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It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to reignite the California water wars he waged in his first term.
On his first day in office, Trump directed the secretary of commerce and the secretary of the interior to develop a new plan that will “route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply”.
In a memorandum titled “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California”, Trump directed the agencies to reprise the efforts of his first administration, which challenged the state’s environmental protection regulations, and allowed more water to be pumped for agriculture and cities.
“The recent deadly and historically destructive wildfires in southern California underscore why the state of California needs a reliable water supply and sound vegetation management practices in order to provide water desperately needed there, and why this plan must immediately be reimplemented,” the memo read.
Trump’s move didn’t exactly come as a surprise; Trump has vociferously attacked California’s water policies, taking particular offense at those put in place to protect the delta smelt, a tiny endangered fish scientists say reflects the declining ecological health of the waters it lives in.
But the order, which relied heavily on misinformation about the fire disaster in Los Angeles to give urgency to the directive, showed a sweeping disconnect between Trump’s view of the issues and the intricate and layered policies already in place.
Moreover, experts told the Guardian, it could bring a new layer of turmoil to California’s complicated negotiations over water use, derailing years of discussions between state and federal officials, water policy experts, tribes, conservationists and farmers over how best to steward and distribute water.
“Trump is a chaos agent,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director at Baykeeper, a non-profit environmental advocacy organization that has been part of the fight to protect the San Francisco Bay.
“Anybody who thought he would not bring chaos to the situation or that he understands California water and environmental management is mistaken.”
‘It’s unclear what happens here’
Formed at the convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the delta flows through the San Francisco Bay and out to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the largest estuary on the west coast, supplying water to roughly 30 million people, irrigating 6m acres of farmland and supporting endangered species and threatened ecosystems. It has also long been center stage in complicated and protracted conflicts over the state’s essential and increasingly sparse water resources.
Plans completed by the Biden administration and California officials, only just announced last December, have already increased the amount of water flowing to urban areas and farms, even as delta species continue to decline.
The plans were years in the making, according to water officials, and the work to find paths forward that supply millions of residents, support swaths of the $49bn agriculture industry, and leave enough in the systems for threatened ecosystems and communities severely affected by the declining waterways – including tribes that closely rely on them for sustenance and cultural identity – has been an enormous challenge.
“The process just completed in December took over three years, using the best available science to ensure the projects are operating in concert to balance the needs of tens of millions of Californians, businesses and agriculture while protecting the environment,” Karla Nemeth, director of the California department of water resources told the LA Times. “To abandon these new frameworks would harm California water users and the protection of native fish species.”
With seven endangered species listed in the delta and San Francisco Bay, including the longfin smelt which was only added last year, environmental advocates and other stakeholders deeply connected to the delta were concerned about the plan the state was advancing even before Trump re-entered the White House.
There are fears that the memo will only increase political tensions and add new obstacles to achieving progress.
“It’s unclear to everybody what happens from here,” Rosenfield said, calling both the state’s solution and Trump’s directive “extinction plans”.
“They are not going to protect endangered species.”
Fightback against false claims
Meanwhile, state leaders have been forced to push back hard against some of the false claims Trump has brought up to justify the order.
In posts on Truth Social over the past two weeks, Trump brought up the battles from his first term and blamed state water policies for the catastrophic outcome of the Palisades fire, which killed at least 11 people in Los Angeles earlier this month.
In a press conference on Tuesday, he repeated the critique, saying California “created an inferno”, with its water policies. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn on the valve,” he said, a confusing mischaracterization of how water systems operate.
Speaking on Fox News later on Tuesday, Trump went even further, threatening to deny California federal aid to recover from the wildfires over the issue.
“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down,” he said.
Experts have refuted the claims that the fires could have been stopped with more water, and in particular with more water from the delta. Los Angeles gets most of its water from other sources, including Owens Valley and the Colorado River. There was also ample water available at the time the fires erupted.
Hoses went dry during the harrowing firefights in the Pacific Palisades, not because the city was out of water but because the municipal water systems are ill-equipped to handle multiple and simultaneous withdrawals at such a scale.
“There is no need to increase water deliveries from the Bay-Delta or any other source from which LA imports water for the region to be able to fight the current fires,” the advocacy organization LA Water Keeper said in a resource page issued to the press, adding that the real threat to the region’s water supplies was climate change.
“The sources of our water imports – Mono Lake, Bay delta, Colorado River – are drying up due to climate change, and are themselves at risk of future interruptions due to natural disasters.”
“Despite recent misinformation, California is delivering more water to farmers and southern regions of the state than under the Trumpadministration,” the office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a statement, crediting strategic negotiations with the Biden administration. “Regardless, these water flows have zero impact on the ability of first responders to address the fires in southern California.”
It won’t be clear what the memo will mean for California water policy until the new administration starts to lay out specifics to their plans. Trump is expected to join Newsom in Los Angeles on Friday to visit the neighborhoods severely affected by the fires, which could change his views on the disaster.
