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Texas Senator Ted Cruz has come under scrutiny for taking another vacation as a deadly disaster unfolded in his state.
Cruz, 54, and his family were on a pre-planned vacation in Greece over the weekend as extreme rainfall led to catastrophic flooding in Central Texas. As of Tuesday, July 8, the death toll sits at 105 victims, including a large group of children who were attending the all-girl Camp Mystic, which is located along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, CNN reported.
The flooding began in earnest on Friday, July 4, and Cruz’s office told CNN that “within hours” the senator had been in contact with President Donald Trump, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other state officials. Cruz and his family were then photographed touring the Parthenon on Saturday, July 5, at around 6 p.m. local time — more than 30 hours after the National Weather Service had begun sending emergency alerts warning that the flooding had become an “extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation,” per CBS News.
Cruz took a flight back to the U.S. on the morning of Sunday, July 6, and was in Texas by that evening. He was on the ground in Kerr County by the morning of Monday, July 7. His office told CNN that the senator returned home “as fast as humanly possible;” however, the Daily Beast reported that there were multiple flights from Athens to San Antonio, Texas, available on both July 4 and July 5.
“I get it, he’s on vacation,” Michael Rocchio, a tourist who snapped a photo of the senator at the Parthenon, told the Houston Chronicle. “But after what happened, vacation or not, you should have been back on a plane on his way back to Texas to deal with everything that was going on with those poor kids in the floodplain.”
In the days before his vacation, Cruz helped add language to Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill that reduced funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The bill, which finally passed on Thursday, July 3, after weeks of deliberation, eliminated $150 million dedicated to weather forecasting, including efforts to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public,” per The Guardian.
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Cruz told Fox News it is lawmakers’ duty to ensure that a disaster like the fatal flooding in central Texas does not happen in the future.
“There’s no doubt [that] afterwards, we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say ‘Okay, what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’ ” the senator said. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”
Cruz’s latest vacation controversy comes a few years after many called for his resignation when he took a trip to Mexico in February 2021 as Texas faced major power outages during a severe winter storm.
After being photographed at the airport, Cruz initially claimed that he was only going to drop his daughters off in Cancún before returning home. However, he later admitted that he planned to stay with his family for the weekend, noting that it was a “mistake” in hindsight.
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“I started having second thoughts almost the moment I sat down on the plane because on the one hand, all of us who are parents have a responsibility to take care of our kids, take care of our family. That’s something Texans have been doing across the state,” Cruz said at the time, via CNN.
“But I also have a responsibility that I take very seriously for the state of Texas and frankly, leaving when so many Texans were hurting didn’t feel right,” he added, “and so I changed my return flight and flew back on the first available flight I could take.”
