Trump backlash adds to challenges for California water policymakers

As firefighters in Los Angeles finally contained the flames from the devastating fires in January, the Trump administration made the curious decision to order the sudden release of billions of gallons of fresh water from two dams about 360km north of the city.

US President Donald Trump had blamed firefighters’ struggles to contain the fires on California’s environmental policies, which he claimed prevented water flowing from reservoirs in the northern part of the state down to Los Angeles. 

Following an executive order, the president got his wish to see the water released on January 31, the day the fires were finally contained.

But the water never came close to reaching Los Angeles. Instead, it flooded farmland in the San Joaquin Valley — an important agricultural area in the centre of the state — at a time when it was of little use to farmers. 

“Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!” Trump said on social media after the release.

California always has had tremendous water problems . . . but it has managed to have a very successful economy

But experts in California say it was a poor use of freshwater, which the drought-prone state cannot afford to waste and that would never have been able to reach Los Angeles through the existing infrastructure.

“There was no clear benefit from doing it,” says Letitia Grenier, director of the Public Policy Institute of California’s water policy centre. “That’s not a normal time of year to be releasing water. The [region] generally would like that water to stay in the reservoirs until they need it — when it’s hot in the spring, in the summer or in the fall.”

US states usually welcome attention from the White House during a natural disaster, but this time California officials found themselves combating what they labelled a “misinformation campaign” about its water management policies, led by Trump and his administration.

Los Angeles had adequate water supplies to fight the fires, according to researchers and water officials, although it experienced early problems with fire hydrant pressure in the Pacific Palisades blazes.

Now California’s environmental policy­makers are braced for four years of possible interventions from Trump as the state faces many water management challenges, including declining surface and groundwater — not to mention the impact of a changing climate.

Trump took an interest in California water policy in his first term

California has been a leader since the 1960s in setting environmental standards, and has run its own water policy without significant federal intervention for more than 40 years, says Jay Lund, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California Davis. “The decisions are made better if they are made locally,” Lund adds.

Trump took an interest in California water policy in his first term as president after a meeting with fellow Republican Devin Nunes, who represented the San Joaquin Valley until he left Congress in 2022. Farmers in the politically conservative region were angry about changes to California’s environmental policy, which they said limited their access to water from reservoirs in the north of the state.

The president has seized on protections for the endangered delta smelt, a fish he calls “essentially worthless”, for the farmers’ problems. He also says “enormous” amounts of water flow “wastefully” into the Pacific Ocean.

In a January 20 executive order, on his first day in office, he claimed he had set out a plan during his first term that would have allowed water to flow from northern California to central and southern parts of the state, but it was halted by efforts to protect the smelt.

Water experts dismiss those claims, but acknowledge that California’s $60bn agriculture sector faces serious potential water constraints. “There’s certainly some reduction in water deliveries, particularly to agriculture, from the environmental regulations in the last 30 years,” Lund says. “It’s not really having much of an effect on actual farm profits so far, but it will.”

The biggest regulatory impact on Californian farmers concerns the ability to tap into groundwater. In 2014, California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in response to heavy, unregulated pumping of groundwater over several decades. “It was causing infrastructure to break, causing wells for people to go dry [and] have contaminated the water in them,” says Grenier. 

The PPIC has predicted that between 500,000 and 1mn acres of agricultural land in the Central Valley region of California will go fallow by 2040 because of the SGMA regulations. The San Joaquin Valley, California’s biggest agricultural region and a significant contributor to the US food supply, could face irrigation water cuts of nearly 17 per cent by then. The state has set a target of achieving “sustainable groundwater management” by 2042.

“SGMA is what is causing the change in the valley, and it is really tough,” says Grenier. “It’s about 10 per cent of their economy, so that’s a big deal and it’s painful. But it is really unrelated to the fish.” 

It is not just agriculture in California that faces supply problems. The Colorado river, for instance, which supports farms and provides about 30 per cent of water supplies for southern Californian cities, has had a 20 per cent reduction in its flow between 2000 and 2023.

More recent concerns about the Colorado river stem from the Trump administration’s cost-cutting plans, led by his efficiency tsar Elon Musk. In March, California’s elected officials warned of the possible “catastrophic consequences” of the administration’s plans to cut the number of employees in the Bureau of Reclamation, including those working on programmes to ensure the sustainability of the Colorado river.

“Ageing dams, reservoirs, and conveyance systems require continuous monitoring and maintenance, and without adequate staffing, the risk of infrastructure failures increases,” said California senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff this month. The potentially disastrous results could include “flooding, water contamination, and severe disruptions to California’s agricultural and urban economies”.

Barring such self-inflicted wounds, Lund is optimistic that California can continue to improve its water policies — especially if it can chart its own path.

“California always has had tremendous water problems and probably always will,” he says. “But it has managed to have a very successful economy despite that, particularly in agriculture. So I think we have problems on top of all our successes.”