The audacity of ignorance

Climate denialism invites death & destruction, as institutional ignorance invites more preventable risks in the future

Over a hundred Texans are dead, and more remain missing—due to the predicted impacts of stupid decisions that experts warned would lead to catastrophe.

They will not be the last Americans to die of preventable causes. They, and too many who will follow in their tragic footsteps, are victims of the plague of institutional ignorance that has befallen this once-great country.

The recent floods in Texas not only revealed the administrative devastation wrought by Trump & Musk during their short time together in Washington, but also foreshadow the equally—likely more—dangerous ignorance of science more broadly, reflected in cuts and interventions at public agencies that used to support science, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).

Musk has the blood of over 100 Texans on his hands

Would over 100 people have died in last week’s floods in Texas if federal weather monitoring agencies were adequately staffed?

Corporate journalists have bent over backwards to indulge supposed questions about the cause of the floods, as if their resolution were not already brutally established by dozens of dead bodies in the wake of clear warnings before the staff cuts driven by Trump & Musk that eviscerated the National Weather Service.

On May 2—two months before the floods—a joint letter signed by every former director of the National Weather Service issued a stark warning. In no uncertain terms, they shared “our worst nightmare…that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

Nor was their warning obscure. Reports about it were published by outlets including NBC News, which noted that:

The former directors — who served between 1988 and 2022 — said that between the Trump administration’s cuts to probationary workers and personnel reductions through buyouts, the weather service’s staffing has been reduced by more than 10% during the busiest time for severe storm predictions.

That was demonstrably the case in Texas last week.

We reap what they sow

The decision to hamstring the federal agencies responsible for weather forecasting did not simply fall from the sky. It was a legislative decision with clear and identifiable sponsors, including U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Before the so-called “Big Beautiful” reconciliation bill was signed into law by the President—on the very same day that the floods began to devastate the Texas hill country—Cruz inserted language that eliminated a $150 million fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in [weather forecasting] research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public.”

Sen. Cruz also cut a separate $50 million in grants that had previously allowed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems and coastal ecosystems.

Decisions have consequences.

And accountability matters.

Flood survivor Kathy Perkins was interviewed at a Red Cross center in Kerrville, TX last Sunday after the floods damaged her trailer home. Her comments captured some of the understandable outrage felt by people who narrowly escaped with their lives. She said that “Many people are angry right now,” and that ” elected officials “won’t just be able to go hush-hush,” because “[t]hose kids should have been safe and they weren’t.”

Hunt, TX resident Lesa Baird, who was also staying at the same Red Cross shelter, confirmed that she heard “no warning at all, none whatsoever” before the floods washed away her home.

Policymakers whose choices force communities to endure preventable death & destruction have no business serving in office.

Of course, if our political system allowed any modicum of accountability, most of Congress would be out of a job. Yet despite widespread condemnation of Congress, the re-election rate among its Members remains well above 90%.

More to come

Beyond the cuts driven by Congress and the president to staffing at weather services, similarly manufactured crises at NIH and NSF threaten scientific awareness of any number of emerging threats. The future of the U.S. is one blinded to its risks, from discrete reflections of the climate crisis to its broader contours, from threats to agriculture and food security to threats to water supplies and the security of basic needs.

Even before reeling from the floods, Texas was already the epicenter of the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The World Health Organization announced the eradication of measles in the U.S. 25 years ago, but an ongoing outbreak centered in Texas that started this year has sparked over a thousand cases. Over 155 people have gone to the hospital, and at least three of them have died. Most reported cases are involving children.

Every one of these measles cases represents a failure of both policy and practice. As one fellow writer on this platform has noted, “Our country's descent into an unnecessary measles pandemic is a new level of maddening.”

David Edmonston was 11 years old when, in 1954, doctors in Boston collected samples from his throat and his blood. Their work eventually enabled the development of the world's first measles vaccine, and helped win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for Harvard professor John Franklin Enders.

Before the development of the measles vaccine in 1963, the disease was both highly contagious and endemic across the United States. Each year, approximately 4 million Americans fell ill, and nearly 50,000 required hospitalization. Measles deaths in the U.S. declined from 500 per year to none.

Today, Edmonston—whose blood helped create the measles vaccine—is 82 years old. Even though his attitudes towards vaccines have shifted over time and grew complicated during the COVID outbreak, he said recently that “vaccines are very important not just for the individuals who take them, but for our society as a whole.”

Referencing federal regulators, Edmonston noted that “There's an awful lot of misinformation out there, and you need to be careful who you listen to.”

As absurd as deaths from measles in 2025 may appear, they remain a signal of more to come.

According to Lauren Gardner, leader of Johns Hopkins University’s databases tracking disease outbreaks, “What we’re seeing with measles is a little bit of a ‘canary in a coal mine. It’s indicative of a problem that we know exists with vaccination attitudes in this county and…[is] likely to get worse.”

Prioritizing politics rather than survival

Why have Texans been reduced to cannon fodder for the dumbest domestic decisions of the empire?

Even though the state is reeling from multiple preventable disasters, its elected leaders appear more focused on their own interests than those of their constituents. Within days of the floods, Texas Governor Greg Abbott published his list of stated priorities for the coming year.

While several items on the list related to building better early warning systems for “flood prone areas throughout Texas,” his list also included a focus on contriving a larger GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives by gerrymandering the state even more than it already has been.

Last year, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU reported that “When Texas Republicans redrew their state’s congressional map [in 2024], they took what had been one of the most competitive and politically interesting maps in the country and, through discrimination against fast-growing racial and ethnic minorities, transformed it into one of the most boring and least dynamic.” The Department of Justice sued the State of Texas the same week that report was released, alleging that the state legislature’s gerrymander is intentionally racially discriminatory and violates the Voting Rights Act.

While his constituents are dying by the dozens from floods, and flooding hospitals due to a disease outbreak, Abbott’s greatest concerns include building his party’s majority by further degrading democracy within his state.

America’s future

The unfolding debacles across Texas should expose the true nature of America’s future intended by the Trump administration. We’ll have plenty of ICE agents but not enough scientists, plenty of police but not enough medicine, plenty of weapons but not enough food.

Welcome to the future of America, in all its ugly and sordid glory.

This is an era of institutional ignorance, with all the surprises that we could expect from electing leaders who bury their heads in the sand.

It is difficult to convey the idiocy of the past week’s events. There is not a single reason to dismiss the floods as an unpreventable calamity when the professionals who used to issue warnings made clear when they were fired that the system they staffed would suffer from inadequate staffing.

Nor does explaining reality constitute politicizing a disaster. It is simply a matter of connecting cause and effect—just like scientists (for whom the administration and its right wing enablers harbor such disdain) do every day.

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