President Donald Trump loves a good water war — and the biggest one yet is about to land in his lap.
A quarter century of climate change and drought has driven water levels along the Colorado River and its two main reservoirs to historic lows, threatening supplies that support 40 million people and economies from Phoenix to Denver to Los Angeles.
The seven states that share the West’s most important river are locked in battle over who must make sharp cuts in their water use to avoid a catastrophe that could hit as soon as next summer, in which federal dam managers would have to decide between cutting water deliveries to Arizona, California and Nevada or losing hydropower production that is critical to the stability of the region’s electrical grid and potentially damaging one of the nation’s largest dams.
The problem has all the trappings of temptation for Trump: The region is home to two political swing states and one of Trump’s favorite Democratic foes, California Gov. Gavin Newsom. There are flailing state and local officials, irate farmers and ranchers, dilapidated dams that were once the pride of American engineering, and an international treaty with Mexico.
But so far, the administration’s approach to the crisis has been anything but MAGA.
“This administration is pretty much like all the other ones I’ve worked with,” said Nevada’s long-time Colorado River negotiator, John Entsminger.
Trump hasn’t wrested control of the system of dams and canals that deliver water, as he did in California’s Central Valley just days after taking office, in the name of sending water to combat already-extinguished fires in Los Angeles. He hasn’t sent in the National Guard, as the state of Arizona did in 1934 to protect its water rights. Trump hasn’t even posted on social media about the topic.
Perhaps most notably, the man his administration has tapped to run point on the Colorado River is not a Trump loyalist or a political ideologue, but a George W. Bush-era budget wonk known for his sweet tooth and pet Siamese cats, who is a self-described neophyte to the arcane and fraught world of Western water.
To be sure, Scott Cameron wasn’t the administration’s first choice to lead the Colorado River negotiations. Nor was he its second or even its third.
But when the White Houseabruptly pulled its nomination of a long-time Arizona water manager in September amid pressure from Republican senators, Cameron, who had been running river negotiations during the transition, was tapped to fill the role.
After months of swinging between hope and fear over how the president’s bare-knuckled, norm-upending style could be brought to bear upon their deadlocked negotiations, state leaders now see Cameron’s pick as an indication that — at least for now — the Interior Department plans to step gingerly through the political landmines that surround the question of how to keep water flowing to cities, farms, tribes, mines and data centers, rather than blow them up.
“I think that the reality is the administration does not have the interest in meddling in state business,” said Gene Shawcroft, the lead negotiator for the state of Utah.
In fact, even as the administration has aggressively sought to cancel spending under Democrats’ signature climate law, it has quietly held onto the more than $2 billion left from the act’s pot of funding for drought and has continued to deploy it across the West.
Cameron has also told state leaders that he’s working to “socialize” the idea of using additional federal dollars to clinch a deal along the river with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has been leveling deep cuts across federal spending, including targeting water infrastructure dollars in blue states.
The Interior Department did not respond to requests to interview Cameron nor other officials involved with the Colorado River talks.
Tipping toward crisis
The Colorado River’s problems have been building for decades. Warming temperatures and reduced precipitation have caused its flows to shrink by 20 percent over the past quarter century. Prior droughts have been weathered thanks to the nation’s two biggest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. But demand has outstripped supply for so long now, water levels at the lakes are plunging towards precarious lows.
The situation has set off a brawl among the states, who have been harboring grudges and animosity against each other for much of the past two decades and now must agree on new rules to govern the waterway before the current ones expire at the end of next year. If they can’t, the federal government will have to decide unilaterally how to keep the system operating.
And it’s possible that there’s even less time than that to work out a solution. Federal projections now show that by next August water levels at Lake Powell could drop below the hydropower heads at Glen Canyon Dam. In addition to threatening water deliveries and hydropower production, the crisis could also trigger Supreme Court litigation that could tie federal water managers’ hands at the very moment they most need to be able to make operational changes to keep water flowing.
“It is literally like, if you could imagine all the worst possible conditions coming together all at once, that’s exactly what’s happening on the Colorado River,” said Kathryn Sorensen, who led Phoenix’s water department for years and is now with the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.
Cameron is described by state negotiators as patient, astute and keen to cobble together a deal.
In the months since he began working on the river, he has eagerly traveled across the region to see the issues on the ground, including a sweltering August trip to California’s Imperial Valley, where a sprawling farm district holds the largest single claim to its flows.
The administration’s approach so far has been “incremental and institutional,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, which represents the states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming.
Cameron has set a deadline of Nov. 11 for the states to coalesce around a plan to manage the river going forward. But even that was seen as an institutional move, since every major deal among the states over the past two decades has been driven by federal deadlines and pressure.
And Cameron’s delivery was hardly belligerent. Although he spoke firmly about Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s willingness to use his authorities to manage the river unilaterally if necessary, he also described the deadline as being driven by the need for the federal government to figure out how it would actually do so if the states can’t agree.
“If there’s not going to be a seven-state deal, then Reclamation needs to focus its attention on what the federal action would be,” he said during a meeting of upstream states in June.
Down to the wire
With less than two weeks left ahead of that deadline now, state negotiators are meeting frequently, and have a new attendee: Andrea Travnicek, the newly Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for water and science at Interior, who is now Cameron’s political boss.
Negotiators are more optimistic now than they have been in months that they might be able to throw together some sort of a tentative deal that could get them through the immediate deadline — and avoid having the problem elevated to the White House — at least for now.
But even as they continue negotiating, the states are also quietly beefing up their legal teams in preparation for a high-stakes court fight. And they’re lining up their congressional delegations around their battle lines.
Upstream states have an advantage on that front, since the only Republican governors and senators in the region reside there.
Meanwhile, California — which has seen federal funding cut by the White House during the shutdown and had its water systems manipulated at the beginning of the Trump administration — holds the largest entitlement to the river out of all seven states.
J.B. Hamby, the Golden State’slead Colorado River negotiator, has tried to dial down the tensions. It doesn’t hurt that he also serves as vice chairman of the century-old southern California irrigation district with the river’s largest water right and the powerful farm families there are predominantly Republican.
“On the subject of water, certainly early on in this administration’s tenure there was special focus on California water issues and the president’s stated goal was to ensure that water was flowing for Californians,” he said. “Certainly we would welcome that same approach here.”
But the behind-the-scenes political machinations spilled out into public view in September when the White House pulled its stalled nominee for Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, longtime Arizona water manager Ted Cooke.
Cooke was seen as eminently qualified by just about all of the major players along the river, having spent his career working on Colorado water and power issues. But most of that career was at the Central Arizona Project, the canal system that serves the cities of Phoenix and Tucson, as well as other municipalities and tribes who are the first ones to take cuts under the laws governing the Colorado River.
Upstream state leaders feared he would be biased and raised fierce objections to their lawmakers, including Utah Republican Mike Lee, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee where Cooke’s nomination was pending.
Lee’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the nomination.
A self-described Trump supporter, Cooke said he wishes the administration luck in the negotiations, despite frustration over how his nomination played out.
But, he said, he is holding his breath, hoping that the looming water crisis doesn’t get pulled into the administration’s efforts to inflict suffering on its political rivals.
“God, no, not when it comes to water. We just can’t have that nonsense happening,” he said. “I pray it doesn’t because it would just make things that are already in dire straits worse.”
