For more than a century, Western states have fought to keep the federal government out of their business when it comes to water. Now, the Trump administration is about to seize control of the Colorado River, the region’s most important waterway.
But it’s not the narrative you might think.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — himself a former Western governor — has said repeatedly that he preferred to have the states work out the shrinking river’s problems. Far from a brash commandeering of the system, the plan his department is set to finalize as soon as Monday is effectively a kick-the-can exercise for managing the drought-riddled river that supplies water for 1 in 10 Americans.
“I would not characterize it as a nightmare, but it certainly wasn’t the preferred path when we entered into these negotiations,” said John Entsminger, Nevada’s lead for the failed water-sharing talks among the seven states with claims to the waterway.
At best, the Trump administration’s plan will leave economies — from the bucolic ranches of the Rocky Mountains to the mansions of Los Angeles, the tech hub of Phoenix and the powerhouse farms along the border with Mexico — in a state of limbo, without clear rules for who will have access to vital supplies in the years to come. At worst, it dares the region’s political leaders — most especially Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, who is facing one of the country’s closest gubernatorial races in the fall — to launch a destabilizing court fight.
The river plan, which is set to be unveiled in the form of a final environmental impact statement, is less of an actual plan than it is a framework for future decisions, according to public statements by Interior officials and the states. It is expected to cover a 10-year period in which the federal government would issue short-term operating regimes every other year, potentially with the sign-off of the states.
But even those piecemeal efforts to keep the river out of crisis are being complicated by the states’ long-running supply feuds, as well as an eleventh-hour bid by the Interior Department to claim its own share of water — a novel idea that is alarming state negotiators.
Mary Carlson, a spokesperson for Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, said the agency is continuing to “work closely” with the states and is in the “final stages” of its environmental analysis.
“Given the risk and uncertainty facing the Basin, the elements of a preferred alternative being analyzed are designed to provide stability while allowing flexibility to incorporate consensus-based recommendations as they develop,” Carlson said in a statement.
‘Trying to thread the needle’
The soon-to-be released plan is a far cry from the detailed, 20-year rules that Interior and the states three years ago set out to craft for the Colorado River, which has seen its flows shriveled by 20 percent over the past quarter century of climate-change-driven megadrought.
The goal of a long-term deal turned out to be politically impossible. Negotiations coincided with one of the driest periods on record in the sprawling 250,000 square-mile basin. After two decades of managing the gap between supply and demand by drawing down water stored in the Colorado River’s two main reservoirs, water managers found themselves with little buffer left.
The result has been several years of crisis management. Reservoir levels plummeted so low in 2022 that federal engineers feared they might soon be unable to produce hydropower and make the requisite releases from Glen Canyon dam. The Biden administration strong-armed Arizona, California and Nevada into a deal to stanch their water use for a few years, with the carrot of more than $1 billion in funding to compensate water users.
This year, when a warm, dry winter resulted in the lowest flows ever into the river’s main headwaters reservoir, the Trump administration followed course. Interior tapped hundreds of millions of dollars from Democrats’ signature climate act, a law President Donald Trump lambasts regularly, to pay farms and cities to forgo.
But none of those moves resolved the fundamental problem: Cities, farms and tribes hold claims to more water that the climate-shrunken river typically supplies.
Now comes a key moment for the seven states, which have spent the better part of three years brawling over their rights to the dwindling supplies.
Interior’s record of decision, which is expected to be released shortly after the environmental review, will offer the warring parties their first opportunity to sue the federal government. The window for an even higher-stakes court fight over Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming’s obligation to their downstream neighbors could open soon thereafter.
Whether or not the states opt to pull the trigger on litigation could hinge on a series of related bureaucratic documents that haven’t gone through any public process and are currently the subject of feverish negotiations among the states, Interior and cities, farm districts and tribes.
The most important document is the first two-year operating plan for the river, to cover 2027 and 2028.
Negotiators say the plan will include a series of wonky but incendiary details, including the minimum amount of water that could be released from upstream states to Lake Mead, the reservoir on the border of Nevada and Arizona that feeds downstream states. It also is expected to lay out decisions about how smaller federal reservoirs that are jealously guarded by upstream states will be deployed in dry years as well as rules for when water users in Arizona, California and Nevada can withdraw supplies that they’ve banked in Lake Mead.
Interior is “trying to thread the needle and find something that no one’s going to like, but might keep people from going to court tomorrow,” said Jeff Kightlinger, former general manager of the water agency that delivers Colorado River water to 19 million residents of Southern California.
The department did not respond to specific questions about the plan.
The balancing act is even more politically complicated since implementing the plan would likely require the sign-off of the Arizona Legislature, as well as a series of city and agricultural water boards in California.
Asked if his Legislature would be willing to approve a deal that included the possibility of deep cuts in water deliveries to Lake Mead, Arizona’s lead negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, responded, “I don’t know.”
Water for Interior?
Then, there’s a last minute play by the Trump administration to claim for itself a share of the river’s supplies that cities and farms are being paid to conserve. While the water is a relatively small slice of the waterway’s overall flows, the move is prompting mass anxiety among negotiators.
The fight stems from a complex proposal put forward by the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona aimed at ensuring the federal government has enough water to fulfill its obligations to tribes during times of shortage. Because the community’s support is seen as crucial to Arizona’s ability to participate in a side deal with Nevada and California, those states had signed off on the concept as well.
But in recent weeks Interior has been pushing a more expansive version of the proposal, which would give the department control of water that entities in the three downstream states are being paid to conserve, according to six people involved in the negotiations. That’s a sharp contrast with the approach the Biden administration took, which saw federally funded water conservation as belonging to the river system as a whole.
“They want their ability to move water to some places that they think it’s most needed and not have to buy and borrow water from other users, and that they can deploy rapidly,” said Kightlinger, who is advising the river’s biggest water user, the California’s Imperial Irrigation District, in the current negotiations.
The move has raised serious concerns from negotiators, who fiercely object to the idea of using one state’s conserved water to offset cuts to a water user in another state. Many others worry it could become a tool for directing supplies to politically-favored entities..
It also cuts against the fundamental tenet of not just Colorado River policy, but all of Western water law, which puts states in charge of the water within their own boundaries.
“Honestly, this could be maybe the most controversial thing around these proposed operations,” a negotiator for one of the upstream states told POLITICO.
“It really kind of offends the way that water has been apportioned to the states,” said that negotiator, who was granted anonymity to discuss active negotiations.
Interior has already begun including language that could enable this new approach in water conservation contracts with water users, according to materials provided to the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which last week approved a contract with Reclamation.
Negotiations over the provision are fluid and state leaders are warning that its outcome will be crucial to getting agreement on how to operate the system over the next two years.
“If this isn’t a program to rebuild storage for the good of all, but is instead a program to try to move water from one state to another, we’re out, we’re not interested,” said Entsminger, the Nevada negotiator.
