Wait, Is the Trump Administration Admitting That Biden Did Something Right?

4 min readIt’s only a matter of time before we hear about The Spigot again.The president’s abject ignorance is never so publicly obvious as it is when he talks about water. He has more trouble with the stuff than Margaret Hamilton does at the end of The Wizard of Oz. His reaction to the California wildfires a year ago introduced us to The Spigot, which the president told us he alone could find and, after having done so, he’d loosed medium-sized lagoons of water. Of course, he released it on the wrong side of a mountain range, but, hey, he alone could fix it.Anyway, the beaten-down Colorado River is perilously close to becoming dust, running at 22 percent of capacity. Lake Powell is headed for its lowest level anyone can remember. In early July, the oncoming crisis was obvious. From The Guardian:The 185-mile Colorado River reservoir currently stands at about 22 percent of its capacity, or roughly 5.6m acre-feet. Lake Powell fell below that level for a few months three years ago. But those 2023 levels were recorded in the winter, when the reservoir, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, hits its lowest ebb. Spring runoff carried the level back up to 9.6m acre-feet by June, according to data from the US Bureau of Reclamation. Not this year. After a winter of historically low snowpack in the mountains and a heatwave that broke records across the south-west in March, water levels at Lake Powell barely rose this spring at all. Even after supplemental releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream, it ended the month of June below the annual low it hit the month before, and could keep dropping. Except for those few months in 2023, Lake Powell’s water level has not been this low since June of 1965—two years after US authorities first started filling it.Now, both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at record low levels, and seven states are now scrambling over each other trying to cope with a serious water crisis that shows no sign of abating. From CBS News:If the water in Lake Powell falls just 33 more feet, the reservoir will no longer meet the water levels needed to generate hydroelectric power, meaning the water can't move through the dam into the Colorado River.Kelly Shannon McNeill, the managing director of LA Waterkeeper, an organization that serves as a water watchdog, told CBS News that California and other lower basin states have cut use of the Colorado River by nearly 20 percent since 2015. But the upper basin states "have gone in the opposite direction," McNeill said. "In the last year alone, they've increased their use over the same period and say they can't afford cuts. And so this is really, you know, it's about political will," she said.Uh oh.After years of failed negotiations between the states, the Trump administration is now poised to impose sweeping cuts. California, Arizona and Nevada have offered to cut their use by about 1.6 million acre-feet, or roughly 500 billion gallons, a year for the next two years.However, federal officials who control the water flow are considering cuts nearly twice that amount. The major cuts would likely mean higher costs for cities trying to secure water, tighter restrictions on outdoor water and significant changes for farmers who use the majority of the river's supply.And the administration’s response is so incoherent that it is calling on Joe Biden's legacy for help. From Politico:As the drought-stricken Colorado River faces record-low flows that could set off a sprawling water and power crisis across the West, the Trump administration is opening the federal cash spigot. In recent weeks the Interior Department has contacted farm districts, cities, tribes and other water users in Arizona, California, and Nevada looking to extend Biden administration contracts that paid out nearly $1.4 billion from Democrats’ signature climate law to entities that agreed to fallow fields, tighten conservation measures, or otherwise forgo water deliveries. At the same time, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered up a list of projects from the region’s seven governors to address the river’s long-term problems, for which the federal government could be a “potential cost-share partner.” The menu of proposals they delivered a week ago includes 85 projects totaling more than $50 billion—a price tag that far exceeds what Interior currently has in its coffers. The sudden willingness to open the federal wallet marks a sharp U-turn for the Trump administration, which froze funding for some of the same efforts last year and has overall sought to claw back billions of dollars of spending from Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.Create the crisis. Bungle the response to the crisis you’ve created. Claim you’ve solved the crisis entirely in a manner beyond the reach of modern man. The art of the deal.