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Trump Tries Another Grab at California’s Water. What Comes Next?

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The Rio Vista Bridge spanning the Sacramento River in California on the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 10, 2021. The area is part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is the hub of California’s water supply, supplying fresh water to two-thirds of the state’s population and millions of acres of farmland. (Joyce Tsai/KQED)

Updated 11:28 a.m. Tuesday

President Donald Trump’s latest sweeping executive order related to California water tees up a legal fight with the state over whether the federal government can use an emergency to sidestep local environmental law.

On Monday evening, Trump appeared to double down on his battle over water policy when he posted on social media that the “United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.”

The post triggered a terse statement from the California Department of Water Resources, which noted that the military had not entered California but that the federal government had simply restarted some water pumps that had been offline for maintenance for three days. “State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful,” the statement said.

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That came after Trump directed the government on Friday to immediately find ways to move more water through the Central Valley to the southern half of the state, circumventing California’s strict environmental rules related to water quality and citing the wildfires around Los Angeles in doing so.

He asked Cabinet members to report back on ways that they could do so within 15 days, “including emergency authorities,” signaling that he is considering using the disaster — which has killed at least 28 people and caused billions of dollars in destruction — as a reason to declare an emergency and force changes to California’s water policy.

A cloudy, blue sky rests on top of a calm river with healthy brush hugging the riverbend.
Wetland marshes of Sherman Island, California, on Threemile Slough, which is part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, on the morning of Friday, Sept. 10, 2021. The Delta is the hub of California’s water supply. (Joyce Tsai/KQED)

But, as state officials and environmentalists were quick to point out, the federal government does not deliver water to Southern California, and the water deliveries Trump references in his order service mostly farms in the San Joaquin Valley, which would be the primary beneficiaries of increased federal deliveries.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D–San Rafael) called Trump’s comments “lies” and accused the president of using the fires as an excuse for a water grab.

“None of the policies in this executive order will move even a single drop of water to communities devastated by these wildfires,” Huffman said.

The Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural irrigation agency in the country, disagreed and said in a statement that “the challenges that [Trump] highlights are real, and his leadership in addressing the barriers to water delivery are welcomed.” The district serves primarily farms in Fresno and Kings counties.

Were Trump to be successful in overriding policy on water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, “it’s a zero-sum game,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow specializing in water at the Public Policy Institute of California. “The state then has to take on the burden of keeping the delta fresh enough so that farmers can use that water. And the state has to take on the burden of meeting the needs for fish in the delta and wildlife. Bottom line, that results in less water for Southern California. Not more.”

Karrigan Börk, a law professor at UC Davis and co-director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, said that Trump’s directive, were it to be operationalized by his government, will no doubt be met with a lawsuit from California.

The key legal question is: to what extent state environmental laws can constrain what the federal government does? For years, the federal government has been deferential to California when it comes to its rules around water quality.

“It’s a really serious issue, which is significant both for California — because it’s a question of how much we’re in control of our own destiny here — but also throughout the West, where there’s a lot of states that don’t want the federal government disregarding their state laws on water or on environmental protection,” he said.

Börk noted that — as with all things related to California water policy — it will be difficult for Trump to make any changes, especially because water and the environment are so heavily regulated at the state level.

If this fight sounds familiar, that’s because it happened once before.

Back in 2019, KQED reported that the Trump administration ordered federal biologists to speed up decisions about whether to send more water from Northern California to farmers in the Central Valley, a move that critics said threatened the integrity of the science.

The following year, the administration moved ahead with plans to
let farmers take more water from the state’s largest river systems, and California sued, arguing it would push endangered populations of delta smelt, chinook salmon and steelhead trout to extinction.

The Biden administration eventually reversed the order.

The difference this time around is that Trump is considering using the L.A. fires as a reason for exempting the project entirely from coverage by the Endangered Species Act.

“To get there, it takes a lot of administrative work up front,” Börk said. “That will probably take a year or two to get done. And I suspect that that will also end up in court fairly quickly.”

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