Water under the Regime
Recent events through a water lens
This week, we'll take a look at how recent government actions are affecting our water, from drinking water to our wetlands, estuaries, and coasts. This is not an exhaustive list, more a representative cross section from the news sources I follow.
Gulf of Mexico
Starting with one of the most obvious items, we have the attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico, an example of what the Brits call "willy waving." I'll just leave that one here.
California
For reporting on water matters in California, I always turn first to the excellent Ian James, @ianjames.bsky.social, at the LA Times. This California section relies extensively on that reporting.
In January, following the fires in LA, Trump waded back into the California water wars. He first posted on social media that the military:
“just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,”
It was a fabrication. The California Department of Water Resources responded in a statement:
“The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful.”
The LA Times confirmed as much here.
In response to another executive order to pump more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, in a made-for-X moment, the Army Corps of Engineers released water from two California dams into the farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley. California water managers convinced the Army Corps to release less water than originally planned to avoid flooding. The water is needed for summer irrigation. The farms are not able to use it at this time of year, and there's no mechanism to transport it to LA. Most of the water was left to evaporate.
Moving to the coast, the California Coastal Commission is in the administration's crosshairs with a threat to condition aid to LA on the hobbling of the Coastal Commission.
Washington State
Diverting Pacific Northwest water
The comment above — "from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond," — is not the first time Trump has set his sights on the Pacific Northwest's water. Conrad Swanson of the Seattle Times has an excellent takedown here:
The answer is no.
President Donald Trump has not and cannot take water from the Pacific Northwest and send it somewhere else, such as California.
It’s not as if we have it to spare, with most of the state still under a drought declaration.
Columbia River
None of that has stopped direct interference with the Pacific Northwest's major river, the Columbia. Workforce cuts at the Bonneville Power Authority, which oversees nuclear and hydroelectric power production and distribution as well as water flows in the Columbia River, endanger the Northwest power system, while layoffs at the Hanford site, the former atomic bomb plutonium factory which I covered here, and at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, are causing blowback for Richland's Musk-supporting mayor.
Cheap power and cooling water have made the Columbia Valley and plateau a go-to area for data centers and AI, with plans for more modular nuclear reactors.
PFAS and Drinking Water
EPA Regs
In January, the EPA withdrew a pending plan to set discharge limits on PFAS from industrial facilities. This does not affect the EPA's limits on PFAS in drinking water, although those remain under legal challenge. States are preparing for the worst by taking steps to set their own limits for PFAS in drinking water.
It’s not just PFAS. The administration is moving to repeal lead limits and lead pipe replacement rules, and is working to kill a ban on trichlorethylene, TCE, a dry cleaning and degreasing solvent and known carcinogen, which is a common water pollutant.
DoD cleanup
Clean-up of military sites contaminated with PFAS, TCE, and other pollutants will be hampered by cuts at the Department of Defense and EPA. Here are the responses to my emails encouraging my friends to hang in there.
From a friend with the Navy's cleanup program:
John,
It has been an extremely stressful week. I have 4 probationary employees that we are fighting to save!
Thank you for thinking of us! It means more than you can imagine.
A friend at DoD:
Thank you, John. Means a lot. We’re hanging in there and taking it day by day. Hope you’re doing ok too!
And EPA:
Thank you, John! I still have my position for now, and truly appreciate your support!
Thank a federal employee today!
EPA Grants
Many of the projects I'm working on, from water system consolidation to Puget Sound recovery, are supported by EPA grants.
The drinking water projects reply on an EPA program called the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. This is a reduced-rate loan and grant program administered, as the name implies, by the states, but backstopped by EPA. So far, it seems those funds are unaffected.
The Puget Sound habitat programs I'm supporting are funded by EPA's National Estuary Program. Funding for these programs was frozen, and then maybe unfrozen, but the status remains unclear.
Wetlands
Under the guise of the administration's declaration of a "national energy emergency," the Army Corps of Engineers fast-tracked each of seven hundred pending permits to fill or destroy wetlands. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing.
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Thank you for this important work of keeping us informed. I was particularly disheartened to hear of filling in wetlands and this is the first I’d heard about it. I’ll be looking out for more information on this - thanks for putting it on my radar.
The Air Force example is bolder. Liking a post, as long as I am liking it as myself regular citizen person, and not while stating my agency affiliation, is not bold, imo. If I get on and say I oppose federal firings, ok. It's if I get on and say I represent one of them and I name the agency and then say I oppose the firings that I am in violation of Hatch, if I understand it correctly. I can oppose it all day long as Mary Beth.