Weeks before flash floods devastated the Texas Hill Country, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) participated in the first meeting of a new council to overhaul the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He criticized FEMA as “slow and clunky,” arguing that states are able to respond “more nimbly, more swiftly, more effectively” to disasters.

A spokesman for Camp Mystic, the Texas enclave devastated by a July 4 flash flood, is raising concerns about communication failures during the disaster.

Cuts made to the Federal Emergency Management Agency under the Trump administration severely impaired its ability to respond to the devastating floods in central Texas.

There are questions over why oversight was eased at Mystic Camp as it expanded in a hazardous floodplain, the AP reported.

Many victims of the recent flooding did not have flood insurance when water washed away homes, cars and belongings.

The program, established by a 2000 law, provides grants for a variety of disaster mitigation efforts, including levees to protect against floods, safe rooms to provide shelter from tornadoes, vegetation management to reduce damage from fires and seismic retrofitting to fortify buildings for earthquakes.

Abrahm Lustgarten says the undermining of science, and cuts to FEMA and NOAA, at a time when erratic weather is making disasters more common, should be "extraordinarily concerning" to us.

Rachel Maddow drew parallels Monday between the Trump administration's response to Texas' flooding and George W. Bush's to Hurricane Katrina.