Water World’s Quiet Trump Freak-out

A Native American tribe with a powerful water claim had an ultimatum for the Trump administration: Release money to protect the Colorado River — or fight over the future of the most important river in the West.

Uncharacteristically, the Trump administration backed down.

The Interior Department released $105 million eight days later to repay the tribe for work it had done to line leaky canals and take other measures to protect a waterway that supports farms and cities in seven states.

It was a victory for Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community — and a rare success in cities, farmers and tribes' ongoing fight over drought funding from Democrats' signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.

But the episode last month, previously unreported, underscores the alarm that Western officials are feeling over the Trump administration’s freeze of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for the waterway, which supports 40 million people and a $1.4 trillion economy but has been gripped by megadrought for more than two decades.

The Gila River tribe is still one of the few entities to have its funding freed up. Most entities with federal contracts for water-saving work are still waiting to find out if they’ll be paid.

And the freeze is just one of a series of unprecedented moves the Trump administration has made that are worrying the officials charged with keeping taps running and irrigation water flowing across a region that spans a broad swath of the West, including the cities of Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego.

That includes the president’s day-one executive order to boost California water deliveries that led to an abrupt release of billions of gallons that nearly flooded downstream farms.

And Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has made dramatic staffing cuts at the Bureau of Reclamation that are threatening its ability to operate the complex and aging system of reservoirs, canals and pumps that actually move water across the West in some regions.

The ongoing funding interruption is throwing a wrench into the works at a precarious moment. The states that share the perennially oversubscribed waterway are trying to write new rules to govern it — and negotiators see the next few months as the window to stave off paralyzing litigation.

The federal drought dollars were a crucial component of those negotiations.

“This is now a major, major problem,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who has sent multiple letters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on the freeze of payments from a $4 billion pot in the Inflation Reduction Act that has been going to pay cities, farms and tribes to forgo water deliveries and funding major infrastructure projects that conserve water over the long term.

‘Terrible consequences for the entire Basin’

The 10,000 acre-feet that the Gila River tribe withdrew last month is a drop in the bucket of Lake Mead, the country's largest reservoir, on the Arizona-Nevada border. But in the arcane world of Western water, it was a shot across the bow.

"We have given the Department every opportunity to avoid what would be a calamitous break in our longstanding partnership, with terrible consequences for the entire Basin,” Stephen Roe Lewis, the community’s governor, wrote to Burgum on Feb. 11 before pulling the water from Lake Mead and moving it to a storage facility in Arizona.

The move worked. Interior unfroze the tribe’s funding Feb. 19.

An Interior Department spokesperson said the agency is “dedicated to providing life-sustaining water and harnessing the significant hydropower the river offers.”

“We are actively engaging in dialogue with the Colorado River Basin partners as we work towards long-term operational agreements for the river after 2026. Throughout this effort, we remain committed to ensuring fiscal responsibility for the American people,” the agency spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

So far, the Gila River tribe is the only entity to withdraw water. But 40 percent of the supplies in Lake Mead are owned by cities, farms and tribes, so if other entities started pulling water, reservoir levels could quickly fall. That would trigger draconian cuts to the states in order to ensure that Hoover Dam doesn’t lose the ability to generate hydropower and make downstream deliveries.

The Trump administration’s chaos is jarring the officials responsible for ensuring that water keeps flowing to cities, farmers and tribes.

“We’re in an increasingly uncertain world,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources.

Impact on state negotiations

The Colorado River has long been prone to battles, thanks to a century-old mistake that promised the states more water than it actually supplies. But as climate change has shriveled the river’s flows — scientists estimate they’ve dropped by 20 percent over the past 25 years — the states have opted to cooperate to keep the river flowing rather than fight over who gets its diminished returns.

That cooperation has been greased by federal dollars, including $1.2 billion for a deal brokered in 2023 among California, Arizona and Nevada to entice farmers, cities and tribes to leave water in Lake Mead and stabilize the reservoir while new rules are negotiated.

Despite the fact that the drought funding stems from the Inflation Reduction Act — a Biden-era law President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to unwind — Western officials had broadly expected them to be safe under the new administration. Not only is the $4 billion pot relatively small in a sprawling law that appropriated hundreds of billions to climate programs, but the work has been bipartisan across a region that includes red and blue states.

“These are not greeny environmental programs,” said Anne Castle, who served as the Biden administration’s appointee to the Upper Colorado River Commission. “A lot of this money is going to rural farmers to reduce their diversions who are counting on that money.”

That funding was supposed to be just the beginning. As the states engage in high-stakes negotiations over new rules to govern the drought-plagued river after 2026, officials broadly agree that they’ll need a significant level of funding to make any deal work.

The uncertainty around the money they thought they already had in hand is taking a toll on those talks.

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), who played a key role in securing the IRA drought funding, said the freeze is “absolutely” impacting the talks.

“So much of what we're negotiating is dependent upon, ‘You get this, we get that,’” he said.

“You got seven different states. They've all got to be satisfied with the compromises that come out of that, and to do that you’ve got to know what the funding is,” he said.

California Sen. Alex Padilla (D) said the freeze is having “harsh, devastating” consequences on the discussions.

The negotiations over the Colorado River are effectively the country’s biggest climate adaptation effort, and they are wrenching. Elected officials from Wyoming to California are reckoning with painful decisions about how to ratchet down water use without undercutting urban, suburban and agricultural economies — or sparking a political revolt.

The talks among the states have been contentious, marked by flared tempers and threats of Supreme Court litigation that could throw the entire region into chaos. But negotiators have in recent months been meeting more regularly. The upstream states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — in late January began to coalesce around amore robust water conservation program.

Funding for that program would almost certainly have come from the IRA pot, Castle said. Not only does the freeze delay the program, it also makes it all the harder to convince water users — mostly skeptical farmers — to sign up for it.

“The uncertainty in the system I think has a broader effect in that people will start to wonder whether this is a legitimate program they can rely on,” she said.

California dam dumps reverberate

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s handling of on-the-ground dam operations has shocked water managers. In late January, after the president had spent days falsely blaming Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s water policies for the devastating fires in Los Angeles, the White House ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to dump water from two dams in California’s Central Valley.

The move dumbfounded water officials across the West, who knew that water couldn’t physically reach Los Angeles, and that releases of the magnitude initially ordered by the White House could have posed a danger to downstream communities.

Although that debacle didn’t directly impact the Colorado River system, Castle said it “absolutely” raised concerns among water managers there, especially in the upstream states that are home to four federally owned and run reservoirs whose operations are hotly contested as part of the ongoing negotiations.

“I think that is a very significant concern for the federal reservoirs in the Upper Basin based on what we saw at the end of January in California,” she said.

For now, state officials are trying to remain calm, hoping that the situation will stabilize once the Trump administration fills out positions at the Interior Department. The Bureau of Reclamation, the agency responsible for Western water, plays a crucial role in the negotiations, but Trump has yet to name his pick to be its commissioner.

“There’s a federal-shaped hole in the post-2026 process that’s waiting to be filled,” said J.B. Hamby, California’s lead negotiator for the river as chair of the Colorado River Board of California.