The Republican Party wants the United States to be much less prepared for weather-related disasters

There isn’t a trace of hyperbole in that statement — it’s just the basic facts of the matter [free link]:

In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.

Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather.

Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would close 10 laboratories run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that research the ways a warming planet is changing weather, among other things. That work is essential to more accurately predicting life-threatening hazards. Among the shuttered labs would be one in Miami that sends teams of “hurricane hunters” to fly into storms to collect critical data. The proposed budget would also make major cuts to a federal program that uses river gauges to predict floods.

The president is also envisioning a dramatically scaled-down Federal Emergency Management Agency that would shift the costs of disaster response and recovery from the federal government to the states. The administration has already revoked $3.6 billion in grants from FEMA to hundreds of communities around the country, which were to be used to help these areas protect against hurricanes, wildfires and other catastrophes. About 10 percent of the agency’s staff members have left since January, including senior leaders with decades of experience, and another 20 percent are expected to be gone by the end of this year.

The familiar excuse is that we must destroy FEMA and the National Weather Service in order to save them:

The White House and agency leaders say they are making much-needed changes to bloated bureaucracies that no longer serve the American public well.

FEMA, for one, “has been slow to respond at the federal level. It’s even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis,” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said last week at a meeting convened by the president to recommend changes to the agency. “That is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today and remade into a responsive agency. We owe it to all the American people to deliver the most efficient and the most effective disaster response.”

FEMA, of course, has been very effective when led by competent people under Democratic presidents. Part of what’s going on here is that Trump just flatly lied about the FEMA response to the 2024 flooding in North Carolina, and was able to get some traction for these lies because of “teach the controversy” media conventions. He now seems to have convinced himself of his own bullshit, so that the dismal performance of an inept nihilist like Noem and the currently-on-a-milk-carton head of FEMA is actually about the agency when it’s about the Republican Party. And needless to say even if the critiques were accurate the indiscriminate removal of funds would not improve its performance. And this is happening when disasters are going to get more severe and more frequent:

The federal government’s retrenchment arrives at a time when climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and severe. Last year, the United States experienced 27 disasters that cost more than $1 billion each.

“The Trump administration is leaving communities naked, without the necessary tools that could help them assess risks or reduce those risks,” said Alice C. Hill, who worked on climate resilience and security issues for the National Security Council during the Obama administration and who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

And while the Weather Service developed an accurate forecast, DOGE cuts made it more difficult to communicate emergency warnings effectively:

For months, experts have warned that cuts to the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, could endanger local communities. Those fears have grown since the deadly flash floods in Central Texas earlier this month.

By all accounts, the Weather Service issued the appropriate warnings for the region that was inundated by the Guadalupe River on July 4.

But the agency had to move employees from other offices to temporarily staff the San Antonio office that handled the flood warnings, and the office lacked a warning coordination meteorologist, whose job it is to communicate with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn residents and help them evacuate. The office’s warning coordination meteorologist had left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration has offered to reduce the number of federal employees.

This is what Grover Norquist government looks like, and Trump was finally able to execute large parts of it after a campaign in which it was fairly common for the media to proclaim him as some kind of economic populist.