July 10, 2025.

Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives

passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill

President Donald Trump demanded.

And at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House Speaker

Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, announced Republicans were laying a key cornerstone

of America's new golden age. But the past week has shown a nation and an administration in turmoil. On July 4th, the day Trump signed the

bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160

still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service, or NWS, for the disaster.

But reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately

and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 11.m., 403 a.m. and 606 a.m.

But four hours passed before the police department in the city of Curville issued a warning. It wasn't until 732 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River

to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been

the Weather Service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early

retirement under pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency and has not been replaced.

Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported,

search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, could not respond

to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA,

had recently tried to cut spending by requiring

her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000.

That order meant FEMA couldn't put crews in place ahead of the storm or respond immediately.

Noam didn't sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours

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