Letters from an American - July 6, 2025

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

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Music July 6th, 2025. At least 80 people are dead and more than 40 are still missing in central Texas after almost a foot or 30 centimeters of rain caused flash floods overnight on Friday. Most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet, or eight meters, in 45 minutes, engulfing a Christian girls' camp.

Even as rescuers search for survivors, the disaster has highlighted the dangers of MAGA governance. The steps that left people in the path of the floods on Friday are unclear, but observers are already pointing to the administration's cuts to government as well as the lack of systems that could have provided earlier warnings to those in the path of the floods. Immediately after the catastrophe became apparent, Texas officials began to blame cuts to the National Weather Service, or NWS, part of the National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, for causing inaccurate forecasts. The Department of Government Efficiency cut about 600 staffers from the NWS. After the cuts, the understaffed agency warned that severe shortages of meteorologists would hurt weather forecasting. All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts leave the nation's official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit, just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes.

Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life. But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavell of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities

to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings, but safety officials didn't send out public warnings until hours later. Meanwhile, Kerr County's most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials telling Flavell that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and taxpayers won't pay for it.

Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas, but coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices, including the National Weather Service, form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity, by which it meant the fossil fuel industry. CNN's Andrew Friedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data.

The journalists also note that the Trump administration's 2026 budget calls for eliminating all of NOAA's weather and climate research labs, along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country. Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week

and signed into law on Friday, boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports. When a reporter asked Trump, are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left

key vacancies at the National Weather Service or the emergency coordination, he responded, they didn't. I'll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is, and that was really the Biden setup, that was not our setup, but I wouldn't blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a hundred year catastrophe and it's just so horrible to watch. The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of

the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern US government, but it is not the only one. On July 2nd, Gabe Cohen of CNN reported that state and local officials are meeting a wall of silence from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. Cohen reported that FEMA leaders have ordered FEMA personnel to stop communicating with the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, members of Congress, and state and local partners, leaving those communications up to the political appointees

running the agency. FEMA is housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Kristi Noem, is tightening her control over the agency and recently called for the firing of employees who don't like us. On June 30, the medical journal, The Lancet, published an analysis of the impact of the United States Agency for International Development, the medical journal, The Lancet, published an analysis of the impact of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, and consequences of its dismantling. The study concluded that from 2001 through 2021, programs funded by USAID prevented nearly

92 million deaths in 133 countries. It estimates that the cuts the Trump administration has made to USAID will result in more than 14 million deaths in the next five years. About 4.5 million will be children under five. On June 30th, Dr. Stephen H. Wolfe of Virginia Commonwealth University warned in the New York Times that a health catastrophe is brewing in the U.S. as well, as the administration

has upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with our health and medical care, leaving behind fewer staff members and programs to address critical needs and changing policies in ways that could endanger us all. Wolf lists cuts of 39% to the Institute that researches heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and diabetes, 37% to the Institute that researches cancer, 40% to the Institute that researches stroke, 40% to the institute that researches stroke, 40% to the institute that researches Alzheimer's, 38% to the institute that researches drug overdoses and suicide, and 36% to the institute that researches COVID flu and

pneumonia. Those cuts, along with the deregulation of industries that pollute our environment and the destruction of programs and agencies that address mental illness, suicide, chronic diseases, poisoning, car accidents, and drowning, Wolf writes, are putting Americans at risk. In May, Laura Unger and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press noted the elimination

of 20,000 jobs at national health agencies, as well as cuts of $11 billion in COVID era funding to state and local health departments that inspect restaurants, monitor wastewater, and so on. In a New York Times op-ed on July 4th, Dr. Perry Klass added that changes to the childhood vaccine schedule under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to bring back diseases that routine immunizations had all but eliminated in the U.S. Yesterday, Deirdre McPhillips of CNN reported that measles cases in the U.S. have surged to a record high since the country declared the disease eradicated 25 years ago.

There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year, passing the previous record of 1,274 said in 2019 and likely a severe undercount. On July 2, Nahal Tusi of Politico reported that cuts to the National Security Council, or NSC, have created a dysfunctional policymaking process. The NSC is supposed to coordinate policymaking across the different parts of the government, but Tusi reported that when the Pentagon recently announced it was reviewing whether the AUKUS Security Pact between the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom

advances Trump's America First agenda, the announcement came from Pentagon Policy Chief Elbridge Colby without input from other key US officials who were blindsided by the move. The acting National Security Advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has downsized the NSC and held so few meetings that career staffers are kept in the dark and others are jockeying for power. One person told Tusi, it's game of thrones politics over there.

Under Trump, the NSC has gone from being a body that can give the president advice to one designed simply to advance the president's agenda. And that is the point of the dismantling of modern government systems under Trump to give him and his loyalists the power to control the country. On July 3rd, Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported on letters Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to companies like Google and Apple claiming Trump has the constitutional power not just to ignore laws himself, but to authorize others to ignore them too. Last year, Congress passed a law banning TikTok in the US, unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance,

sold its stake in the platform to a non-Chinese company within nine months, or 12 if a sale was in progress. The Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously, and TikTok disappeared from U.S. app stores. But when he took office, Trump told the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for 75 days while his administration reviewed it. He also told Bondi to tell companies they can continue to carry the TikTok app without incurring any legal liability, no matter what the law says. The letters she wrote,

newly available through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, suggest Trump can ignore the law because of his unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions. The law banning TikTok that Congress passed, President Joe Biden signed, and the Supreme Court upheld 9-0 had to give way, she wrote, to Trump's core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.