The evening of the Fourth of July, as the rain clouds hovering over Texas Hill Country took a merciful pause, an impressive array of leaders from around the state made their way to the Kerrville City Hall. They came to this devastated, flooded town to provide a show of force and purpose—via a press conference—and to let their constituents, neighbors, and even observers from around the nation know they had a handle on the scale of the unfolding tragedy.
Governor Greg Abbott was positioned at the center of a long conference table that was draped in a black cloth and decorated only with the state seal. He was flanked by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and the chief of the state’s emergency management department, and further surrounded by local officials including Kerrville’s mayor, the county sheriff, state legislators, community leaders, and a handful of uniformed Texas Rangers.
The tone of the press conference was defensive and digressive, a coordinated appeal meant to quell rising anger and frustration with an administration that had been failing its constituents since long before flooding began on Friday. “My job today is to tell people thank you—city, county, state,” said Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring Jr. “This is a hard day and there will be hard days to come.”
“These people behind us, Governor, have done everything they can,” Patrick said, as much to the assembled media and their viewers and readers as to Abbott himself.
Unfortunately, that last quote is true only if you consider the frantic mobilization of local and state resources that came after one of the most catastrophic floods in Hill Country history, one that has killed 120 people and left at least 173 still considered missing as of Thursday.
There is no doubting the sincerity of those assembled at the city hall in wanting to save as many lives as possible, recover those who’ve been lost in the waters, and fix this shattered place. But doing everything they can would have involved a level of investment, preparation, and thoughtful leadership that has largely eluded Texas and its residents for more than a generation now.
In Kerr County, for example, officials had for years debated the merits of investing in a public flood warning system. It seemed like a necessity, especially in the summer, when church camps host thousands of children along the banks of the Guadalupe River in a part of the state referred to as Flash Flood Alley. But budget concerns in the rural county won out. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge—the chief executive of the county—recently told The New York Times. And when the fast-moving waters from the river swept through the area in the predawn darkness Friday, there were no sirens or early flood warnings to help get people out.
The National Weather Service issued its usual round of warnings, and some people got text messages on their phones about the potential for catastrophic flooding. Kerr County and the county Sheriff’s Office issued warnings of the impending danger on Facebook. But it wasn’t nearly enough.
Unfortunately for Texans, scenes like that press conference from Friday have become all too familiar in recent years. After disasters, natural or otherwise, Abbott and a smattering of public officials arrive in town asking for prayers, promising to assist with recovery, and congratulating themselves for showing up on the town’s worst day. Then they head back home, never to sufficiently address the real issues that had brought them there.
It happened after severe winter storms triggered widespread power outages across Texas in 2021 that killed hundreds and left millions in the cold and dark for days. Abbott and his administration blasted the embattled operator of Texas’s energy grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). “What happened is absolutely unacceptable and can never be replicated again,” Abbott said then. Though state legislators have since taken steps to winterize generators and power plants to avoid future widespread power outages, ERCOT said in December that a winter storm of similar force has an 80 percent likelihood of causing rolling blackouts.
It happened after mass shootings, like the one that occurred at a church in Sutherland Springs in November 2017, and the Uvalde elementary school shooting in May 2022. State officials came through, praising the tragically inept response of local police and talking about the need for more mental health support. “It could have been worse,” Abbott said. Then lawmakers went on to expand gun rights across the state.
Texans have learned to live with and brace for the challenges, hardships, and ultimately deaths that come with these shortcomings. “As the mom of a victim of the Uvalde school tragedy, I know all too well the price Americans are about to pay for failed leadership,” read the caption of a July 4 Instagram post from Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter, Alexandria, was one of the 21 victims in the Robb Elementary shooting.
And one of the most telling traits of this generation of Texas political leaders—nearly all of them Republican or Republican-appointed, in a state where no Democrat has won a statewide election in the past 31 years—has been their inability to step up to own their role in these systemic failures.
In that July 4 news conference in Kerrville, Texas Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd tried to subtly blame the National Weather Service for not fully conveying the threat of the storms. “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” Kidd said. The National Weather Service has since released a timeline of its warnings from that day, showing the agency sent out alerts more than three hours before the waters started to rise.
That inevitably shifted attention to the state and local governments responsible for financing and running the warning systems—alerts, sirens, and flooding monitors, among other emergency infrastructure necessities—that these rural communities depend on to stay ahead of the storms.
The news has been retroactively infuriating: In 2018, Kerr County decided against spending a little less than $1 million to install a flood warning system. A few months ago, in April, the Texas Senate failed to pass a House bill that was meant to improve the state’s disaster response. And this is all part of a larger pattern of neglect in a state that has a $54 billion backlog of flood management projects, but that has approved more than $51 billion in property tax cuts.
Additionally, Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently used the GOP’s “big beautiful” reconciliation bill to eliminate a $150 million fund meant to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” about weather forecasting.
Now officials in Texas—and around the country—are facing widespread public scrutiny. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for an investigation into whether cuts at the National Weather Service affected the agency’s response. Texas Representative Julian Castro backed Schumer’s call for a probe. Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led military relief efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, has criticized Trump’s plan for cuts at FEMA: “We need to improve FEMA, not destroy it.” Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of liberal-leaning website MeidasTouch Network, posted on X that, “The people in Texas voted for government services controlled by Donald Trump and Greg Abbott. That is exactly what they [are] getting.” He later deleted the post. Shea Jordan Smith, a political strategist from Houston, asked on X, “How many more disasters do Texans have to endure before we call Greg Abbott what he is? A failure of leadership.”
Asked about “blame” during a Tuesday press conference, Abbott lashed out at the reporter. “You asked and I’m going to use your words, ‘Who’s to blame?’” he said. “Know this, that’s the word choice of losers.”
Honestly, it barely matters who’s at fault. In what’s basically become a one-party state, Abbott and the Texas GOP have piled up debacle after debacle with virtually no consequence at the ballot box. They’re coming off a banner year in the Statehouse, having secured essentially every legislative priority they had: a $1 billion taxpayer-funded school voucher program, requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and banning Chinese and Russian ownership of Texas land, among other things.
It’s doubtful Republicans will pay a price for their failings during the disaster in Kerr County. In the next major election after the power grid debacle and the Uvalde school shooting, Abbott and Patrick were elected for their third terms, and Republicans again swept the remaining statewide elections and gained a seat in Congress due to a special election. That reality has stirred growing, if understandable, resentment nationally, as some, like Filipkowski, have come to believe that Texans are reaping what they’ve sowed because of their political choices.
But take it from a Texas native who has family living virtually all over the state, including in Kerrville: Many of us want better for ourselves and our neighbors. I’m originally from the Houston area and my father’s family has been in Kerrville for nearly a century, starting with my great-grandmother, who settled there in the 1930s after leaving Mississippi. In the town’s then-bustling little Black community, she owned a soul food restaurant, a 12-room hotel, and several small homes she rented to locals and seasonal workers.
We’d often make the four-hour drive from Houston, stopping along the way for barbecue in Luling and then spilling out into the neighborhood’s dusty streets with my cousins and friends who lived nearby. We chased after the chickens and ducks on my great-grandmother’s property, played basketball at the covered playground next to the cemetery, and slurped on 25 cent Kool-Aid cups in the shade. Sometimes, an uncle or family friend would let me have a sip of Tecate, then give me enough dimes and quarters to goof around on the pool tables and listen to music on the jukebox at the back of my great-grandmother’s restaurant.
We rarely ventured outside the neighborhood; there wasn’t much need to. So I was surprised to learn years later that some people considered Kerrville a picturesque little getaway. Tucked into the limestone cliffs of the Hill Country, Kerrville drew thousands for folk-music festivals and parks, summer camps, and ranches along the Guadalupe River. In the ’90s, The Wall Street Journal named Kerrville one of the wealthiest small towns in America.
I never got to know that Kerrville: My great-grandmother died in 1989 at the age of 91, and I’ve been back only a handful of times since. Most of my family members who lived there have since died or moved away, and just one cousin remains. He made it through the flood just fine. Much of the rest of the town, obviously, didn’t.
I still want to get to know that side of Kerrville, and I even expected to move back to Texas as recently as a few months ago. I wanted to give my children a part of the childhood I had—the suburban comfort, the urban amenities, the easy access to the bluebonnet-lined highways leading in and out of the Hill Country. But then I had to grapple with the reality of a state I no longer recognized.
When I moved away from Texas in 2005, it had barely been a decade since Ann Richards—a Democrat—served as governor. It was a growing, diverse state that took pride in making converts of outsiders. My hometown of Houston had elected its first Black mayor (Lee Brown) in 1998 and in 2010 became the largest city to elect an openly gay mayor (Annise Parker). But things have shifted since.
Now it’s a place where the state’s universities have shuttered diversity offices and initiatives, the kind that once beckoned to me as a high school student who didn’t really want to leave Texas. A place where Abbott last year offered a rare pardon to a man who had shot and killed a 28-year-old Air Force veteran at a Black Lives Matter protest. A place where, in an especially unseemly and foreboding stunt, Abbott reportedly spent $148 million to bus migrants released from federal custody to other states. A place where my family’s safety was in question, causing me to fret from afar: begging my parents to leave town during Hurricane Harvey in 2017; hoping they didn’t freeze in their homes when the power stayed out for almost a week after the winter storm of 2021; scrambling to pay to remove a tree that nearly caved in my mother’s roof following the derecho that swept through Houston in May 2024.
There is no “reap what you sow” schadenfreude to be had here. First because Texas is far too large—land- and population-wise—to be defined by one political party. Last November, over 4.8 million people in the state voted for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris—more than any state other than California. The major cities in Texas—Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin—have routinely elected Democratic mayors.
And second because, as President Donald Trump and his cronies consolidate power in the White House and the executive branch, we could all be Texas soon.
Trump said last month that states need to share more of the burden for disaster response and recovery costs and that his administration intends to begin “phasing out” the Federal Emergency Management Agency after hurricane season ends in November. “We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said then. Already, Trump’s FEMA has denied assistance to West Virginia; Washington; and Arkansas, before later approving an appeal from Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary.
Already, the Trump administration has targeted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service for major job and budget cuts, and has eliminated research centers that study the world’s weather, climate, and oceans. The National Weather Service’s work force is down at least 20 percent at about half of the 122 NWS field offices. At the agency’s Austin/San Antonio office, which provides coverage to Kerr County, six of 27 positions are currently listed as vacant.
And extreme weather events are continuing apace. Just this week, damaging floods punished North Carolina and New Mexico. Forecasters predict “above-normal” hurricane activity in the Atlantic this year. And no state, especially a blue one, can count on the Trump administration to provide the sort of assistance it’s grown accustomed to from the federal government over the years.
To be sure, flash floods are a part of life in the Texas Hill Country. Climate disasters aren’t going to stop just because local governments decide to invest, or not, in a new warning system. And, as usual, many Texans have admirably rallied to help their neighbors in a moment of crisis and desperation. They deserve much better from Trump, Abbott, and their recalcitrant stakeholders.
They just haven’t gotten it.
