We Cannot Stop the Floods, But we Can Cut the Death Toll

August 30, 2026

By Yiannis Damellos

I am willing to play devil's advocate just to prove my point. Can we agree on something other than climate change being responsible for every natural catastrophe these days? Just because the loss of life from natural disasters has increased lately, maybe we can agree on a common denominator. Something like "The purpose of a good government is not to prevent nature from killing us. It is to make sure that nature doesn't get to kill us simply because we failed to use everything science already knows." How about that for starters?

The Grand Canyon has just demonstrated something Washington should understand before it dismantles another scientific agency: preparation does not prevent a disaster, but it can prevent a disaster from becoming a mass casualty event. A flash flood destroyed bridges, cut trails and overwhelmed infrastructure, yet warnings, monitoring, evacuations and emergency response gave people a chance to survive. That is what government science is for. It does not stop nature. It gives human beings TIME.

The same principle applies far beyond the Grand Canyon. A satellite sees the storm before the hiker does. Radar measures rainfall before the river rises. Sensors detect movement in a glacier or unstable slope before the mountain comes down. Computers turn millions of observations into forecasts, and emergency systems turn those forecasts into warnings. Modern America possesses an extraordinary technological advantage, but technology is useful only when the scientific institutions collecting and interpreting the information remain intact.

That is why weakening those institutions is not ordinary government downsizing. The Trump administration has proposed major reductions to NOAA, including eliminating much of its research arm, while its broader FY2027 proposal calls for substantial reductions at NOAA, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The administration argues that a leaner government will eliminate unnecessary programs; the danger is that the cuts do not distinguish between bureaucratic excess and the scientific infrastructure that tells Americans when to get out of the way.

NOAA is not merely an agency producing charts for scientists. Its weather observations, satellites, forecasting models and National Weather Service operations form part of the country's emergency-warning system. When a hurricane changes direction, when a wildfire weather pattern intensifies or when torrential rain begins falling over a burned watershed, Americans need the information immediately. The value of that information is measured not in bureaucratic efficiency but in minutes, and sometimes minutes are the difference between evacuation and death.

The White House knows what I am talking about: TIME — while government services are being dismantled, taking away the very minutes of warning that can save an American life, Trump is selling that same precious commodity — earlier access to his market-moving words — to people wealthy enough to pay for it; how’s that for putting a price on TIME?

The argument becomes even more absurd when placed against the technology now available. Artificial intelligence is rapidly improving weather forecasting, but AI does not magically manufacture knowledge: it requires enormous quantities of reliable observations with which to train and test its models. The United States is simultaneously developing increasingly sophisticated predictive systems while debating cuts to the very observational and scientific infrastructure that makes those systems useful.

This is not an argument for an unlimited government or an excuse for waste. Scientific agencies should be audited, modernized, and forced to demonstrate results. So should businesses. But there is a profound difference between eliminating waste and eliminating capacity. You can remove bureaucracy from a weather warning system; you cannot remove the weather data and expect the warning system to work.

Nepal and the Grand Canyon therefore offer the same lesson from opposite sides of the planet: we cannot negotiate with physics, but we can negotiate with the consequences of physics. We cannot stop a glacier from collapsing, a wildfire from burning, or a thunderstorm from producing a wall of water. We can monitor the danger, warn people, evacuate them, and build infrastructure that gives them somewhere safe to go. That is not government interfering with nature. That is civilization learning how to live with it.

The choice before America is therefore remarkably simple. We can spend the coming decades building the most intelligent early-warning network in human history, using satellites, sensors, artificial intelligence and publicly funded science to see danger before it reaches us. Or we can weaken the institutions that collect the information and then wonder, after the next flood or fire, why nobody saw it coming. Nature will continue doing what nature does. The real question is whether the American civil service will still be there watching.