The Blame Game
Shortly after the devastating floods hit Kerrville Texas, last week which killed over 100 people, including many children, the people on the left, on cue, crawled out of the woodwork to politicize this tragedy, blaming the deaths on Donald Trump and his spending cuts from DOGE. Democrat Representative Becca Balint from Vermont, posted on X, “We knew that these cuts would have deadly consequences. The NWS budget isn’t just a number that can be slashed because Trump and DOGE feel like it. These are real services that would have saved real people.” Hollywood leftist, Rosie O’Donnell said, “When the president guts all of the early warning systems and the weathering forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we’re going to start to see on a daily basis.” Senator Chuck Schumer called “to open an investigation into the scope, breadth, and ramifications of whether staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service (NWS) stations contributed to the catastrophic loss of life and property during the deadly flooding."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded by saying, "blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie.” In truth, 400 employees of the National Weather Service were laid off or retired since January which comprised about 10% of the total workforce at the agency. The NWS released a statement stating that it had extra staff members on duty that night at the NWS Austin/San Antonio local office ahead of the event, and that “Flash Flood Warnings were issued on the night of July 3 and in the early morning of July 4, giving preliminary lead times of more than three hours before warning criteria were met.”
I cannot say one way or the other who is right in this situation. If the cuts made to the NWS hurt our readiness and ability to react to this natural disaster, then those cuts were wrong. But no one in Washington has any standing to criticize those decisions. We have $37 trillion of debt, but when I walk outside, the streets aren’t paved in gold, the public-school systems are not bastions of learning, public hospitals cause more harm than good, the VA have 6-month waiting lists, there are tens of thousands of homeless veterans, bridges are falling down, roads are crumbling under our tires, and we have $37 trillion of debt. Where did all that money go? What was it spent on? We take in over $6 trillion every year; we add over $1 trillion of debt, and the problems and failings in our country are too numerous to list. If we take in $6 trillion every year, and have $37 trillion of debt, we should be living in paradise. Everything should be state of the art. But it is not, far from it. $37 trillion of debt and we don’t have a state-of-the-art emergency weather warning system in every state? That should be high on the list of budget priorities, but sadly, it wasn’t.
Here is a short list of the programs that our politicians chose to spend money on instead of updating disaster warning systems throughout our country:
$137 million to house illegal immigrants in New York City hotels in 2024
$50 million to fund condoms in Gaza
$37 million to the pro-abortion, anti-American World Health Organization
$20 million to produce a Middle Eastern version of "Sesame Street" in Iraq
$16 million in funding for institutional contractors in gender development offices
$12 million to the Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security
$10 million to support male circumcision programs in Mozambique
$6 million for redundant administrative supports for the Center of Excellence
$6 million to fund tourism in Egypt
$4 million for the Center for Climate-Positive Development
$3 million to provide evaluation services for planning and learning programs
$2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam
$2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala
$1.5 million to “advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”
$1 million of humanitarian aid in Syria which was diverted to Al-Qaida terrorists.
$600,000 to fund technical assistance for family planning in Latin America
Tens of thousands of dollars for “transgender operas” in Colombia, and a “transgender comic book” in Peru
Every single politician in Washington who is blaming Trump for the tragedy in Kerrville, voted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this pile of garbage. Every dollar that was spent on this list, was a dollar that could have been spent updating the warning system in Kerrville, Texas or some other community who may be living under a similar threat. Not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars that went to USAID which operated as a vast dark money laundering scheme use by corrupt Democrat politicians. Maybe some of that money would have been better spend on emergency preparedness.
Trump was not the only politician who had fingers directly pointed at him after this tragedy, Republican politicians in Texas also faced harsh criticism from the left. Local politicians in Kerrville had been asking the state for $1 million so they could update the flood warning system in the area which is often referred to as “flash flood alley”. Every bill requisitioning that funding from the state over the last five years, had been voted down. Maybe if our country, and Texas in particular, had not been intentionally overrun by 10 million illegal immigrants in the last four years, who cost the federal, state and local governments over $200 billion every year in social services, Texas may have been able to fit that request for an updated flood warning system into their budget. Maybe the Texas politicians’ eyes were taken off the potential flooding problem in Kerrville, Texas, because they were dealing with an invasion at their southern border. Maybe if our politicians put America first, more Americans would be safe, more Americans would be alive.
The fact remains, most politicians don’t vote against spending bills, because they’re mean spirited, or they don’t care if kids to die, or they want old people to starve to death, most politicians vote against spending programs because they know that most of our tax dollars gets lost in waste, fraud and abuse or they get chewed up in the vast bureaucracy that is our federal government. Their voters get fed up with their tax dollars being wasted like that. So, they are against new spending programs. If 99 cents on every dollar that was allocated for a government program in the United States actually went toward the problem it was meant to address, most people would support the majority of the spending programs. But sadly, most of our tax dollars go into a black hole, that we never see again. And the problem is, the things that our tax dollars should get spent on, rarely do.
And as agencies like the NWS get downsized, and lifesaving warning systems do not get approved because of massive government debts, every politician who goes to Washington sees their net worth increase by ten to twenty times. They enter public service in Washington, DC, middle class and they leave ten years later part of the top 1%, and they do it all on a congressperson’s salary. We must realize that there is not a single politician in Washington who actually cares about the little children who died last week in that flood, or at least, they do not care enough to make the changes in the way Washington operates that would have made a difference that tragic night. The current way is too lucrative for them, so they will shed their crocodile tears on TV the next day and go on with business as usual until the next preventable tragedy occurs that they will try to exploit for their own political purposes.
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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.