The government weather forecaster has been hit with huge cuts by the president’s administration.
Officials in Texas are casting blame on the National Weather Service (NWS) for failing to forecast catastrophic flooding that has killed 24 people.
NWS was among the government agencies targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency in its effort to gut the federal bureaucracy, losing approximately 600 staffers.
After the cuts, the agency—which was already understaffed—began to prepare to offer “degraded” forecasting services, facing “severe shortages” of meteorologists, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times in April.
“The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country,” said Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd at a press conference Friday. “The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”
