I mean, FEMA loves Texas, so…
Gov. Greg Abbott was quick to request federal assistance last week after devastating floods hit the Texas Hill Country.
But the Republican governor is simultaneously helping the Trump administration find ways to “wean off” of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has sent more than $7 billion to Texas over the last decade for natural disasters like the flooding that had left 120 people dead and dozens more missing as of Thursday.
Abbott is on a Trump-appointed panel drafting recommendations for reforming the agency. He has criticized FEMA as ineffective, even as Texas has been one of the biggest recipients of the agency’s largesse.
“FEMA is slow and clunky and doesn’t solve the needs of those who need it the most,” Abbott said during the panel’s first meeting in May. “States have proven that we can move more nimbly, more swiftly, more effectively.”
Disaster response experts and former FEMA officials say states like Texas, with robust emergency response agencies of their own, are only able to act so effectively because they are bolstered by the federal agency — and billions in federal funding that flows to the state after each disaster.
Texas, on average, has received nearly $900 million from FEMA alone after each disaster that has struck the state in the last decade, according to research by Sarah Labowitz at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The agency has sent more than $7.2 billion to Texas in that time, making it the third-largest recipient of FEMA aid behind Florida and Louisiana.
“If you’re thinking right now that Texas can handle its own disasters because it has a track record — it’s doing that with huge investments from the federal government,” Labowitz said. “When we get $7 billion over the last 10 years for disaster recovery, that underwrites a lot of capacity at the state level. If that money goes away, then what is our capacity?”
How many special sessions would Abbott have had to call in the last decade to appropriate disaster relief funds if there were no FEMA? How slow and inefficient and politicized would that have been? Of course, Abbott would probably prefer that all of those funds come straight from a fund that his office controlled, which is what Trump wants to do with FEMA. If you can’t see the potential for graft and enemy-punishing in that, I don’t know what to tell you.
I wasn’t going to do another Hill Country flood roundup post, but there were a couple of stories I saw that I wanted to mention, so I decided to include them here.
The Texas Floods Amped Up the Battle Between MAHA and the Tech Right
One longstanding fight that has divided the political right has been over whether or not humans should be allowed to modify the weather, with religious conservatives saying absolutely not, while the tech visionaries are all for it. These debates were often theoretical, but then the catastrophic floods in Texas took place.
On July 2, two days before floods devastated communities in West Texas, a California-based company called Rainmaker was conducting operations in the area. Rainmaker was working on behalf of the South Texas Weather Modification Association, a coalition of water conservation districts and county commissions; the project is overseen by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Through a geoengineering technology called cloud-seeding, the company uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds to encourage rainfall. The company is relatively new—it was launched in 2023—but the technology has been around since 1947, when the first cloud-seeding experiment took place.
After news of the floods broke, it didn’t take long for internet observers to make a connection and point to Rainmaker’s cloud-seeding efforts as the cause of the catastrophe. “This isn’t just ‘climate change,’ posted Georgia Republican congressional candidate Kandiss Taylor to her 65,000 followers on X. “It’s cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation. If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder.” Gabrielle Yoder, a right-wing influencer, posted on Instagram to her 151,000 followers, “I could visibly see them spraying prior to the storm that has now claimed over 40 lives.”
Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser and election denier, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about Russia, told his 2.1 million followers on X that he’d “love to see the response” from the company to the accusations that it was responsible for the inundation.
Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s 25-year-old CEO, took Flynn up on his request. “Rainmaker did not operate in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th,” he posted on X, “or contribute to the floods that occurred over the region.”
Meteorologists resoundingly agree with Doricko, saying that the technology simply isn’t capable of causing that volume of precipitation, in which parts of Kerr County experienced an estimated 100 billion gallons of rain in just a few hours. But the scientific evidence didn’t dissuade those who had already made up their minds that geoengineering was to blame. On July 5, the day after the floods, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she planned to introduce a bill that would make it a felony offense for humans to deliberately alter the weather. “We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering,” she tweeted.
Lawmakers in both Florida and Tennessee appear to feel similarly; they have recently passed laws that outlaw weather modification. But other states have embraced the technology: Rainmaker currently has contracts in several states that struggle with drought: Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, and Texas, as well as with municipalities in Utah and Idaho.
The debate over cloud-seeding is yet another flashpoint in a simmering standoff between two powerful MAGA forces: on one side are the techno-optimists—think Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk (who has fallen from grace, of course), or even Vice President JD Vance—who believe that technological advancement is an expression of patriotism. This is the move-fast-and-break-things crowd that generally supports projects they consider to be cutting edge—for example, building deregulated zones to encourage innovation, extending the human lifespan with experimental medical procedures, and using genetic engineering to enhance crops. And to ensure those crops are sufficiently watered, cloud-seeding.
The opposing side, team “natural,” is broadly opposed to anything they consider artificial, be it tampering with the weather, adding chemicals to food, or administering vaccines, which many of them see as disruptive to a perfectly self-sufficient human immune system. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement started by US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., lies firmly in this camp.
Indeed, Kennedy himself has spoken out against weather modification. “Geoengineering schemes could make floods & heatwaves worse,” he tweeted last June. “We must subject big, untested policy ideas to intense scrutiny.” In March, he tweeted that he considered states’ efforts to ban geoengineering “a movement every MAHA needs to support” and vowed that “HHS will do its part.”
You can file this under “Let them fight” and “I hope both sides lose”. I mean, Sid freaking Miller is out here trying to talk some sense into the MAHA lunatics. How am I supposed to cheer for that?
Can sirens help save lives in the next flood? Yes, but there’s more to it.
The National Weather Service issued cellphone alerts repeatedly in Kerr County as the Guadalupe River rose early Friday morning. Around the north and south forks that feed the river, forecasters triggered one push alert after another, according to PBS data.
The first went out at 1:14 a.m., then another at 3:35 a.m., then a third at 4:03 a.m. Then a handful more. “Move to higher ground now,” some of the alerts said. “Act quickly to protect your life.” At 5:34 a.m. and 7:24 a.m., more messages went to those along and down the river.
But the series of notifications was not enough to save more than 250 people who died or are counted as missing after the July 4 flood. A week after the tragedy, rescue crews continue scouring miles of riverbank and searching huge debris piles for victims.
For warnings to work, people not only have to receive the alerts but they also need to understand how the warnings apply to where they are and know what to do about it — which is especially hard when it comes to flooding, said Kim Klockow McClain, a senior social scientist supporting the National Weather Service.
“We left way too much up to individuals to receive those warnings, know what to do and know where to even go,” McClain said, adding, “You need to tell people a little bit more.”
State legislators are searching for solutions to improve warning systems in places such as the Hill Country ahead of a special session later this month. The Texas House and Senate announced Thursday that they had formed committees to consider that and other disaster-related topics, starting with a hearing in Austin on July 23.
Lawmakers such as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the state Senate, have suggested the state should support the installation of warning sirens, a technology used decades ago to warn of air raids.
Researchers say there will be no single, simple fix.
Sirens can help in rural places where cell service is unreliable and phone alerts might not go off, according to researchers, but they are no silver bullet.
“Flash Flood Alley, from what I’ve read, that sounds like the perfect place to put sirens,” said Jeannette Sutton, a leading expert on warning systems and associate professor at the University of Albany. “It’s kind of remote. They know that there’s a high risk in that area.”
But, she added, “They can’t let it just be one solution.”
How sirens can help: They can be set up to trigger automatically if water reaches a certain height, which could require additional investment in flood gauges. This can be effective because it doesn’t require someone to be awake or rely on a judgment call on when to trigger them. There are also sirens that blare voice messages about impending danger.
But researchers emphasized that people may not hear sirens if they’re indoors during a heavy thunderstorm, and they need to be taught what the sirens mean when they go off, perhaps with signs in public places or pamphlets passed out to visitors when they check into a hotel or RV park.
A visitor from a tornado-prone area, for example, might run inside instead of fleeing to higher ground before a flood strikes.
Other states have already found ways to educate out-of-town guests about local hazards. McClain, the researcher who supports the Weather Service, pointed to the coasts of Oregon and Washington as places that have worked to prepare visitors for a tsunami with signage along evacuation routes and in hotels.
“Is it going to be perfect? Probably not,” McClain said. “But is it going to be better than doing nothing? Absolutely.”
I am once again putting on my cybersecurity hat to say that this is why we take an approach called defense in depth. No one strategy for cybersecurity is close to being sufficient, but each individual aspect of it plays an important role and they all come together to be a robust strategy. (There’s a close analogy to gun control that I have made more than once and no doubt will make again.) Sirens, education, cellphone alerts with their own distinct ringtones, radios, being careful to not overdo anything so people don’t tune it all out, and more. I think the Lege could handle this, even in a short 30-day special session, if they focus on this as a priority and not get distracted by redistricting and red meat. Good luck with that.