Noem Vows NWS Forecast System Fix
Even Though Locals Missed Warnings
Capitol Inside
July 5, 2025
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed on Saturday to lead the charge to beef up the federal government's weather forecasting system in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in the Hill Country that left at least 47 people dead after a monstrous wall of water tore through a Christian girls camp on the Guadalupe River.
Noem's pledge to upgrade the National Weather Service contained its fair share of irony just months after the agency fell victim to the deep cuts that President Donald Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency initiated in a move that produced staffing shortages that put its forecasting abilities in substantial peril.
Appearing with Governor Greg Abbott and other Texas officials at a press conference this afternoon in Kerrville, Noem overlooked the layoffs and cutbacks that the DOGE effort put in motion at the federal weather agency with the president's blessings. But she appeared to give credence to local officials' claims that they failed to receive sufficient warnings from the NWS on the lethal potential of storms in the area. Noem promised that Trump would have her back on improvements in technology that the NWS uses to read the weather for the sake of the nation's health and safety.
That would be a major turnabout from the DOGE-spurred reductions that spawned an internal plan for "degraded" operations at field offices to coincide with reductions in the number of people running them. The Associated Press reported this spring that half of the NWS offices around the country had 20 percent of their positions vacant. Experts warned that the cuts would put the nation's ability to anticipate the weather at severe risk during the hurricane season. But Noem contended that improvements at the NWS were necessary as a result of an ancient system that Trump inherited from the Biden administration.
“There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking,” Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin said at the press conference with Abbott, Noem, U.S. Senator John Cornyn and local officials today. “There’s a lot of people saying ‘why’ and ‘how’ - and I understand that.”
But the NWS said its office in New Braunfels that oversees the region that was devastated said it was fully prepared for the potentially destructive weather with five agents on duty - more than double the number who are there most of the time. The NWS issued a flash flood watch for the area on Thursday at 1:18 p.m. The agent sent out updated alerts during the early morning hours on Friday urging people to evacuate areas that are vulnerable to serious flooding. A five-alarm warning on the potential for catastrophe went out at 4:01 a.m. telling people to flee for higher ground immediately.
Local officials apparently missed the warnings or failed to take them seriously - saying that he no way to know that it would rain hard enough to cause the degree of damage that the flooding inflicted when the Guadalupe River waters rose 26 feet above the shores in a torrent of unthinkable destruction. But the NWS had predicted up to 8 inches of rain in a small span of time there - and that's considerably higher than the threshold that should trigger evacuations of susceptible areas.
But local emergency forces clearly were not prepared for the disaster. "We know we get rains. We know the river rises,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said at the Abbott news conference. “But nobody saw this coming.”
Kelly said the county had considered the installation of a flood warning system like those that are used for tornados in some places. But the proposal fizzled seven or eight years ago, Kerr added, as a consequence of the amount it would cost the county to have it built and run.
The county judge said he wasn't aware if the girls summer camp that took the hardest hit had a warning system for weather events like the flash flood that apparently swept more than two dozen young campers away in the dark of the early morning. The death toll is expected to rise with some of the girls still missing from the 99-year-old Camp Mystic as search crews worked frantically into the night. The camp had 750 girls at the location during the flood.
more to come ...
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