Science denialism is steady, deadly business in Texas.

Fresh off of a record year of measles infections, hospitalizations, and deaths courtesy of vaccine hesitancy inspired by our very own Secretary of Health, RFK Jr. -Texas has now also been subjected to a deadly flash flood -killing 27, which Texas officials blame (both rightly and ironically) on poor federal forecasting efforts:

“Listen, everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service, right?” Kidd said. “You all got it, you’re all in media, you got that forecast. It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.”

Of course, the National Weather Service suffered an utterly merciless DOGE-purge of over 500 meteorologists shortly after Trump’s inauguration, which closed 6 forecasting offices, reducing capabilities and indefinitely suspending dedicated 24-hour weather monitoring among many of the surviving offices. Weather balloon launches and (unthinkably) weather satellite data were also scaled back, as part of deep cuts to the NWS, which exists mainly to minimize the casualties of severe weather, like those observed yesterday along the Guadalupe River.

It is quite challenging to forecast the weather without equipment, data, or trained meteorologists. In the absence of experts and the logistics that support them, you are left with results of a quality that rival that of magic 8-balls and the spasmodic proclamations of Miss Cleo. Whimsical, wildly inaccurate, and potentially hilarious if the lives of your neighbors didn’t depend on the certainty of specific predictions. AND THEY DO.

Most -if not all of the deaths in Texas (infectious or weather related) could have been prevented with a rudimentary appreciation of, and a reasonable investment in -science.

But that isn’t the America we live in anymore. We live in an America that believes that it can legislate or imagine away the very nature of reality. We live in the America predicted by Isaac Asimov in 1980 where “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge,” and people are so very offended when you point out that their alternative facts are actually just… spectacularly incorrect.

Do efforts to maintain the NWS and public health efforts cost money? Of course they do… but what is the point of saving government money if that savings leads directly to the deaths of citizens -many of whom are children? What else could we POSSIBLY prefer to spend our tax dollars on, if not in the service of preventing a child’s funeral?

I would really love to know.