Column By John Young
The river knew what these people were talking about.
The morning after the Texas deluge, when the death toll along the Guadalupe was only in double digits, a commentary in The New York Times carried this subhead: “The poisonous effects of cutbacks will eventually reach you.”
Add the alarm sounded by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: Presumptive and capricious budgetary actions will have “enormous real-world consequences.”
As I digested these words, I was thinking of the Guadalupe River. But neither warning had to do with flooding. Both were about the staggering sweep of stupid policy decisions under this president.
The first of the two statements came from Steven Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth, who decried the “kneecapping the very infrastructure” of public health prevention and research.
Justice Jackson’s statement was more general, a furious dissent when the Supreme Court allowed executive orders to remain in place, terminating thousands of federal employees.
Real-world consequences had been on the mind of Kathy Bryson, who can see the Guadalupe River from her front porch in Kerrville, Texas. Months ago, she wrote the local newspaper about the administration “deliberately ‘traumatizing’ and eliminating federal workers, including the federal employees who give us severe weather warnings.”
Much like the now-indecipherable debris along the paradise that drew hundreds for a lazy July 4 weekend, we cannot know exactly at this moment how arbitrary and capricious budget decisions contributed to the calamity.
Let’s just say, however, that some people were asking for it.
Of the firings Justice Jackson decried, the malicious vendetta monger we made president last November said citizens “won’t even notice” the effects.
The fact is, even the ax men noticed some of the effects.
After firing 600 National Weather Service employees, causing many forecasting offices to close at night, the administration announced it would hire 126 people in what a spokesperson called an effort to “stabilize” the department.
How did they come up with 126? Probably not the same way they came up with 600, which we can only imagine took the deliberation it takes to order fries and a shake.
“It’s not a chainsaw,” said a former Weather Service official of the cuts wrought by DOGE. “It’s a hand grenade.”
Some have called the Weather Service antiquated, doing tasks that artificial intelligence could. I don’t know: Can AI launch and chase down a weather balloon? Can AI rouse a rural sheriff who’s at the slow-pitch tournament?
Sure, artificial intelligence can do useful things. But with this White House, we aren’t talking about AI. We’re talking about “IA”: “indiscriminate acts” — budget cuts that can’t be defended based on any standard of how they affect the people served.
DOGE is not about better government. Ask Brian LaMarre.
Under the Biden administration, the veteran meteorologist was assigned to conduct an ambitious modernization plan for the Weather Service. LaMarre told The New York Times he identified some redundancies to address, to save money and streamline operations.
Suffice it to say, with cuts ordered by the DOGE executioners, this White House has thrown those meticulous deliberations to the wind.
Right now, LaMarre said, the Weather Service is in “survival mode.”
That’s an alarming statement. It’s the type of honesty that would get someone fired under this vindictive president. LaMarre could say it for one reason — for, writes the Times, “He’s one of the hundreds who left in the spring.”
“Real-world consequences.”
The above-mentioned commentary by Steven Woolf blasted the shotgun blast that will reduce the budget of the Centers for Disease Control by more than half, under the straight-from-the-factory propaganda line, “Make America Healthy Again.”
The con man in the White House and his con-spirators have “upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with medical care,” Woolf writes, leaving a diminished presence to deal with what comes next.
What next? How about now? As of this writing, we have 1,288 cases of measles, mostly in Texas. Like lots of reasonable measures to serve us all, safe and sane measures had eradicated that scourge in our country by the turn of this century.
That was before public service turned into Demagogue Theater.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
