Thirty-six Children Are Dead. Whose Fault Is It?

The blame game in Texas

Our hearts go out to everyone who has been impacted by the Texas flooding. As of the time we headed to press, Governerds have raised nearly $500,000, money that has served more than 10,600 individuals in six communities, and distributed more than 200,000 pounds of essential supplies to families that have been impacted. If you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation to Convoy of Hope, you can use this link.

On the early morning of July 4, floodwaters from the Guadalupe River surged more than 32 feet above normal levels, transforming campsites in Texas Hill Country into a nightmare that claimed more than 120 lives. Among the dead were 36 children, including campers at the nearly 100 year old Camp Mystic.

The disaster had many causes, including buildings that were constructed in "floodways" — areas at exceptionally high flood risk where construction is generally discouraged.

But the story is also about a cascade of failures at different levels of government — from local officials whose repeated warnings of impending danger were ignored, to state bureaucrats who played politics with federal funding, to a federal administration that reportedly failed to respond and systematically weakened the very agencies designed to prevent such disasters.

Unheeded warnings

Kerr County officials weren't naive about their vulnerability. They had been sounding alarms for years, with an almost prophetic clarity about what was coming.

“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.

County Commissioner Tom Moser had been even more explicit back in 2016, declaring that their area was "probably one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state.” These weren't abstract concerns. A 1987 flood on the same river had killed 10 teenagers, even as development exploded along the riverbanks.

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 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had grant programs that could pay for it.

But despite years of warnings and planning, Kerr County found itself trapped in a bureaucratic maze. The first two requests were denied by the state — in 2017, because the county lacked required mitigation plans, and then in 2018, when Hurricane Harvey shifted state priorities away from counties like Kerr that weren't affected by that storm.

Federal money, local politics

In 2021, Kerr County received what should have been a lifeline: $10.2 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds from the Biden administration. The funds could be used for flood-related infrastructure such as the warning systems and drainage enhancements that other cities and counties in Texas invested in with the same federal grants.

But Kerr County was caught between federal resources and local political fury. A survey of 180 residents showed that 42% wanted to reject the $10 million altogether, sending it back to the federal government, largely based on a dislike of the Biden administration.

"I'm here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal, treasonous, communist government ever to hold the White House," one resident told commissioners in April 2022.

"We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much," another resident declared. "We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County, and their money."

But Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s senior elected official, thought that if they returned the money, it would go to blue states like New York or California “to spend on values that we in Kerr County don’t agree with.” Better to keep the money locally, he reasoned.

Ultimately, county commissioners didn’t bend to public pressure, and chose to keep the funds. But they allocated them to priorities other than flood prevention, including a radio communications system for the sheriff's department ($7 million), employee stipends and raises ($1 million), and additional county positions ($600,000). A flood warning system remained unfunded, and some residents are now digging into why.

As the floodwaters receded, the consequences of its lack became obvious. Why weren’t people in the area warned, reporters asked? Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd deflected, blaming the National Weather Service. “The original forecast that we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted three to six inches of rain in the Concho Valley and four to eight inches of rain in the Hill Country,” Kidd said “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts nonetheless.”

But the NWS was quick to say they had warned people in the area.

Twenty-two alerts were sent out by the NWS, according to CBS News. The first alert was part of the forecast issued on July 3 that included a flood watch until Friday morning. The alerts became increasingly pointed, including this one at 4:03 a.m. for Kerr County: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!... Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order."

Local officials sent text messages to residents who signed up to receive them, but they stopped short of using the emergency alert system that sends a loud warning to every cell phone. Ultimately, it was the National Weather Service that began issuing these alerts. Experts like Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, who researches emergency management at the University of Central Florida, likens this to a critical failure on the part of local officials. Locals are more likely to trust locals than a national alert system, and a locally issued warning could have saved lives. Kerr County could also have issued an evacuation notice, and did not, according to records examined by The Washington Post.

An agency under siege

In the aftermath of the tragic flooding, the weakened state of FEMA became increasingly apparent. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly called FEMA “a disaster,” and just one month ago he promised to start "phasing out" the agency after this year’s hurricane season. His preferred approach was shifting responsibility to individual states, forcing them to either raise taxes for disaster preparedness or accept the consequences.

Since January, hundreds of FEMA employees have been fired, and the agency has lost an estimated 2,000 employees through resignations and retirements in response to Trump’s criticisms and priorities. Key leadership positions sit vacant as a result, including the regional administrator for Texas.

FEMA resources were reportedly delayed in response to the flooding. Multiple FEMA officials told CNN that new rules enacted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem meant that she needed to personally sign off on any grants over $100,000. Because of that, the officials said they couldn’t quickly deploy search and rescue teams to the Texas floods, as they would have in the past. It took a full 72 hours to get her approval, according to these officials.

Noem was asked about that on Meet the Press on Sunday, and she denied there were any delays, saying DHS, the Coast Guard, and Border Patrol were deployed immediately, and “FEMA was there just within a few hours as well.” But CNN says multiple FEMA search and rescue teams were not given the go-ahead to travel to Texas until the Monday after the floods.

The New York Times also reported that on the evening of July 5, in the midst of the flooding, FEMA laid off hundreds of contract workers in emergency call centers. And on July 6 and 7, thousands of calls from flooding victims went unanswered.

Noem’s response to that was “False reporting, fake news.” But the numbers tell a different story. The percentage of calls that were answered plummeted from 99.7 percent on July 5 to 35.8 percent and then 15.9 percent the following two days.

The administration also cut billions in disaster preparedness grants, including a program known as the Building Resilient Infrastructure Communities. That program “would have funded things like the siren system to line a river like the [Guadalupe] in Kerr county,” said former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen. “Not that many people needed to lose their lives if more mitigation measures had been put in place."

It’s not clear whether Kerr County would have used those funds to build a warning system this year before the floods. But the loss of the program means that the danger endures: Coen says it is “only foreboding for the future on what could happen to other communities if they don’t mitigate and don’t have access to the federal funds.”

Trump’s attitude about FEMA changed remarkably after disaster struck a county that had supported him: suddenly, it was something to "remake" rather than destroy.

"I think the president recognizes that FEMA should not exist the way that it always has been. It needs to be redeployed in a new way, and that's what we did during this response," Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem explained on Meet the Press. When pushed about whether Trump still wanted to eliminate FEMA, Noem said the president "wants it to be remade so that it's an agency that is new in how it deploys and supports states." The rebranding would emphasize state leadership while maintaining federal support.

There's logic to this approach — state and local officials do understand their communities' specific needs better than federal bureaucrats. But the contrast with Trump's approach to blue-state disasters is stark. When wildfires devastated Los Angeles in January, he called California's Democratic officials “incompetent pols” who "have no idea" how to put out fires. The Trump administration has so far declined to approve $40 billion in wildfire recovery funding that Governor Gavin Newsom requested in February, demanding policy concessions — including stricter voter ID laws and changes to environmental regulations — in exchange for aid.

Meanwhile, Trump promised that Texas would get "anything" it needs, according to Senator Ted Cruz. The president declared the flood zone a major disaster area within days and praised state officials for their "incredible" response.

As climate change makes extreme weather more frequent and severe, the demand for disaster preparedness will only increase. Texas alone has $54.5 billion in needed flood control projects, according to the state's own estimates. Local governments simply cannot shoulder these costs alone, and state politics too often prevent rational allocation of federal resources.

The tragedy in Kerr County exposes the fundamental flaw in treating disaster preparedness as a political football rather than a public safety necessity. When federal funds are rejected for ideological reasons, when state bureaucrats prioritize politics over vulnerability assessments, when agencies are gutted in the name of “waste, fraud, and abuse” — real people pay the price.

As search teams continue their grim work along the Guadalupe River, the question isn't just how to prevent future floods — it's how to build systems that save lives when the next disaster inevitably strikes.