Western drought

Trump taps Democrats’ climate money for Western drought

As Colorado River water levels reach disastrous lows, the administration looks to draw cash from the 2022 climate law it sought to neuter.

By Annie Snider

As the drought-stricken Colorado River faces record-low flows that could set off a sprawling water and power crisis across the West, the Trump administration is opening the federal cash spigot.

In recent weeks the Interior Department has contacted farm districts, cities, tribes and other water users in Arizona, California and Nevada looking to extend Biden administration contracts that paid out nearly $1.4 billion from Democrats’ signature climate law to entities that agreed to fallow fields, tighten conservation measures or otherwise forgo water deliveries.

At the same time, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered up a list of projects from the region’s seven governors to address the river’s long-term problems, for which the federal government could be a “potential cost-share partner.” The menu of proposals they delivered a week ago includes 85 projects totaling more than $50 billion — a price tag that far exceeds what Interior currently has in its coffers.

The sudden willingness to open the federal wallet marks a sharp U-turn for the Trump administration, which froze funding for some of the same efforts last year and has overall sought to claw back billions of dollars of spending from Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

That Interior is now quietly tapping those funds underscores the dire crisis facing the Colorado River, which serves 40 million people, a blossoming tech sector and 5.5 million acres of irrigated farmland from Wyoming to Mexico.

But the one thing that could actually solve the waterway’s fundamental problem is missing from the conversation, former officials and water experts say: permanently reducing the amount of water that farmers and ranchers draw from a river that has been dramatically shriveled over the past quarter-century due to climate change.

“We’ve got to move away from remaining quiet and saying the politicians can just continually ask for billions of dollars in federal money to keep from making any difficult decisions,” said Bruce Babbitt, who served as Interior secretary under President Bill Clinton after spending nearly nine years as governor of Arizona.

“These proposals are all nice proposals, but they don’t even come close to addressing the bigger problem,” he said. “I would call it avoidance money.”

A spokesperson for the Trump administration’s top Western water official, Interior Assistant Secretary Andrea Travnicek, declined an interview request and did not respond to questions for this story.

Some money is already flowing without fanfare by Interior. The department last month released more than $120 million in Inflation Reduction Act spending in Colorado and Utah for environmental projects tied to the river that were approved in the waning days of the Biden administration.

‘The political death penalty’

Roughly three-quarters of the Colorado River’s flows are used by farmers and ranchers who hold powerful legal rights under the century-old system that governs Western water. That means that during times of shortage, cities and suburbs typically see their supplies cut first while farmers and ranchers can continue their full draws from the waterway.

It will be impossible to fix the imbalance between supply and demand on the drought-shriveled river without taking some of those irrigated acres completely out of production, said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

“There’s no way to solve the math problem without taking on agriculture,” she said. “You can’t fix this by focusing on the conservation efforts of the cities. It’s just not enough water.”

Sorensen, who previously headed Phoenix’s water department, co-authored a recent paper arguing that policymakers need to start talking about the difficult farmland realities. It was a gentle attempt to jump-start the conversation that no one wants to have — least of all elected officials who are highly tuned to the political perils of crossing rural farmers.

“It’s toxic,” she acknowledged. “It is the political death penalty for elected officials.”

Even some of the staunchest farming proponents acknowledge that it may make sense for some land to come out of production.

“I can’t say absolutely no fallowing,” said Samantha Barncastle, executive director of the Family Farm Alliance, an advocacy group for irrigated agriculture. “As a farmer’s wife, as an irrigation district attorney, as the leader of the Family Farm Alliance, it pains me to say that you should take out a farm under any scenario, but I know that the reality is that sometimes that is going to be necessary.”

Still, the river supplies some of the country’s best farmland, producing not just alfalfa, but also vegetables, citrus, lettuce and other crops. Barncastle noted that as more land comes out of production, “it won’t take long for that affordability crisis to hit home for average Americans.”

The key, she argued, is that any decisions about fallowing or buy-outs must be entirely voluntary for the farmers and must be done in a strategic way to minimize impacts on other farmers, the environment and consumers.

JB Hamby, California’s lead Colorado River negotiator and a board member of the river’s largest agricultural farm district, the Imperial Irrigation District, agreed that retirement is a conversation worth having about low-yield farmland. But he noted much of California’s land is productive.

“This is an important part of our domestic food security needs, as we were really awakened to during Covid,” Hamby said.

Experts say farmland is going to be dried up one way or another, since cities and suburbs can afford to pay far more for water than farmers that are tied to international commodity prices.

Cities across the seven states that rely on the Colorado River have already undertaken major work to reduce their water use by requiring the removal of lawns, mandating efficient equipment in buildings and policing water use. Las Vegas — the city of excess — has taken perhaps the most aggressive approach, reducing the metro region’s water use by 40 percent since 2002 at the same time that its population has doubled.

While there’s more work to be done to tighten efficiency, most of the options that cities have left to keep the taps running are expensive infrastructure projects that would take decades to bring online, such as desalination plants and facilities to turn sewage water into potable supplies.

Economically, it would make far more sense for municipal water agencies to buy farmland and take it out of production or cut long-term deals with farmers to pay them to fallow during times of drought, said Jim Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water.

“It’s going to happen one way or the other if hydrology continues to go the way it’s going,” Lochhead said. “It could either happen with a softer landing helped by federal funding or it could happen just by virtue of the market causing land to be dried up and local communities suffering the consequences.”

Crowley County, Colorado, offers a cautionary tale of what can happen when large amounts of farmland are taken out of production without a plan in place. Farmers in the southeast corner of the state began selling their water rights off to Front Range cities more than a half-century ago. As more and more land went out of production, farm supply stores, railway infrastructure, restaurants and grocery stores closed, too, devastating the region’s tax base. Today, the county seat is little more than a ghost town.

A ripe moment

Lochhead said some quiet discussion about addressing agricultural water use has begun as part of a push for $2 billion in federal funding being mounted by irrigation districts, cities, environmentalists and tribes.

The moment could be ripe. Farms are facing intense economic headwinds heading into the summer growing season, with the U.S.-Iran war driving up the cost of diesel, fertilizer and other crop inputs. Fears are high that this summer could be ruinous across the West, with a super El Niño forming in the Pacific, threatening to raise temperatures, while dry forests and soils are poised to turbocharge the wildfire season.

More farmers have applied for the few existing short-term fallowing programs in the region than there is funding to support. That includes a summer program at California’s Imperial Irrigation District, said Tina Shields, the district’s water manager.

A larger-scale effort to cut agricultural water use over the long-term could take a number of different forms, experts said.

One option would be to model a program on the Agriculture Department’s existing Conservation Reserve Program. That voluntary program is focused on water quality, paying farmers rent when they sign long-term contracts to convert environmentally sensitive acreage to native grasses, trees or cover crops.

A similar program focused on water quantity could instead pay farmers to enroll marginal land using a disproportionately high amount of water for low-crop output, Sorensen argued in her paper.

Another approach would be to leverage the handful of existing programs like the one at Imperial, in which farmers conserve water to transfer to cities. Those programs help shore up cities’ supplies but don’t actually reduce river use.

Babbitt argued they could, though, if policymakers required cities to give up a portion of that conserved water and instead leave it in the river’s reservoirs to bolster the system as a whole.

But all of the options run head-long into politics. That’s because, under Western water law, any river supplies suddenly freed up by taking one parcel of agricultural land out of production become available to the next user in line, unless state, local and federal rules are changed.

“We’ve got 1840s water law, 1900s infrastructure and 21st-century agriculture, and they don’t fit well together,” said John Entsminger, Nevada’s lead Colorado River negotiator. “The simplicity of, ‘Just buy up 10,000 acres of alfalfa production and leave that water in Lake Mead’ — it’s not that simple.”

The current agricultural water transfer programs have been hard-wrought and politically consequential.

Imperial’s came about a quarter-century ago, when President George W. Bush’s administration strong-armed California into reducing its Colorado River water use. The urban water purveyor for Southern California, which otherwise would have had to bear those cuts, instead cut a series of deals with Imperial and other agricultural districts in the state to pay farmers to fallow some portion of their land or adopt water conservation measures.

Under intense political pressure, the Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors narrowly approved the deal. The three board members who voted for it were the target of intense political opposition and two of them were unseated in the next election.

Paying farmers not to farm

Rather than undertake a politically treacherous program to permanently reduce agriculture’s Colorado River water use, the Biden administration, and now the Trump administration, opted to pay farmers not to farm, year after year.

Partly that’s been driven by crisis. In 2022, water levels at one of the river’s biggest reservoirs, Lake Powell, were plunging fast toward the point at which hydropower production would cut off.

That’s when Democrats approved a $4 billion pot of drought funds in their Inflation Reduction Act that the Biden administration used to pay farmers, cities and tribes to forgo supplies for up to three years.

Nearly $1.4 billion was spent on such contracts — half of which went to Imperial, which got paid nearly double what other entities received — despite urban water managers’ concerns that the influx of federal dollars could drive up the price that farmers would demand for water conservation.

Biden administration officials said at the time that they planned to reserve the majority of the $4 billion for projects that would make permanent reductions.

Some projects, like a water reuse plant in Tucson and a lawn removal program in Southern California, did get funded. But others under consideration were halted when the Trump administration took office, first as part of an across-the-board freeze on any Biden-era spending. Trump administration officials later sought to use federal money as leverage to prod the seven states that share the river into cutting a water-sharing deal.

But the states remain deadlocked, and the Colorado River is now facing record-low flows after a warm, dry winter.

With the IRA dollars set to expire at the end of September, the administration appears to be preparing to spend the nearly $1 billion in remaining drought funds on another round of contracts paying cities and farmers to relinquish supplies for a year or two.

Bill Hasencamp, the Colorado River resources manager for the water purveyor that supplies Los Angeles, San Diego and other Southern California communities, said it’s reasonable to cut another round of short-term deals now, given the looming disaster at the river’s reservoirs.

“The situation on the river right now is so dire,” he said. “One more year could be really bad. Now it makes a lot more sense to focus on short-term.”

But, he said, the Trump administration is looking to pay less for those short-term contracts than the Biden administration did three years ago.

Shields with the Imperial Irrigation District said she has agreed to accept half of the amount paid by the Biden administration for extra conservation this year. But, she said, that only worked because the higher price they got from the remaining contract was covering the district’s overhead costs for running the program.

“We were doing it already for what was already contracted,” she said. “That’s the reason we could agree to the cost share this time.”

But even just re-upping the Biden contracts stands to be a heavy lift for Trump’s Interior Department, especially after sharp staffing cuts and a reorganization that hit Interior’s division of water grant experts particularly hard.

Hasencamp said there’s been no formal bid process and many regional water officials haven’t heard back from Interior after getting a round of emails several weeks ago asking if they’d be interested in doing another round of conservation.