What did Donald Trump do today?

He whistled past the graveyard of his budget cuts to weather and emergency services.

At least 50 people, many of them children attending summer camps, have died in flash floods in Texas. A massive search-and-rescue effort is underway, but the death toll is expected to rise. 

In response, Trump released a civil, if slightly showy statement of support for the victims, promising to work with state and local officials. This is, in and of itself, newsworthy: it's not uncommon for him to lash out at victims, as he did when he called the survivors of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico "politically motivated ingrates." He also routinely uses the disasters themselves as a political cudgel against politicians he doesn't like, even when the events themselves were unavoidable and his own explanation for how he could have done better ridiculous.

Nor is it a given that Trump will approve states' request for emergency funding or support to help manage disasters. These appeals are normally granted automatically, because the federal government has much greater capacity than individual states. Trump has rejected them in at least four cases since returning to office where the states had met all of the official criteria for aid, without offering any explanation or new guidelines.

On returning to office, Trump slashed the staff and frozen the legally allocated budgets of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and federal agencies dealing with weather and climate change. It has already begun to affect hurricane preparedness, with forecasters expected to make do with drastically reduced satellite imagery to track storms.

State and local officials in Texas were vocally furious with what they saw as a late and underwhelming warning from the National Weather Service, one of the agencies that was already showing clear signs of inability to perform its mission due to the Trump cuts. Less than a month ago, its offices in Texas warned that they were working with only 56% of their normal staffing. 

With the crisis in Texas not yet over, it's not clear whether or how much the weakened NWS presence played a factor, given how urgently state officials rely on its forecasts and alerts. Given the literally unprecedented intensity of the flooding—the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes—it may not have been possible to entirely avoid loss of life even with federal weather and emergency services operating at full capacity. But this kind of extreme weather event is becoming more common as the climate changes, particularly in Texas, where so-called "500-year floods" are now almost an annual event.

Trump's official position is that he believes climate change is a "Chinese hoax," and his policies reflect that: he recently claimed the authority to "discipline" and rewrite the findings of federal climate scientists whose results he doesn't like. As a private citizen, Trump applies for government funds to help mitigate the effects of climate change on his golf courses.

Why does this matter?

• Slashing the budgets for weather forecasting and emergency preparedness isn't such a great idea when there are weather emergencies that forecasting could have helped you avoid. 

• Disaster victims deserve federal support whether or not Trump likes their governor. 

• The lives of Americans impacted by climate change are more important than Donald Trump's inability to gracefully back away from a false talking point.