The West’s Water War Arrives In Washington

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stepped into the seven-state brawl over the Colorado River on Friday — a high-stakes battle over water supplies that poses significant political danger in Western swing states for the Trump administration.

Burgum convened most of the region’s governors and their lead water negotiators in his office Friday afternoon for more than two hours in a bid to secure a deal to divide up the flows from the river, which have shrunk dramatically as climate change inflicts deeper droughts across the region.

It’s the Trump administration’s first big foray into the battle over a waterway that supports 40 million people from Wyoming to the U.S.-Mexico border, along with 5.5 million acres of farmland, American Indian tribes and the high-tech industry that has blossomed around Phoenix. But governors who attended the meeting said the meeting produced no breakthrough, and it was quickly clear that major divisions remain.

The states have been bitterly deadlocked ahead of the Trump administration’s Feb. 14 deadline to reach a new water-sharing agreement to govern the dwindling river. The crux of the fight is over whether the downstream states of Arizona, California and Nevada must sharply curtail the water they are currently using for farms, subdivisions and data centers in order to ensure that upstream states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — can grow using supplies that were promised a century ago, but have been diminished by climate change.

Meanwhile a hot, dry winter in the West is threatening to send reservoir levels plunging to catastrophic levels this fall.

“This is one of the toughest challenges facing the West, but the Department remains hopeful that, by working together, the seven basin governors can help deliver a durable path forward,” Burgum said in a statement. “Looking at this as a former governor, the responsibility each of them carries to meet the needs of their constituents cannot be understated, and we are committed to partnering with them to reach consensus.”

There is a risk that Burgum's involvement now could turn what has historically been a nonpartisan issue into a political fight.

Those fears have been stoked by President Donald Trump’s veto earlier this month of a bill aimed at completing a small, noncontroversial water project in southeast Colorado. The measure passed Congress unanimously and would have benefited a deep-red area of the state, but Trump — who has feuded with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis — told POLITICO he rejected it because the plan was “wasting a lot of money and people are leaving the state” because of the “bad governor.”

Trump has also reveled in targeting Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom over his state’s water policy on a separate river system, and went so far as to dump water from a Central Valley dam last year. Trump claimed that the water release would help fight fires more than 150 miles away in Los Angeles — which had already extinguished them.

Newsom’s absence at the table on Friday, which his office said was due to a long-planned family trip, conveniently avoided an in-person showdown between the likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and Trump officials. Newsom spoke to Burgum Thursday night to explain his absence, and the conflicts between the governor and Trump didn’t come up during the meeting, according to Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary who stood in for Newsom.

Coming out of the meeting, governors vowed that they are committed to pursuing a negotiated deal rather than duking it out in court.

"It was a great consensus that we prefer the security of an agreement as opposed to years of uncertainty and turmoil without one," Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis said in an interview.

But it was immediately clear that some of the key impasses in the negotiations remain.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat facing reelection this fall in a state that voted for Trump in 2024, has said that for her to sign onto any water sharing deal, she must see “shared sacrifice” from the upstream states.

Arizona is the most vulnerable in the water fight since the 336-mile-long canal that shuttles water to Phoenix, Tucson, and other cities, tribes and farmers in the central part of the state holds the lowest priority rights under the legal regime that governs western water. That means it would be the first to see cuts under a strict application of the law.

While upstream states have expressed a willingness to create voluntary water conservation programs, they have refused to commit to anything mandatory.

Hobbs said she thinks that upstream states understand that “they need to go back and have some firm, measurable things in their conservation programs.”

But Colorado’s lead negotiator, Becky Mitchell, quickly put out a statement in response, holding firm to the position that “any contributions must be voluntary.”

Whether the gubernatorial summit represents a shift from the hands-off approach the Trump administration has so far taken to the issue remains to be seen.

Polis and Hobbs both said that Burgum issued no threats, ultimatums or significant pressure — tactics that the federal government has wielded to prod states into agreement in every major water deal along the river in recent years.

“The pressure is felt intensely by all seven states because of the uncertainty of courts and litigation. So there’s no need for other external pressures,” Polis said.

Three people close to the negotiations who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter told POLITICO the administration’s top political official overseeing the Colorado River is Interior’s third-ranking leader, Associate Deputy Administrator Karen Budd-Falen.

The Wyoming attorney is known as a fierce advocate for states’ rights and rose to prominence for defending Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who staged an armed standoff with the federal government over cattle grazing fees in 2014. Budd-Falen is facing scrutiny for her husband’s lucrative water rights contract with a lithium mine that Interior approved during her tenure at the department during Trump’s first term.

The people said Budd-Falen, who attended the Friday meeting, lacks expertise on Colorado River issues, and that she has pushed a limited role for the federal government in resolving the river’s problems.

Interior declined to comment on Budd-Falen’s role.

Interior had hoped to cut a deal to govern the river for the next two decades, but the lack of progress has instead shifted that target towards a five-year deal that could be the first step towards a longer one.

Crowfoot said that federal officials were pushing that five-year term on Friday in the hopes of reconciling differences between the lower basin and upper basin. Crowfoot called a short-term deal “the most pragmatic way to achieve a compromise.”

And Hobbs and Polis both said they don't expect any deal by the administration's Valentine's Day deadline.

But the department might not be able to dodge the problem for long. The current rules governing the waterway expire at the end of the year, and Interior faces an Oct.1 deadline to set water deliveries for 2027. If the states don’t reach an agreement by that point, Interior will have to decide for itself how to divide up the shrinking volumes of water.

Earlier this month, the department released a draft environmental impact statement laying out options for how it could do so.

Meanwhile, nature could force fraught decisions even sooner.

Snowpack in the river’s headwaters, which provides the lion’s share of the waterway’s flows, is off to a dismal start this winter, with temperatures in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado averaging more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit above their 20th century average for the month of December, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It’s just completely grim,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. He said that snowpack above Lake Powell in Utah and Arizona is currently at 65 percent of median level — a situation that could be expected to produce just 50 percent of the typical runoff in the spring and summer.

Interior’s latest projections for the Colorado River show that water levels behind Glen Canyon dam at Lake Powell could fall low enough to endanger hydropower production and downstream water deliveries as soon as September.

To head that off, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation can release water from a series of reservoirs above Lake Powell to bolster water levels at the dam, although that’s a contentious move with the upstream states, who jealously guard the water in those smaller reservoirs for their own use.

Reclamation is in talks with those states over the issue now, but “no decision has been made,” bureau spokesperson Mary Carlson said by email. She said any potential upstream releases wouldn’t start until after the mid-April reservoir projections are released.

The other option Interior has to safeguard water levels at Lake Powell is to ratchet down releases from it to Lake Mead, which lies further downstream along the border of Nevada and Arizona. But that could run headlong into the central fight in the river negotiations: how much water upstream states must deliver downstream to Arizona, Nevada and California.

The century-old compact dividing up the river’s flows is based on a 10-year rolling average of water deliveries from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. And that average is teetering on the cusp of falling below the amount downstream states say they are owed.

Falling below that threshold could quickly trigger a Supreme Court battle, a terrifying scenario for water managers, since it would then be up to nine justices — only one of whom is from the West — to decide how the river should be managed during a period of crisis. The outcome would have sprawling economic repercussions across the West.

Eric Kuhn, retired general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, said there’s a real chance that deliveries could cross the compact’s “tripwire” this year if winter conditions remain dire.

“We’re right on the edge of that tripwire,” he said. “The secretary’s got a very difficult decision ahead of him.”

Camille von Kaenel contributed to this report.