Federal funding freezes and staffing cuts are setting off alarms about the future of the Colorado River, a critical artery that supplies water to some 40 million people in 30 tribes and seven states across the U.S. West, as well as in Mexico.
The Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal budget and workforce coincide with a pivotal point in Colorado River history, as the region’s states negotiate the long-term operational guidelines for the 1,450-mile artery. The current interim rules, set in 2007, will expire at the end of 2026.
Policymakers warn that a loss of funds and Bureau of Reclamation employees could disrupt programs important for sustaining the drought-strained river — and complicate the negotiations that will steer its course for years to come.
“The level of uncertainty is greater than it’s ever been, and the challenges are greater than they’ve ever been,” Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s lead Colorado River negotiator, told The Hill.
The Trump administration’s day-one pause on certain disbursements from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked $4 billion for water management in the region, is raising particular concern among stakeholders about the fate of key conservation projects that keep the Colorado River flowing.
Earlier this week, Senate Democrats from the region’s Lower Basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — urged the Department of the Interior to end the freeze, arguing that the disappearance of these funds could endanger the river’s water supply.
They expressed particular concern over the future of a conservation program aimed at increasing basin-wide efficiency and “the Colorado River system’s reservoirs from reaching dangerously low levels that threaten water deliveries and power production.”
Two of the same senators, California’s Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, then sent another letter on Thursday to the Interior Department, demanding a halt to further workforce cuts to the Bureau of Reclamation — the federal agency that is party to Colorado River operations and negotiations.
They noted that Reclamation is already slated to lose about 100 California employees, or around 10 percent of regional personnel. Emphasizing the constant monitoring required to maintain dams and reservoirs, the lawmakers warned that “without adequate staffing, the risk of infrastructure failures increases.”
Meanwhile, the negotiations over the river’s long-term operations are ongoing. The final structure of the guidelines remains unclear, with the Lower Basin states and their Upper Basin peers — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — at odds over the details. The Biden administration tried to hasten the process by issuing a bullet-point list of five options in late November and a longer version in mid-January, while state-level talks have continued in parallel.
In their initial appeal to the Interior Department, the Senate Democrats stressed the critical role their conservation program has played in shaping past agreements among vying states. Under such an arrangement last year, they explained, the Lower Basin states pledged to conserve 3 million acre-feet of water, with the goal of stabilizing the system until post-2026 guidelines materialized.
For reference, a century-old allocated 7.5 million acre-feet to each basin on an annual basis. The average American household, meanwhile, consumes about 1 acre-foot of water every year.
A cessation in funding, the lawmakers warned, could jeopardize conservation targets, local economies and ecosystems, while also “undermining future multistate agreements.” Their message followed a similar appeal sent to President Trump by Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.), who described current conditions as an “absolute breaking point.”
The short-term reductions in water usage — the 3 million acre-feet arranged in last year’s consensus — are not only large in volume, but they also have significant economic and political impacts, according to Buschatzke, the Arizona negotiator.
Previously, he explained, cuts were typically limited to big consumers like the Central Arizona Project, the massive system that brings water to more populous areas across the state. But if extremely dry conditions were to strike the region, the burden would spread to other Arizonans.
Such curtailments could “cut into even higher-priority users, like my young farmers,” said Buschatzke, who is also the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
“That’s the same thing in other states,” he warned. “The risk is greater.”
If such drastic effects do come to fruition — and without the compensation that the frozen funds could have provided — future collaboration could become more difficult, according to Buschatzke.
Short-term losses, he added, could also have long-term effects by “eroding confidence that creative tools like the conservation programs can actually be put into implementation moving forward.”
Of specific concern to Buschatzke was the financial viability of a concept proposed in the post-2026 alternatives, which involves creating “pools” for water savings within the basin’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Just how much money would be necessary to create these pools, he explained, remains unclear amid “a lot of moving parts.”
Responding earlier this week to a query from The Hill about the funding freeze, an Interior Department spokesperson, declined to comment, only noting that that agency’s “policy is to not correspond with members of Congress through the media.”
Amid sporadic cuts and cancellations, the Trump administration’s approach to the Colorado River remains elusive. The Bureau of Reclamation last month announced that “a decision was made to reschedule” a meeting of the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Work Group, the body responsible for overseeing downstream flows from the Lake Powell reservoir.
Meanwhile, Anne Castle, a Biden-era appointee to the Upper Colorado River Commission, departed at the behest of the Trump administration a week after inauguration. In her resignation letter, Castle described an “existential time,” in which stakeholders “who rely on and care about the river” are working on guidelines “that will govern our lives and our economies for decades.”
Castle also commended Interior Department public servants for their dedication and professionalism “despite being vilified by the very administration they serve,” while blasting shifts in employment terms as “explicitly designed to result in a wave of resignations.”
“This broad brush, unfocused purge in furtherance of the stated goal of liberating large corporations from regulation they do not care for will result in attrition of expertise, damage to the American public, and specifically, a more disordered and chaotic Colorado River system,” she added.
Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, told The Hill that he sees the federal government as playing an important role in Western water in general. In the Colorado River basin, he explained, this means providing money, setting environmental regulations, and administering projects and interstate agreements.
At the same time, however, Lund stressed that “almost all decisions in this basin are at local and regional levels, plus state water rights and some tribal rights.”
As far as President Trump’s rationale behind the $4 billion pause is concerned, Lund reasoned that “this could fit as part of his widespread freezes on funding, some or many of which will likely be reversed or altered over time as they see fit.” Alternatively, he suggested that Trump could be “collecting points of leverage on parties in the basin for later negotiations.”
“Money not yet spent is always a potentially useful lever. But it is unclear what he really wants,” Lund said.
Buschatzke, meanwhile, offered some optimism in that most of the federal employees involved in the Colorado River’s post-2026 environmental review process were “still in their jobs.”
“In the broader scheme of things, there are many Reclamation people that we rely on,” he said, referring to experts such as “modeling gurus” and administrative contractors.
“All those people fit together in a way that enables us to get our collective work done,” Buschatzke added. “How much of that is going to be impacted, I don’t think anyone can tell you, and I certainly can’t.”
