This is what happens when everything is boiled down to money

Searching for victims along Guadalupe River Photo: NPR

I challenge you to go back through your memory of the last five months when coverage of the DOGE cuts to government departments and programs and coverage of the Big Bullshit Bill were in the headlines and see if you can recall the word “consequences.”

I can’t. There was a lot of reporting about 600 people laid off here, a thousand laid off there, and the word “probationary” came up a lot as the Trump administration used it to explain away the people whose jobs were cut. But there wasn’t much debate about the bill in either the House or the Senate. In fact, one story I read last week was about how the nearly 1,000-page monster was pushed through with few committee hearings and little testimony about what was in the bill.

I think I remember reading one story about cuts to the FAA budget around the time of all the delays and cancelled flights at Newark Airport. But the coverage of cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) was focused almost entirely on the number of proposed staff cuts and the “savings” they would produce. The budget cuts sometimes showed in tens of millions of dollars and in other reports appeared as percentages. CBS reported back in February that former NOAA officials said that “current employees had been told to expect budget cuts of 30% and a 50% reduction in staff.”

Finally, when tornados recently swept through Missouri and Tennessee and Kentucky, there were a few reports about local NWS office staffing shortages. The reports were explained away the next day by Caroline Leavitt at the White House saying that the cuts had not affected “overnight” staffing at local offices. Follow up reporting proved her statement about local NWS offices to be a lie, but reports about her lies had become so numerous that the one about the NWS just disappeared down the memory-hole with all her other lies.

The tornado that tore through Kentucky happened back in late May. It killed 19 people, according to the Louisville Courier Journal. Do you remember that number? I didn’t. I had to look it up. There was some aerial footage of the destruction in Laurel and Pulaski Counties. There were a few short bios of some of the people the tornadoes killed. One woman died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator she ran when electricity went out during the storms. Another woman was killed by “blunt force trauma,” according to her autopsy. A fireman in London, Kentucky, was found dead atop his wife after the tornado hit their home.

Tornadoes are notoriously difficult to predict. So are flash floods. The NWS puts out warnings and emergency notifications on radio and television broadcasts, and these days there are systems to send out blanket alerts by cell phone. But TV’s and radios don’t work during electrical outages, and cell phone towers are vulnerable to storms, especially tornados. So even if alerts go out, sometimes they cannot be received.

The stories about NWS staffing in Kentucky in May disappeared after the storms had passed and television news stopped putting their drones in the air and reporters went back to interviewing people about inflation and the economy.

Tonight, the Times is reporting that 80 were killed by the flash flood that ripped down the Guadalupe River and its tributaries on the 4^th of July. Forty-one people are still missing. Twenty-eight of the victims were children. Now there are new alerts for more flooding in the same areas hit by the flash flood on Friday, including Camp Mystic, the Christian camp located on the banks of the Guadalupe. Twenty-eight victims of the flood have not been identified.

There are some numbers for you. Nineteen killed by tornadoes in May. Eighty killed by a flash flood in July. Donald Trump, who signed an emergency declaration today that will provide FEMA relief to the affected areas and help to pay for the search and rescue efforts, told reporters “FEMA is something we can talk about later,” as he prepared to fly back to Washington D.C. from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump has called for the dissolution of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has provided relief to areas hit by hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and other natural disasters since it was formed in 1978 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Some $175 billion has been appropriated for FEMA during the last four budgets and continuing resolutions.

And now Donald Trump wants to “wean” states off FEMA and “bring it down to the state level — a little bit like education, we're moving it back to the states.”

That’s what it’s all about. Money. It’s what Trump’s disastrous DOGE adventure was all about. It’s what his Big Bullshit Bill is about, moving money from people who don’t have enough of it to people who have too much of it, and denying it in the form of health care and nutrition to people who need it.

The coverage of what the cancellation of USAID will cause has just begun. We have seen the aid losses in dollars, and now we will see it in the bodies of people who have died from AIDS and Tuberculosis and other preventable diseases, and of course starvation, just as preventable with food aid.

Watch the numbers of people killed in the Texas flooding increase over the next few days. It is hurricane season, so watch for the coverage of those storms and their body counts.

Everybody will forget the numbers in Kentucky and Texas except the families and friends of the dead. The budget “savings” from DOGE and Trump’s odious bill, now signed into law, will be lied away in the White House press room, and two weeks from now, nobody will remember how many died in Texas, the same way nobody remembers how many died in Kentucky. It’s what happens when everything is boiled down to money.