Texas floods fact-check: NWS and NOAA cut jobs, but Trump hasn't ‘defunded’ them

The flooding in Texas that killed more than 100 people including girls at a summer camp brought renewed attention to job cuts at the federal agency that includes the National Weather Service.

A July 6 TikTok post said that President Donald Trump had defunded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The TikTok was taken down after we launched our fact-check, but we found the video also shared on X — and the claim that NOAA and the weather service had been defunded was shared widely on other platforms. 

"The reason the Texans had no idea that a giant flash-flood that killed 20 plus people was going to be coming to them was because the Trump regime has defunded not only the National Weather Service but also what’s known as NOAA … both of those things are how we predict weather events like these," the video’s narrator said.

The weather service, which provides weather and climate data, forecasts and warnings, is one of NOAA’s six offices. 

The Trump administration cut NOAA’s staffing under pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency, but NOAA was not entirely defunded. And although Trump has proposed more extensive cuts — about 28% budget cuts across all of NOAA’s offices — Congress hasn’t voted on those cuts. And Trump’s proposal gives the National Weather Service a 6.7% budget increase. 

"While the administration has not defunded the NWS or NOAA, it is proposing in 2026 to cut significant research arms of the agency, including the Office of Atmospheric Research, a major hot bed of research," Matt Lanza, Houston-based meteorologist and editor of The Eyewall, a hurricane and extreme weather website, told PolitiFact. "Multiple labs that produce forecasting tools and research used to improve forecasting would also be impacted. The reorganization that's proposed would decimate NOAA's research capability." 

The creator of the TikTok post told PolitiFact in a message that the word "defunded" was confusing but pointed to news reporting about federal cuts.

Trump administration cut NOAA’s workforce

Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency was tasked with cutting jobs throughout the federal government.

The New York Times found that as of mid-May, NOAA’s workforce had sustained an 11% cut, including about 800 terminations and 500 buyouts.

Nearly half of those staff cuts came from the weather service. The service cut 100 probationary employees, and 500 took buyouts, Tom Fahy, National Weather Service Employees Organization legislative director, said July 7. That amounted to about a 17% personnel cut for the weather service, Fahy said.

The Texas Tribune reported that based on the labor union’s data, the National Weather Service’s Texas offices that had jurisdiction over the areas that flooded July 3-4, had vacancies when the rain in central Texas began to fall: The San Antonio forecasting office had six vacancies out of 26 total positions and the San Angelo office had four vacancies out of 23 positions.

Fahy told The New York Times that the San Antonio office’s vacancies included a warning coordination meteorologist, the employee charged with coordinating with local emergency services ahead of floods.

Although the offices were not fully staffed, Lanza told PolitiFact "their vacancy rates were not outside the realm of what is normal."

Trump froze all federal civilian hiring when he assumed office — and has since extended that freeze — but the White House exempted the National Weather Service, permitting it to hire for 126 positions following DOGE’s cuts.

"We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology," Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the weather service’s West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth, told the Texas Tribune. "This was us doing our job to the best of our abilities."

In response to journalists’ July 6 questions about agency staffing, Trump said the federal government was not investigating the staffing cuts’ relationship to the flood’s disaster response. And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees NOAA, said the cuts "did not" leave key weather service vacancies affecting emergency coordination.

A day later, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called for the Commerce Department’s inspector general to investigate "whether staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service (NWS) stations contributed to the catastrophic loss of life and property during the deadly flooding."

Trump’s proposed budget would not cut weather service, but cuts other NOAA areas

A president’s budget proposal is a wish list — Congress doesn’t have to follow it. So, although Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal would cut NOAA’s workforce by about 17% starting Oct. 1 and bump the weather service’s budget by 6.7%, there’s no guarantee that will come to fruition.

The weather service budget request is a little higher than the other recent presidential requests, but overall, the department has had relatively stable funding in recent years. Since fiscal 2023, the National Weather Service budget has varied from $1.36 billion to $1.38 billion, usually ending with $3 million to $20 million below the presidential budget requests.

NOAA requested about $1.45 billion for the weather service, including 4,350 full-time equivalent positions. That’s an increase of about $91 million from the current level, although most of that comes from moving programs that are currently under the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research to the weather service’s umbrella, wrote meteorologist Alan Gerard, a former NOAA official, in a June 30 Substack post.

Trump’s proposed budget gets rid of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research including climate laboratories and cooperative institutes such as Miami’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory and Norman, Oklahoma’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. Government weather specialists traditionally work closely with such researchers.

"The weather service itself would stay under the proposal, but the people who largely make those forecasts better would be cut," said James Franklin, a retired forecaster at the National Hurricane Center. "All of those things contribute to forecast improvements over the years and it would be pretty devastating if they were to go away." 

Our ruling

A TikTok post said the Trump administration "has defunded not only the National Weather Service but also what’s known as NOAA."

Under Trump, the National Weather Service has lost roughly 600 employees through staffing cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency and from voluntary departures. But this doesn’t add up to complete defunding; the union said it was about a 17% cut of employees.

Although the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal would cut NOAA by about 28%, it would increase the National Weather Service’s budget by about 6.7%. The requested amount for the weather service is broadly in line with its budget since 2023. This proposal hasn’t been implemented; Congress must agree to it.

Although the National Weather Service has undergone cuts, and there were some vacancies in the Texas offices that oversaw July’s flooding, the Trump administration has not completely removed funding or dissolved the agency. 

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate this statement Mostly False.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird, Senior Audience Engagement Producer Ellen Hine and Staff Writer Madison Czopek contributed to this fact-check.

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