Click the link to read the editorial on the Las Vegas Sun website. Here’s an excerpt:
February 28, 2025
The Colorado River is drying up, and now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s unprecedented freeze on federal funding, efforts to save it are drying up too. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order halting the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Trump claimed the order was intended to attack far-left “Green New Deal” initiatives — an inexplicable claim given that almost no Green New Deal policies have ever been implemented at the federal level. In reality, the order gutted nearly all federal environmental initiatives and anything the president simply didn’t like or considered too “woke” — a term Trump has refused to define.
Among Trump’s victims was $4 billion earmarked to protect the flow of the Colorado River. Those funds were set aside to pay farmers to use less water, increase the efficiency of Western water usage and upgrade critical infrastructure and water capture technology. Now, with the West already parched by a historic megadrought, Trump’s freeze is making a dire situation even worse…The IRA funding was designed to prevent catastrophe. Much of the money was being used to pay farmers and Native American tribes to leave more water in the river, helping to stabilize reservoir levels while putting money in the pockets of rural Americans. In California’s Palo Verde Irrigation District alone, landowners received $40 million to cut back on water use. Without those funds, conservation efforts will grind to a halt. Farmers want to be part of the solution, but they can’t afford to reduce water use and thus reduce crop yield, or move to crops that aren’t as water intensive, without compensation. This freeze leaves them in limbo just as they plan for the next growing season.
The funding freeze also jeopardizes projects meant to support new water-sharing agreements. Arizona lawmakers spent the past 16 months securing $86 million in Bureau of Reclamation funding to build a recycled water plant in Tucson, Ariz., allowing the city to rely less on the Colorado River. But with federal funds in limbo, those plans, and others like them, may be dead in the water. According to Pima County Wastewater Reclamation, the Tucson project alone would have saved an estimated 56,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water over the next 10 years. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined annual water usage for 100,000 homes…Other projects that are now in jeopardy include local conservation projects designed to restore watershed habitat that helps store and filter water that flows to the river and to underground aquifers. These are projects that ensure clean and reliable long-term water supplies in the West…Here in Nevada, lawmakers have been working to retire overdrawn water rights, allowing groundwater to replenish — but those projects rely on federal funding. Similarly, in Arizona and California, farmers depend on federal funds to balance their water budgets. Without these programs, aquifers will continue to shrink, wells will go dry and agricultural output will decline even further. That means higher food prices nationwide and economic devastation for rural communities. If Trump refuses to be a president for all Americans, he should at least recognize that many of his own supporters are among those who stand to lose the most…
Beyond the immediate impact on water supplies, Trump’s funding freeze threatens delicate negotiations over the future of the Colorado River. The current Colorado River Compact expires in 2026. Seven states, 30 Native American tribes and representatives of both the U.S. and Mexican federal governments have spent years locked in tense negotiations over how to allocate the river’s dwindling supply.