Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting.
Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp.
The Greece trip, first reported by the Daily Beast, ended in time for Cruz to appear at the site of the disaster on Monday morning to decry the tragedy and promise a response from lawmakers.
“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”
The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and around $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.
But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.
Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.
A further $50m in Noaa grants to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems and coastal ecosystems was also removed. Cruz was contacted by the Guardian with questions about these cuts and his trip to Greece.
Environmental groups said the slashed funding is just the latest blow to federal agencies tasked with predicting and responding to disasters such as the Texas flood. More than 600 employees have exited the National Weather Service amid a Trump administration push to shrink the government workforce, leaving many offices short-staffed of meteorologists and other support workers.
Around a fifth of all full-time workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), meanwhile, are also set to depart.
“Ted Cruz has spent years doing big oil’s bidding, gutting climate research, defunding Noaa, and weakening the very systems meant to warn and protect the public,’ said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Fossil Free Media.
“That’s made disasters like this weekend’s flood in Texas even more deadly. Now he’s doubling down, pushing through even more cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill. Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting big oil instead of the people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful.”
Cruz, who has previously cast doubt over the scientific reality of the climate crisis, said that complaints about cuts to the National Weather Service are “partisan finger pointing”, although he conceded that people should’ve been evacuated earlier.
“Some are eager to point at the National Weather Service and saying that cuts there led to to a lack of warning,” the Republican senator told reporters on Monday. “I think that’s contradicting by the facts and if you look in the facts in particular number one and these warnings went out hours before the flood became a true emergency.”
The Trump administration, too, has rejected claims that the service was short-staffed, pointing out that extra forecasters were assigned to the San Antonio and San Angelo field offices. The service’s employees union has said the offices were staffed adequately but were missing some key positions, such as a meteorologist role designed to coordinate with local emergency managers.
“People were sleeping in the middle of the night when the flood came,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “That was an act of God; it’s not the administration’s fault the floods hit when it did.” Leavitt said any blame placed upon Trump for flood forecasting is a “depraved lie”.
Resources for weather forecasting, as well as broader work to understand the unfolding climate crisis, could be set for further cutbacks, however. The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal seeks to dismantle all of Noaa’s weather and climate research labs, along with Noaa’s entire research division. This would halt research and development of new weather forecasting technologies and methods.
This planned budget, which would need to be passed by the Republican-held Congress to become law, comes as the threats from extreme weather events continue to mount due to rising global temperatures.
“We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
“Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is.
“Measuring the exact size takes careful attribution studies, but basic physics already tells us the direction – climate change very likely made this event stronger.”
