MAGA's Katrina
"Heckuva job, Donnie." Government incompetence surrounding the Texas floods is reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina response in 2005 -- with one major difference.
You knew it would happen.
The first time you heard the Trump White House wanted to eliminate or at least financially curb FEMA, you knew lives would be lost in a disaster made worse by an ill-equipped emergency response agency. You knew you'd one day read a lede like this one in today's Washington Post:
Two days before torrential rains turned the Guadalupe River into a raging flood, a veteran official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency told The Washington Post that one of the main concerns for this disaster season was the agency’s ability to quickly deploy specialized search and rescue teams. The Trump administration’s new rules mean disaster specialists can no longer “make decisions on their own.”
The official then watched it happen in real time in Texas.
You knew the details would boggle your mind and break your heart.
Deployments of critical resources, such as tactical and specialized search and rescue teams, were delayed as a result of a budget restriction requiring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to approve every purchase, contract and grant over $100,000, according to a dozen current and former FEMA employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
When rapidly responding to billion-dollar disasters, that “is basically everything,” said one current official.
More than 120 dead in Texas Hill Country, including tiny campers ripped from their bunks and spat into the killer churn of the Guadalupe River.
You knew it would happen. Anybody with half a damn brain knew it.
This reminds me so much of Hurricane Katrina, when government incompetence and negligence at the local, state, and federal levels greatly exacerbated the deadly effects of the 2005 storm. The political fallout was intense. But there is a major difference between these two tragedies two decades apart.
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Democrats controlled the city of New Orleans in 2005 and the GOP ran the state and federal governments; two parties split the blame. Today, the Republican Party holds a trifecta in Texas flooding culpability; they control federal, state, and local governments.
On at least three occasions between 2017 and 2024, local officials in Texas’ Hill country sought funding for a flood warning system but were rebuffed by the state, the New York Times reports today. “Those failed applications came even as the federal government made billions of additional dollars available for disaster-reduction projects — including $1.9 billion that has flowed to Texas over the past decade to be spent at the discretion of state officials,” according to a Times analysis.
The warning last fall was, in retrospect, achingly prescient.
It is likely’ that Kerr County “will experience a flood event in the next year,” city and county officials concluded in a report for the Federal Emergency Management Agency released last October. Such floods, they added, could pose a particular danger to people in “substandard structures” and result in “increased damage, injuries, or loss of life.”
One solution, county officials noted, would be a flood warning system that could alert residents to rising waters. They estimated the cost of such a system at less than $1 million, and noted that FEMA had grant programs that could pay for it.
“But by the time floodwaters raged down the Guadalupe River last Friday morning, killing at least 121, including at least 36 children, no such alarm system had been installed in Kerr County. A week later, amid trees shorn of their bark from the force of the water, recovery crews were still cutting through towering piles of debris, in search of the missing.”
An obvious question is whether there will be a political price to pay for such glaring malpractice. In normal times, administrations would be rocked and heads would roll. But these aren’t normal times, and the MAGA faithful are unlikely to turn against Trump or his Texas allies because of their easy acceptance of deflections and lies.
A generation ago, I was covering the Hurricane Katrina fallout when President George W. Bush defended his incompetent FEMA administrator Michael Brown. "Brownie," he said, "you're doing a heckuva job."
No matter how high the death toll rises — and regardless of how many investigative journalists connect GOP government failures to the Texas floods — MAGA voters will almost certainly give Trump a pass. Heckuva a job, Donnie.
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Sadly Texas will probably give ICE Barbie a break. Texas needs FEMA as much as any state with the possible exception off California due to the wildfires and Florida with the hurricanes. But no state is safe now. How many times has Houston flooded in recent years? Heat Dome events are frequent in Texas and every time the heat cranks up for weeks there is legitimate fear that the electrical grid might not be up to the demand. And of course Hurricanes have a long, long history of doing major damage in the Lone Star state.
The most vivid five words seen today: "spat into the killer churn"