As we all know, under the current Trump administration, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) — led by Elon Musk for most of its life, including during the relevant period we are going to highlight here — made cuts to numerous real government agencies. That included the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
To make it clear that we’re not just making things up after the tragedy that is the focus of this article, Jennifer Sensiba warned a few times of significant risk in times of emergencies that would come from the cuts DOGE made to NOAA, including 8 months ago. More recently, one month ago, Cynthia Shahan (my mom) warned of this.
Well, in the face of the tragic deaths of numerous girls in a Christian camp in Texas, some people have connected the dots and contended that delayed flooding alerts from an understaffed NOAA could have contributed here to the unfortunate deaths of these girls.
The tweet above was sent out to me as a notification this morning. Scrolling through the responses, I saw defenders of Elon Musk’s/Donald Trump’s actions claiming that you can’t attribute causation in this case. Ah, yes, the old strategy to obfuscate the obvious. Some people also claimed this Grok response was fake, but then I ran across someone asking Grok again in a slightly different way, and I screenshotted Grok’s response.
Naturally, there hasn’t been a scientific study done to statistically or otherwise confirm that a cut to NOAA led to deaths, but when you cut staff so significantly, when people specifically predicted this kind of thing would happen if staff was cut like this (for clear and obvious reasons), and when people reported insufficient alerts, well, you’re sticking your head in the sand if you refuse to believe there was at least possibly a connection.
Approximately 20 girls died from this flooding.
I already wrote previously about how the DOGE cuts would clearly cost the United States more than it saved us financially. Just purely looking at money matters, that’s clear and obvious. In other words, the whole point of DOGE — at least, it’s purported aim — isn’t even being achieved, while the US and the world are losing numerous important services and programs. In terms of loss of life, economists have to try to put a value on that. There are various estimates with various justifications. Needless to say, though, a human life is not deemed to be worth $10. Here’s a Wikipedia page on the topic. It may feel heartless to put a dollar value on these lost girls’ lives, but doing so would again show that cutting government services is not a one-way street. You don’t just save money by cutting the workforce at NOAA and other government agencies. There are also things that you lose. There are reasons those people were in those jobs in the first place. It’s not like cutting your spending on ice cream and junk food. These were real humans committed to doing useful government work for the betterment of society. It seems that, somehow, through decades of Republicans attacking government as evil — and almost all government agencies as useless, inept, if not harmful organizations — Americans have come to underestimate what the federal government does for us all.
Returning to “Trump Tracker’s” tweet, yes, it seems that blood is on the hands of MAGA voters.
Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Whether you have solar power or not, please complete our latest solar power survey.
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
Advertisement
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy