Devastating Texas floods highlight stakes of vital weather services amid reckless Trump cuts

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Good evening, you guys.

I have to ask you if you got the dreaded control room warning.

You guys, you guys, Rachel might not be ready.

Did they actually tell you that?

They didn't tell us, but they said, take your time.

Just take your time.

So this involves randomly sticking a finger into some mascara and then touching my face, like right in the middle of my face,

immediately before the lights came on.

You know, Rachel, just so you don't feel alone, I've done that on occasion too.

I just had to put a little bit right under the eye.

I understand, baby.

There you go.

You can pass it off as like a football thing or something, but for me, it was like a very, very failed effort to make a beauty spot and it really didn't work so thank you for saving me from that you guys

all right much appreciated you guys thank you so much all right you never know it's live tv anything can happen all right uh thank you very much um at home for joining me this hour really really happy to have you here i was away last week i want to thank everybody and team gen sake for filling in for me while i had the night off very kind of everybody i know it's lots of work but it's good to be back we of course have eyes tonight on central Texas, where rescue and recovery operations are now into their fourth night, and where Texas officials say the death toll has now topped more than 100 lives lost in this terrible, terrible flash flooding centering on Kerr County, Texas.

This is now officially one of the deadliest floods in the United States in decades.

We're going to have eyes there throughout the night again as rescue and recovery efforts head into the fourth night.

We're also going to be talking tonight with a meteorologist and journalist who just before these storms

was trying to publicly sound the alarm about the Trump administration dismantling important parts of the National Weather Service and the consequences of that for any part of our country facing severe weather.

We've got that expert perspective from a very prescient person who was warning about these things just ahead of this disaster.

We've got that coming up this hour tonight.

We've also got a live report tonight this hour hour, from a lawyer who just made a bombshell discovery about President Donald Trump's ongoing efforts to ship people off to random foreign countries for potentially lifetime imprisonment without trial.

The subject of this new revelation, this is something the Trump administration has publicly denied.

It is something they may have lied to the courts about,

but it has now been discovered and it has the potential to really mess up the Trump administration's efforts in court in all of these cases that they are already repeatedly losing.

Again, a big new surprise revelation that is adverse to the Trump administration, discovered today by a lawyer who has been up against them in court on these really, really outrageous radical immigration, deportation, sort of international gulag stories.

We've got that story for you coming up here tonight, both of those stories coming up tonight.

But I got to tell you,

it's been a strange day in the news

for a whole bunch of reasons.

You might remember before the election in November, there was a little story.

We covered it here on the show.

You might remember it.

It was a statue that mysteriously appeared on the National Mall in Washington.

Do you remember this?

It was a larger-than-life depiction in bronze of Nancy Pelosi's desk.

It had a nameplate on the desk that said Nancy Pelosi.

It had a landline phone cast in bronze and bronze post-it notes and file folders.

And also cast in bronze right there on the desk, gigantic.

There was a huge poop,

a stylized poop in the shape of a swirly poop emoji right there in the middle of the desk.

And this weird bronze statue went up on the National Mall just before the election.

It was an anonymous artwork.

It was titled The Resolute Desk.

Nobody knows who put it up.

But this

statue, statue, this piece of art, it had a very, very formal looking plaque that made clear what it was about.

The plaque said, quote, this memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the U.S.

Capitol on January 6th, 2021 to loot, urinate, and defecate throughout those hollowed halls in order to overturn an election.

President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as, quote, unbelievable patriots and warriors.

This monument stands as a testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.

So that was the plaque on that poop on the desk statue that went up on the National Mall in October just before the election.

And then whoever did it, we still don't know,

did a follow-up.

They said

they gave her a statement to a reporter at DC News Now, quote, we figured that a monument isn't a real monument until cheap souvenirs are involved.

That's why, just like the heroes who invaded the Capitol and landed some sweet laptops, iPads, and a John Lewis photo, we wanted people to have something to take home with them

from this

monument.

So they made brochures celebrating what they called the Trump National January 6th Memorial.

Again, the poop desk.

They also made little foam replicas of the poop.

A little swirly poop on a plinth.

Trump National January 6th Memorial.

It says on the little plaque there, little foam replicas.

They gave them away near that statue on the National Mall under a sign that said, free, please take only one.

Of course, as soon as Trump got elected, he immediately did pardon all the January 6th convicts, including the guy from Brooklyn who publicly bragged, indeed, about having pooped inside the Capitol.

Trump pardoned him.

But then there was more.

In Philadelphia and in Portland, Oregon, sort of formal-looking statues were put up of Trump looking very portly, wearing a suit.

These are statues that purported to honor him for a quote lifetime of sexual assault.

In New York State, the Donald J.

Trump State Park in Yorktown Heights, New York, somebody put up a thing they called the Very Large Donald J.

Trump Monument.

And the thing was, in fact, gigantic.

It's kind of hard to get a sense of the scale of it here.

But if you look at those little votive candles that are left on the steps there, you'll get a sense of it.

This plinth, this sculptural base is huge.

It's more than seven feet wide.

The whole thing is more than eight feet tall, but perched on top of all of it, like the whole thing is setting up this teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny little thing on top, a little tiny mushroom, which is the very large Donald J.

Trump monument.

That little tiny golden mushroom is a very specific reference to Donald Trump,

one that I

cannot explain because I am easily embarrassed.

Then there was the tiki torch statue.

eight foot tall hand holding a tiki torch that was put up on Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.

That's a reference to the neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate torch-lit march through Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

There was a plaque on that one as well.

It It said, quote, this monument pays tribute to President Donald Trump and the very fine people he boldly stood to defend when they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Then after that, there was a few months when we didn't have any new ones, but now apparently we're back in business.

This one went up recently in Washington, also about eight feet tall.

It's really big.

It shows Trump's signature thumbs-up photo pose smashing down onto the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

It says in bronze letters across the front, dictator-approved.

And then on the four sides of the base, it has four quotes from dictators, all praising Trump.

There's a quote praising Trump from Vladimir Putin, one from Viktor Orban, one from Jair Bolsonaro, and one from Kim Jong-un.

That dictator-approved one went up a few weeks ago in roughly the same place as the Pelosi desk poop statue.

The White House was apparently very unhappy about this one.

They put out a sort of

sad, scoldy, petulant statement about it.

They said, quote, in the United States of America, you have the freedom to display your so-called art, no matter how ugly it is.

They actually said that in a White House statement.

The people who created that so-called art apparently heard that statement from the White House and thought, challenge accepted,

Washingtonian magazine got a comment from one of the anonymous organizers behind that piece of art who told them that

once the White House put out that statement, you have the freedom to display your so-called art no matter how ugly it is.

Once they heard that from the White House as an official White House statement, they decided they would meet the challenge.

They would try to create, quote, the ugliest art that we could think of.

And so then they put up a new piece.

And it actually has that full White House quote on a plaque.

And that plaque is on yet another new sculpture,

I think, deliberately designed to be as ugly as possible.

It's got a

gold spray-painted IV and a gold spray-painted eagle and a gold-spray-painted TV.

And in these images, it looks like the TV is off, but in situ, this sculpture actually has the TV playing stuff.

The TV apparently is battery powered, and it runs a constant loop of video clips of Trump doing his signature dance where he looks like he's doing something rude with each hand.

And these clips that play on a loop on this sculpture, they include a little squib of video of Trump kind of doing that dance at a party with the late millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein,

to whom President Donald Trump was in fact a friend.

Because

for our sins, with everything else going on, you know, with Trump today restarting the total economic chaos of random scattershot tariffs on every country in the world other than Russia, with the U.S.

government in its infinite wisdom under Donald Trump getting us back into the measles business, which we had basically eradicated, but now we've got the biggest measles outbreak we've had in more than 30 years, with President Trump saying he was, quote, not notified of the decision to cut off U.S.

military support shipments to Ukraine.

He said he was not notified and he issued no instruction to do that, raising the obvious question of, okay, then if you as president didn't make that decision, who made that decision?

With Trump literally paving the rose garden

and putting this picture of himself up in the White House in the room with all the portraits of the first ladies.

I mean, this is what he put up, right?

I mean, in the middle of everything else, large and small that we are contending with,

there really is a Jeffrey Epstein-Donald Trump subplot in our lives now

in which this footage exists

and in which the Trump Justice Department put out a statement today saying, never mind all the things we ever said and hyped and screamed about the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Turns out it's all nothing and people should stop asking us about it.

Headline: Trump administration acknowledges lack of evidence from Epstein documents.

After months of promising big revelations, Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledges a lack of evidence for a host of conspiracy theories, including a quote, client list.

Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi, in fact, not only said there was a Jeffrey Epstein client list

that Trump had ordered her to review and release to the American people,

she not only said there was a Jeffrey Epstein client list, she said that she had it in her possession on her desk.

One of the things that you alluded to, and this is something Donald Trump has talked about, that DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.

Will that really happen?

It's sitting on my desk right now now to review.

That's been a directive by President Trump.

I'm reviewing that.

I'm reviewing JFK files, MLK files.

That's all in the process of being reviewed because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.

Oh, yes, it was a directive of the president.

The Epstein client list is sitting on my desk right now.

Says Donald Trump's hand-picked Attorney General.

New statement today from her department, the U.S.

Department of Justice,

says there is no Epstein client list.

The systematic review revealed no incriminating client list, according to today's DOJ memo.

These guys have been hyping the whole Epstein conspiracy theory for years.

I mean,

this is the guy who Donald Trump appointed to be deputy director of the FBI.

I've already told you the Epstein story.

Let's just say a friend who knows about something, if you've heard the story, was on the plane with Clinton, Clinton with the Epstein thing, and he said, Hey, I'm out of here, Daddy O.

I told that story quite a few times.

So I know a lot about this story.

There are a lot of people who know old Jeff.

A lot of people.

So it's kind of weird.

Like this client list is about to come out.

Everybody got quiet all of a sudden.

I know a lot about this story.

Says the podcaster who Trump named to be deputy director of the FBI.

Now, today, knock, knock, knock, FBI, what's up with that?

Today, according to the FBI and the Justice Department, there is nothing at all to this Jeffrey Epstein story.

Please stop talking about it.

There will be no further information released.

Client list, what client list?

We will not be talking about this anymore.

There will be no further information.

You should stop talking about this, except

maybe if it is raised, you know, know,

on the gold spray-painted television sculpture on the National Mall.

Maybe you could learn something about it there.

But otherwise, now that Donald Trump is the head of the U.S.

federal government, we're just, no.

Trump administration today

announced that on second thought, they are not

going to fire 83,000 people who work at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Trump appointed a Republican congressman to run the VA.

He called the VA bloated and announced that it would need to be radically, radically reduced in size.

He announced that tens of thousands of people were going to be fired, pounded his chest that there'd be more than 80,000 people fired from the VA.

He put out a video saying, quote, we'll be making major changes, so get used to it now.

Now, tonight, that's off, apparently, the Washington Post reporting tonight, quote, the announcement marks a significant reversal for the Trump administration

in recent days we've also seen the Trump administration reverse course and say it's no longer going to knowingly declare dead people who it knows to be alive they had done this to more than 6,000 people at the Social Security Administration with plans to do it potentially to millions of people now they have reversed course on that and they will no longer declare people who are alive to legally be dead

they also reversed course on HIV prevention.

Trump had ordered a halt for some reason to HIV prevention efforts all across the country because, yeah, heaven forbid, we try to prevent people from getting HIV and AIDS, but they've had to reverse that too, quote, following outcry.

With this ongoing catastrophe in central Texas right now, just watch.

They are going to have to reverse

all they've done to try to destroy the National Weather Service Service and NOAA.

They are going to have to figure out a way to reverse that.

We'll, as I said, have more on that coming up later on this hour.

This Trump presidency wants to be seen as fearsome, right?

They want to be seen as powerful and scary.

They want people to be afraid of them.

But what they really are, in equal measure, is awful and weird.

And it's worth being afraid of that because it's weird and awful and scary to have somebody that weird and awful in charge of the federal government, but it's not fearsome in the way they mean it to be.

It's fearsome in the sense of like, oh my God, these people are in charge of what?

I mean, Trump really did pardon the guy who bragged about pooping in the U.S.

Capitol.

And that footage of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein is a real thing.

And the bizarre thing with his Justice Department today and its pronouncement on the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, what are we supposed to make of all that from these people?

At the same time, he's got the military, the U.S.

military deployed in Los Angeles, California.

While the National Guard is now asking pleas for its troops back because among other things, they need to prepare for wildfire season.

But no, Trump today, for whatever reason, sent a small army of federal agents and National Guard troops in military vehicles and on horseback into a park in Los Angeles for a big, weird show of force that nobody can figure out.

There was kind of nobody nobody in the park.

They didn't seem to have any reason to be there, but this is how they fanned out across a mostly empty MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, California today.

What's that about?

What are you doing?

The president of the Los Angeles City Council telling reporters today, it quote, looked like a staging for a TikTok video, saying that if Border Patrol wants to film in Los Angeles, quote, you should apply for a film permit like everybody else and stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody who lives in this great city.

The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, showed up herself at MacArthur Park while Trump's agents were doing whatever they were doing there today.

Made them look all the more ridiculous with them masked up, dressed up like they're going to rappel out of helicopters into Fallujah.

Here's the mayor in her light blue suit saying, guys, what's up here?

She basically shooed them away and they left.

Then she spoke to reporters about it.

So I went to MacArthur Park because it is very important that the truth be told about what happened there.

Now you can spin it any way you like, but in my opinion, it's a political agenda of provoking fear and terror.

Frankly, it is outrageous and un-American that we have federal armed vehicles in our parks when nothing is going on in the parks.

It's outrageous and un-American that the federal government seized our state's National Guard.

It's outrageous and un-American that we have U.S.

Marines who are trained to kill foreign soldiers overseas deployed in our American city.

So here's the truth.

There's no plan other than fear, chaos, and politics.

Home Depot one day, a car wash the next, armed vehicles and what looked like mounted military units in a park the next day.

What happened to the criminals, the drug dealers, the violent individuals

who were in the park today were children.

It was their summer camp.

Why did Trump today send federal agents on horseback and in what looked like armored personnel carriers into a random California park hosting kids' summer camp.

Why this use of federal government resources?

Because it's a day that ends in Y under this president,

which is why every weekend and every holiday and most days of the week now have Americans protesting against him in blue states and red states, in big cities and small towns.

I mean, these were anti-Trump and anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles over this holiday weekend before the weird photo op with the horses and everything in MacArthur Park today.

This was North Charleston, South Carolina protesting against Trump over the long holiday weekend.

This was the protest this holiday weekend against Trump outside Trump Tower in New York City.

This was the protest this holiday weekend against Trump in Grand Junction, Colorado.

This was the protest against Trump this holiday weekend in Lansing, Michigan, where they held a funeral for democracy.

This was the protest against Trump this long holiday weekend in Louisville, Kentucky.

This was another one in Schaumburg, Illinois.

This is one that happened this weekend, this long holiday weekend in Tustin, California.

This is one that happened this long holiday weekend in San Diego, where the protest was led by U.S.

military veterans.

This was an anti-Trump, anti-ICE protest in Omaha, Nebraska.

This was Medina, Ohio, where they held what they called a Celebrate America rally.

Celebrate America by protesting against Donald Trump, no kings.

This was Lenexa, Kansas, protest against Donald Trump and what he's doing to immigrants.

This was Kingston, New York.

Tyranny is at our door.

This was Buffalo, New York, and Niagara Falls, New York.

Two of more than two dozen protests that were held this weekend on the American side of the Canadian border for American citizens to show solidarity and friendship with Canada and with Canadians.

Protests this weekend along those lines from Alaska all the way to Maine.

In Leavenworth, Kansas, people have been organizing there against efforts to open a private immigration prison in that town, the city of Leavenworth, and its population is trying to stop it.

In rural Louisiana, people have been protesting at the big immigration prisons in Gina, Louisiana, and Basile against Trump treating those places in Louisiana as if they are domestic black site prisons.

In Burlington, Vermont, people are trying to get the airport there, the biggest airport in Vermont, trying to get the airport there to stop cooperating with ICE for immigrant prison flights.

And locals in Vermont have built public spreadsheets to track the names and all the information they can find about people who are being stashed in jails and prisons and immigration detention facilities in their state so local Vermonters can show up to try to get people out.

The revulsion for this administration is yielding

not just protest, it is yielding protest everywhere, all the time, every day of the week, but it's also yielding increasingly creative ways to try to stop them in their tracks.

They want to seem fearsome.

They want to seem powerful.

They are more often weird and incompetent.

And when you push back on them, they cave.

The more than creative efforts to stop them now today include a spectacular revelation in court, a revelation that very well may upend the Trump administration's plans to try to build out an international gulag of foreign prisons.

This was a surprise revelation that happened today.

The lawyer who found it is going to join us here live next.

This is an interesting story.

You're going to want to see it.

Stay with us.

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Judge, quote, the real question for the defendants is what they're going to do if he's released from criminal custody on July 16th.

Trump administration lawyer.

You want me to tell you the plan for him?

Judge, please.

Please tell me the plan.

Today there was a federal court hearing in Maryland where a judge is hearing a case about the bizarre, bungled, seemingly lawless departation of a man named Kilmar Abreco Garcia.

This Maryland man who was sent to El Salvador became a nationally recognized case.

Today the judge became just totally exasperated

by the Trump lawyer, Trump administration lawyers, just refusing to give her clear answers to her clear questions.

And the judge just basically took the Trump administration lawyers apart in her courtroom today.

Law Affairs Anna Bauer was there in court for today's proceedings and she had this reporting from the courtroom.

The judge, what will you do if he's released on July 16th?

Trump administration lawyer.

The government has two options.

First, it could remove him to a third country.

Second, it could see to dissolve his withholding of removal to El Salvador.

The judge, okay, but what are you going to do?

Trump Justice Department lawyer.

That will be assessed when or if he's released.

Assuming he is released, the current plan is to attempt to remove him to a third country.

It's possible, however, that DOJ could reassess that and seek to dissolve his withholding of removal.

The judge.

I don't buy for a second that you don't know what you're going to do.

Trump administration lawyer.

I said that the plan currently is third country removal, but I'm not prepared to say that option number two is ruled out.

The judge, okay, what third country?

Trump administration lawyer.

I don't know.

There are a number of countries that we have treaties and agreements with, and Homeland Security will assess options closer to time of release.

The judge, have you started the process of identifying a third country?

At this point, another Trump administration lawyer pipes up to say, I don't have that information.

The judge, have you asked that question?

Trump administration lawyer, quote, I haven't.

It's hard for an agency to process someone if they don't have them in custody.

Sanna Bauer then reports, in response to this, the judge is basically like, huh?

Huh?

Can't you answer any of my questions about what you're doing here?

The lawyers for the Trump administration today refuse to provide straightforward answers to very straightforward questions from that judge.

And although the Trump administration made it clear today that they would very much like to deport Kilmara Breco-Garcia again,

for now he is here in the United States.

He is no longer being held at El Salvador's notorious Seacott terrorism prison where he was sent earlier this year.

And yet the Trump administration has sent hundreds of other people to that prison in El Salvador.

And the administration keeps insisting in court that it has no control over any of the men who are being held there.

It keeps saying, yes, we may have sent these people to El Salvador under circumstances that we can't justify, but too bad they're there now.

They're totally out of our control.

The administration has claimed it's impossible to to return any of those individuals because they're no longer under u.s government control they're under control of the government of el salvador el salvador has authority over them and they're a sovereign country that has been the trump administration line over and over again but today a major development happened on that front

In a new filing in federal court in Washington, the country of El Salvador has apparently contradicted the Trump administration's claims on that.

This filing was submitted by lawyers for men who are being held in that prison in El Salvador, and the filing says, quote, the government of El Salvador recently told the United Nations that it bears no legal responsibility for the men.

The document written in response to a UN inquiry examining some of the deportations claimed that the Salvadoran government was merely doing the United States bidding when it accepted the men into its prison system.

ACLU lawyer Lee Galernt is lead counsel in this case.

He says, quote, El Salvador has confirmed what we and and everybody else understood.

It's the United States that controls what happens to the men languishing at Seacot.

Remarkably, the U.S.

government did not provide this information to us or to the court.

Joining us now is Lee Galernt.

He's deputy director of the Immigrant Rights Project at the ACLU.

He's lead counsel in this case against the Trump administration.

Mr.

Gallernt, it's nice to see you.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks, Rachel.

So I'm not a lawyer, but as a layperson, I feel like one of the things that I have absorbed absorbed here in this whole bizarre saga is that the Trump administration wants to send people from this country to a prison in a foreign country.

And then by virtue of the fact that those people are in a prison in a foreign country, it wants to disclaim all responsibility for them, say they can't.

be reached within the U.S.

law, and they certainly can't be returned to this country for any reason.

It would appear that you have now discovered something that gives lie to that entire line of reasoning and line of argument to the courts from the Trump administration.

Is that a fair interpretation?

Yeah, that's absolutely fair.

And I want to thank our friends at Human Rights First who wrote the UN and were able to secure this document and give it to us for our court case.

This is a remarkable turn of events, I think, in two respects.

One is that the United States government has told every court, district court, court of appeals, and the U.S.

Supreme Court, we don't have legal responsibility for these men.

El Salvador does, and therefore they need to continue languishing there.

And as you put it, essentially, what's a gulag, sent there without any due process.

The men overwhelmingly dispute that they're members of gangs, but yet we're never given a chance to show that.

They're sitting in there, and the United States government says, well, we don't have legal responsibility.

This document from the government of El Salvador says, No, it's the United States that has legal responsibility, the direct opposite of what the United States government is telling our courts.

The second thing that's remarkable is what you also said, Rachel.

For three months, the government has, the United States has been in possession of this document, never gave it to us, never gave it to the court despite a discovery request.

And so the court is making decisions without full information.

I mean,

unfortunately, it's par for the courts, for this administration.

So it's, you know, it's shocking, but not surprising that the document was not turned over to us or the court.

So if at baseline, this is the El Salvador, the Salvadoran government admitting and putting in writing and declaring formally that people who are being held in this prison, who were sent there by the U.S.

government, are in control of the U.S.

government, and therefore the U.S.

government is able to decide their fate.

If that's the implication of this document, and the U.S.

government knew that El Salvador

has declared that and knew that this document existed and refused to hand it over to the court when the court expected to see anything along these lines.

Isn't that a problem, not just for the Trump administration in terms of making this argument?

Isn't that a problem for these Justice Department lawyers who have been defending the government's actions here in terms of their duty of candor to the court, their responsibility to hand over documents that are demanded in the course of these proceedings?

Yeah, so you're hitting on a lot of big issues.

I mean, one thing we're going to have to see is whether the government lawyers knew about the document, because one thing I've seen standing up in court against the Trump administration all these days, you know, over the last three, four months, is that often the lawyers are not told information precisely so they can have plausible deniability.

So we'll have to see what the government lawyers themselves knew.

But there's no question the United States knew about this document.

And from our standpoint, I mean, you're absolutely right to focus on that issue, but from our standpoint right now, we're focused on trying to get these men back.

I don't want to be cynical, but I suspect the Trump administration is going to say that that was a mistake.

The Salvadoran government made a mistake in saying that.

And now it's been all cleared up and the United States doesn't have legal responsibility.

That would be an ex-post whitewashing of this.

We'll see what they say,

how the courts react, and we'll also see what the lawyers knew about it.

But this is a remarkable turn of events because these men have been sitting there in horrendous conditions, never having had a chance to show that they're not gang members in one of the worst prisons in the world.

We're going on four months now, and the United States has had this document now for, we think, three months.

Yeah, and what the document says is that the U.S.

government is responsible for the fate of those men.

And so it's a moral responsibility as well as a legal responsibility here that's on all of us.

This is a remarkable development, and this is presumably going to have some really important

repercussions in terms of these cases.

We look forward to staying in touch with you about it, Lee.

Thank you.

Thanks, Rachel.

Lee Kalern is Deputy Director for the ACLU's Immigrants Rights Project.

All right, we got more news here ahead.

Stay with us.

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The death poll from the catastrophic flooding in central Texas has now reached 104 lives lost.

That includes at least least 28 kids, many of them girls who'd been staying at a summer camp along the Guadalupe River.

Search and rescue efforts are ongoing tonight in central Texas.

About 5 million people were still under flood watch as of about an hour ago tonight.

Part of recovering from this historic and horrifying disaster is, of course, understanding whether we were ready for it, whether we could have done more.

This was exactly four weeks ago at the Texas Tribune.

Quote, staff vacancies hit Texas weather offices as they brace for a busy hurricane season.

This was May of this year from KEYE in Austin.

Warnings, fears of impacts of staffing cuts at National Weather Service.

This was from even earlier,

from April from KXAN in Austin.

Head of local weather warnings.

takes early retirement as NOAA cuts continue.

That one's about the person in charge of coordinating weather warnings at the local offices of the National Weather Service for this region where the floods just happened.

He was a 32-year veteran of the job.

He took early retirement because the Trump administration pushed through its inexplicable austerity regime at agencies that indeed included the National Weather Service and NOAA.

Again, this is Austin Station, KXAN.

Quote, the importance of experience in the warning coordination meteorologist role cannot be overstated.

Ensuring ample and timely warning to the central Texas counties is among the chief responsibilities.

As for replacement, the current hiring freeze under the Trump administration may make filling that role more challenging.

All of that reporting coming before

disaster struck in the Texas Hill Country in the pre-dawn hours of July 4th.

Given how quickly that flooding situation escalated, with the water rising 20 or 30 feet in the matter of an hour in some cases.

It may be of some comfort to hear former officials from the National Weather Service saying the forecasts ahead of the storm may have been as good as could be expected.

But as the New York Times reports today, beyond the vacancies at the regional offices, beyond the number of vacant positions, Texas also faced the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.

Like, say, for example, the warning coordination meteorologist with decades of experience who left that exact job in that exact place in the middle of the onslaught against government agencies led by Donald Trump and Doge.

There are real consequences to this president's efforts to dismantle the U.S.

government.

It's not just about ideology.

It is about lives.

One very smart person with really relevant experience in the field joins us here live next.

Stay with us.

Joining us now is Eric Holthaus.

He's a meteorologist and the founder of Currently Weather Service.

He's been doing some, frankly, harrowing reporting on the collision of budget cuts and climate change and science for the Guardian newspaper.

His latest article for The Guardian is titled, Texas Floods Reveal Limitations of Disaster Forecasting Under Climate Crisis.

Mr.

Holthaus, thank you very much for joining us.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much.

It's a real honor to be here.

The rescue and recovery operations in Texas are still underway.

It is heartbreaking.

It's also,

I think, increasingly infuriating that we're in this situation.

Is it fair to say that we are taking action as a country to basically lessen our readiness, to lessen our ability to protect people and warn people in the face of this kind of disaster?

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, that's exactly right.

I think that

what the Trump administration has been doing is systematically undercutting science.

I mean, let's take a step back here.

We are in the middle of the

most severe problem our species has ever faced.

in climate change.

And that problem is accelerating.

Emissions are accelerating.

And this administration has really decided to just say, nope, we're not going to pay attention to that.

And we'll hope that everyone can, you know, fend for themselves.

And it's really, really infuriating as someone who's been covering this beat for 20 years now.

I have little kids, you know, like I wake up at night and am just worried for, you know,

where's the next flood going to be?

We haven't entered hurricane season yet, and it's just, it's going to be bad and it's heartbreaking.

I feel like one of the things that we've all all had to learn in these last few years is that climate change means climate chaos.

It means weather chaos and it means unpredictability when it comes to dealing with severe weather events of all kinds.

One of the things that I think we're looking to science for right now in terms of resilience is to try to increase predictability, to try to increase what we understand about how weather goes haywire in this type of climate crisis that we're in.

Is that the kind of science that is being abandoned or turned off by this administration?

Right.

I mean,

there's one thing with the National Weather Service cuts.

So,

you know, the Austin San Antonio office, which has responsibility for Kerk County in this case,

was missing its warning coordination meteorologist, as you outlined.

And that is the person who coordinates with emergency officials as a representative of meteorologists employed by the federal government government to manage that disaster.

And yes, they had enough people on hand during this storm to cover that role.

But as you said,

you lost someone with decades of experience for no reason.

And systematically now throughout the administration,

as we're going through this budget process the last couple months, The parts of NOAA, parts of the parent of the National Weather Service that have been cut most are the researchers.

So the people that are working to make our science moving it forward,

those positions are being cut.

You know, the Environmental Modeling Center, which is based in Maryland, their only job is to improve the weather models that every single person in the United States, every weather app, and anytime you get a weather forecast, these are the models that that forecast comes from.

And those people have been fired.

And it's just like, I don't really understand

any reason for that other than

this idea that

if you stop predicting something that it won't happen which obviously is a fairy tale.

Wow.

Yeah.

It doesn't even count as magic.

It'd be bad magic to even try that.

Eric Holdhouse, founder and chief meteorologist at Currently Weather Service, thank you for being with us again in the midst of this still ongoing disaster.

We look forward to having you back to

talk about this more in the future, Eric.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.

All right, that's going to do it for me tonight.

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