Colorado River – With Lake Powell and Lake Mead drained by overuse and a two-decade drought, states at odds over mandatory cuts are pushing instead for federal projects. The Trump administration faces a September deadline on restrictions, while Interior Secretary Doug Burgum h
On April 30, 2026, the bathtub rings around Lake Powell looked less like history and more like a warning label. In Glen Canyon National Recreation Area near Big water, Utah, the receded shoreline sits with the quiet evidence of what’s been happening for years: the Colorado River is running out.
The crisis, as multiple basin states acknowledge, is blunt. The seven states that border the Colorado River—Arizona. California. Colorado. Nevada. New Mexico. Utah. and Wyoming—use more water than the river contains. Chronic overuse has drained Lake Powell and Lake Mead. and a two-decade drought cycle has brought both reservoirs to the edge of collapse. The “dream” response would be a binding agreement to use less water across the basin. But for now. the politics of who cuts—and how fast—has blocked the kind of deal that would force cities. farmers. and utilities to change.
“The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future.”
Those words were offered during a Senate committee hearing last week by Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico—one of several senators who appeared to encourage new federal investment as the standoff grinds on.
The problem isn’t that people don’t agree on the end goal. It’s that the basin can’t agree on the method. The Upper Basin states—led by Colorado and Utah. alongside Wyoming and New Mexico—believe the Lower Basin states—Arizona. California. and Nevada—carry legal and moral responsibility to reduce consumption during dry years. The Lower Basin states make the mirror argument.
Negotiations that began after the last dry spell in 2022 have ended in frustration and name-calling. And the stalemate has pushed the Trump administration into a tight timeline. A crucial September deadline is coming, and the administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of it. Yet Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.
Instead, the administration is reaching for a strategy that sounds simpler than rationing: money for projects that could increase supply.
The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of proposals to expand water availability. even as it marks a reversal of President Trump’s earlier zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion. Several startups are also positioning their projects for funding.
Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and a governance expert, framed it as a practical pivot in a slow-moving emergency.
“It is something easier for people to agree on,” Pitt said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”
At the same Senate committee hearing. Andrea Travnicek—the Interior Department’s top water official—said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She did not offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how taxpayer money is spent. Still, senators from both parties seemed to signal openness to new investments.
The shift also echoes the policy under President Joe Biden. During the extreme drought in 2022. the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow using money from the Inflation Reduction Act. That pot has almost run dry. The proposals now being floated are broader. and some are far less certain to deliver additional water at the scale and speed the river needs.
The menu ranges from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.
Desalination, though, comes with a price tag and hard tradeoffs. A company called Poseidon Water opened a desalination plant in San Diego in 2015 and spent decades trying to open another in Los Angeles. In the governors’ request to Interior. the wish list asks for as much as $6 billion to build a plant across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona’s dwindling Colorado River supplies.
In early June. the Interior Department signed an agreement with San Diego’s water agency explaining how such a plant would help. The arrangement is not simply about shipping treated seawater inland. Instead, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and would be the most likely participant in that exchange.
But desalination is expensive. It requires enormous amounts of electricity and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion. and San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it would purchase from the plant. Trading water could help offset some of that cost—but only if the economics line up.
Nevada, meanwhile, has already cut water use dramatically by replacing grass with artificial turf in Las Vegas. Now it is seeking money to tackle some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. According to the state’s wish list. Nevada wants $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3. 000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities.
Closed-loop systems like those recirculate the same cooled water, and in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air. The approach has drawn attention in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.
At the headwaters of the river. where northern states receive only the rain and snow that feed the system. the pitch turns even more unusual. Lower Basin states such as Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand. Upper Basin states can’t. For decades, they’ve asked Washington for ways to increase precipitation.
Cloud seeding—spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds to force them to release water they might otherwise retain—has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing it, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent.
In parallel, some startups are offering cheaper, more scalable versions of the idea. Rain Enhancement. a Florida-based outfit. says it has brought about 15. 000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year. Rainmaker says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. The companies’ claims are ambitious. but the promise of federal funding—at a moment when the basin’s political bargaining has stalled—could make them worth pursuing.
Then there is desert groundwater—where promises can last decades and opposition can be equally enduring.
Cadiz is a project nearly 30 years old to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert. It has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert.
During the Biden administration. Cadiz ran into a series of setbacks: it lost a federal permit. California ended its pipeline lease. Arizona declined to support it. and its stock price fell to almost zero. Susan Kennedy. the company’s CEO. says Cadiz is “flowing again” with a funding agreement from the Interior Department aimed at studying exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.
But the company still has work left to do. It needs to finish two pipelines—one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water. Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.
“This isn’t a competition; it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” Kennedy said about the Colorado River.
Still, the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent to the Interior Department—an omission that underlines the gulf between the kinds of fixes people are willing to fund and the kinds of fixes they are still willing to back politically.
By the time September arrives. officials in Washington will need to decide what comes first: forcing reductions that basin politics can’t broker. or betting that expanded supply—through desalination. energy and cooling upgrades. cloud seeding. and groundwater studies—can buy time. The evidence of what’s been lost is already visible on the landscape. The question now is whether the money being discussed can change the timeline—or whether the basin’s unresolved fight over cuts will simply catch up to every project before it can deliver.
Colorado River Lake Powell Lake Mead drought federal funding Interior Department Doug Burgum Andrea Travnicek Martin Heinrich desalination cloud seeding Cadiz Nevada data centers zero-water cooling