whether criminal liability is appropriate, given some of the red flags and the immense loss of young lives here.”
Accountability can look different after an extreme event such as the Texas floods. Many were quick to point out that the Trump administration, aided by DOGE, has cut at least 600 positions from the National Weather Service since the beginning of the year. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to Duane Townsend, the Commerce Department’s acting inspector general, requesting an investigation into the potential impact of the NSW staffing cuts on the local response to the Texas floods.
The New York Times reported key staffing vacancies at the local Texas offices of the National Weather Service, including a senior hydrologist, a staff forecaster, and a meteorologist in charge. Meanwhile, President Trump rejected the idea that his administration’s major cuts contributed at all to the tragedy in Texas.
In its 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration has signaled significant budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service, as well as offices responsible for earth science and climate research, and commercial fisheries management.
It struck me that more people should understand how weather forecasts come together, and the high stakes of gutting the agencies that make accurate reporting possible. I reached out to two experts in this field to learn more about these issues. Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent at The Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. David Dickson is a meteorologist and TV engagement coordinator at Covering Climate Now.
The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Noa Azulai: Do most people understand where our weather reporting comes from? What does weather forecasting impact?
Mark Hertsgaard: I think a lot of Americans look at weather forecasts a little bit like many of us look at the meat that we buy in grocery stores. That meat just comes from the grocery store, and not from live creatures that are raised and slaughtered and then processed and transported to your local grocery store. And it’s a little bit similar with weather forecasts. We think that the weather forecasts are just there on my phone, or the television, or the radio. And in fact there is a vast and complicated and sophisticated apparatus behind all of those weather forecasts that are so important to how we live our lives.
There’s a reason that for decades—until Trump and his fellow budget-cutters came along—the United States government invested so much money in getting the best quality science and interpretation of science out to the public. It’s because weather forecasts have not just enormous implications for human safety, as we saw in such heartbreaking ways with the Texas floods recently along the Guadalupe River. But weather forecasts also have just staggeringly large economic implications.
When do farmers harvest? When do you leave on your ski or beach vacation? When do we shut schools? When do we put up warnings for people to flee a coastal area because a hurricane is coming? And is it a category 1 hurricane or is it a category 4 hurricane? These are enormous life and death decisions of staggeringly large financial dimensions as well. So that’s why the US government, and specifically through the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA, has spent so much time and money over the years trying to get this right.
David Dickson: It’s a huge endeavor. And part of the reason why NOAA, as well as the organizations underneath it, including the National Weather Service, are so important is because it is so complex. In fact, the National Weather Service is the only one that can issue severe weather alerts.
Essentially, there are weather reporting sites all across the world and all across the United States. They are not only on land, but also in the ocean with buoys, as well as up in the sky with weather balloon launches, which have been reduced by the Trump administration as a cost-saving measure.
All of this information is gathered by the National Weather Service, and it is all public access. No matter where you get your weather information from, the backbone of all of that data has its roots in NOAA, as well as the National Weather Service.
As meteorologists, we learn the formulas that represent how the atmosphere works. And we have these massive supercomputers that are just running these calculations further out in time to determine future weather. But they have to have initial conditions to start making these predictions. So when we talk about the degradation of this data, with weather balloon launches being taken away, for example, that’s why meteorologists have been sounding the alarm that our forecasts are going to get worse. It’s like running a computer program: If you make a mistake early on, those mistakes compound further and the further out in time you go.
Mark Hertsgaard: I think the more people who can understand just how much work, time, and expertise goes into weather information, the more we will be better prepared and able to protect it. Because make no mistake: this kind of information is under direct attack by President Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress. They’re trying to dodge this now. They’re trying to act like they didn’t do this, but they absolutely did. There are now 500-plus fewer people working at the National Weather Service than there were before Trump took office. The New York Times, along with Wired, did some of the early reporting showing the immediate impacts of how, in the tragedy in Texas, it wasn’t that the weather service didn’t get the forecast correct. They did, but the staff shortages meant that information—that forecast—did not get transmitted to the public and to the local emergency authorities quickly enough.
This is a broader point: Everything that climate science is telling us in the last 5 to 10 years is that the scientists have underestimated how fast this is coming and how destructive it will be, and just how sensitive the Earth’s climate system is to even relatively small increases in temperature. So it’s like these budget cuts. It’s as if we’re flying into a thunderstorm, and someone says, “Let’s turn off all radar systems. Let’s turn off all of the things that could get us through it because who needs that? That’s a bunch of woke nonsense.”
Noa Azulai: Mark, you’ve been in this field for a long time. Has the weather ever been this politicized?
Mark Hertsgaard: No, never. And why would that be? Because everybody is affected by the weather. Until Trump’s second term, even the hard-right would not go along with this, because their base is out in rural America. I come from rural America; I grew up on a farm. I know what it’s like to be a farmer. You live and die according to the weather. You need accurate weather forecasting.
And so I think there was always a caution, on the part of Republicans, that they would not want to politicize the weather like this. It’s like what’s happening with cuts to Medicaid, and now with public radio. As it turns out, it’s really rural America where people are most reliant on these services of the government. That’s why it was never politicized in the past. If anything should be nonpartisan, it should be the weather.
Noa Azulai: You both co-authored the recent article, “Summer Camp Kids Did Not Have to Die in the Texas Floods.” If these cuts to NOAA continue, what else are you worried about? What’s important for people to know?
David Dickson: Unfortunately, this conversation is going to happen again about who’s to blame for these children dying, for preventable deaths, for destruction to life and property. Who’s to blame? That happens after every extreme weather event. Unfortunately, it’s a multifaceted thing. I wouldn’t even say that the disruptions we’ve seen to the National Weather Service in NOAA were completely to blame for what happened in Texas. The same way that we can’t say that climate change is completely to blame for the floods in Texas, or any other extreme weather event.
The question that we should be answering is, how did it influence it? Climate change doesn’t cause anything. It influences things. So, we saw the influence of climate change with the floods over the past several weeks, whether it was in Texas or in New York. We also will likely understand that there was some impact from the disruptions to NOAA and the National Weather Service. The bottom line is this was a tragic event. It was a complicated event. When I look at things from a weather side of view, it was possibly the worst case scenario.
When it comes to flooding, unfortunately, people are going to die. It’s a matter of life and death. The best that we can potentially hope for is if the warnings come out fast enough that people can prepare and take adequate precautions quickly enough. But people have to understand their risk. And unfortunately, a lot of people’s perception of risk is determined by their past experiences. People based their preparedness and evacuation plans on the experiences they had in the past. And we’re seeing extreme weather events that far exceed anything that we ourselves have seen. And so people are going to have to grapple with how to prepare for something that we’ve never seen before? All the while, we’re seeing disruptions to federal agencies.
Mark Hertsgaard: I will confess to you that as I was writing that piece, especially the parts about that little 8-year-old girl, I was weeping. I’m a dad myself. And the nightmare of any parent is the loss of your child. An unimaginable circumstance. And that happened to those families, and there’s nothing going to bring those kids back. And it did not have to happen. And today I was emailing with a longtime colleague of mine, a very respected climate journalist who had read my piece and said, “I’m afraid we’re going to be writing a lot more pieces like this in the future.” And that’s my answer to your question. If this stuff continues or even if these current cuts stay in place, we are going to be seeing more unnecessary death and suffering and misery.
We know from climate science that extreme weather is going to only get more and more extreme. We just hit 430 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere, and we are rising fast, and that inevitably is going to mean more flooding, more storms, more heat waves, more fires. Meanwhile, Trump also wants to kill FEMA and put all that responsibility back to the states, which they do not have the expertise or the money to handle.
If we stay on this course, there’s going to be a lot more heartbreaking but infuriating stories like we saw out of Texas. So I hope that more and more people will stand up and say enough is enough and push back against this because again, this does not have to happen. This is a political choice that is being made in Washington.
Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent of The Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. His new book is Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and A Story of Race in America.
David Dickson is a meteorologist and TV engagement coordinator at Covering Climate Now.
