The Colorado River Basin is in crisis.
Climate change is reducing its flow and its biggest reservoirs are shrinking. The seven U.S. states that use the river are negotiating cutbacks to their water use. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico are deadlocked with the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona, and Nevada.
But the federal government has a big stake in the negotiations, too. It oversees and operates some of the most critical infrastructure on the river, including dams that create its biggest reservoirs. Dwindling water levels hurt its ability to generate and sell hydropower. Lower flows degrade the federally-managed national parks the river flows through. Diminishing supplies threaten the viability of the river's core legal document, the Colorado River Compact.
With all of those layered interests, it's led some to ask: Why aren't federal officials applying more pressure to get a deal finalized?
This would not be the first time the federal government has tried to decrease water use on the Colorado River. A little over 20 years ago, California was using about 800,000 acre feet of water more than it was allotted. Federal officials stepped in, with the goal of reining in the river's single biggest water user, the Imperial Irrigation District.
"If you're going to solve a water shortage, you don't go to the little guys, you go to the big guy," said Tina Shields, one of the water managers at IID. Shields was at the district during QSA negotiations and currently oversees its compliance with the agreement.
Farms in Southern California's Imperial Valley—an agricultural powerhouse that grows some of the nation's winter produce—rely on the powerful district to deliver Colorado River water.
Recounting the fight over California's overuse, Shields says the district was presented with a deal to reduce their take in 2002, with a deadline to sign it. IID's board declined. Interior Secretary at the time, Gale Norton, threatened to cut off water deliveries to the district. The secretary is considered the "water master" among the river's Lower Basin states.
"Essentially it was a coordinated federal and state attack on IID to get us to agree to the deal," she said.
In 2003, IID agreed to a deal that drastically reduced its water use in exchange for payments from large municipal water providers in the state, which is now known as the Quantification Settlement Agreement. But the year between IID's rejection of the initial deal and its signing was marked by resistance from the district, playing out in lawsuits and court battles—and lots of federal pressure.
"At the time, it was not good," Shields said. "We had a gun to our head and our arm twisted behind our back. But through the 20 years since then, we've developed the relationships with the management and the staff of these other agencies."
IID says that since 2003, it has conserved 9 million acre feet of water, and Shields said the QSA could be a model for other states looking to cooperate on conservation measures. But, she reflected, the QSA saga is in sharp contrast to the way the federal government is currently handling the Colorado River.
"Back then, when a deadline wasn't met, there were consequences to it, right?"
Since then, the warming and drying trend in the Colorado River Basin has gotten much worse, necessitating cutbacks. The Upper and Lower Basins have not been able to agree on who will take those cuts, bypassing deadline after deadline set by Reclamation to come up with a deal. Another deadline looms: February 14, 2026 marks a deadline for the states to present the Bureau of Reclamation with a deal that outlines the conservation commitments between the basins.
All the while, climate change is threatening the viability of federal infrastructure – like Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, and their hydropower turbines.
"Our hydrology is permanently bad," said Elizabeth Koebele, an associate professor at the University of Nevada Reno, where she researches Colorado River governance.
"This isn't something that we bounce back from anymore," she said. "Even a really good water year doesn't really do a lot for our storage reservoirs. And now, the most cutting-edge science says even the same amount of snowpack isn't producing the same amount of runoff into our streams anymore because we have all these other processes going on related to aridification."
Koebele said less water makes hard decisions even harder, and it backs the states into their respective corners, refusing to make concessions. Uncomfortable yet necessary basin-wide cuts have created a dynamic that has made Reclamation reluctant to play bad cop.
"It's become really political, and so someone is going to be upset by any decision, which could lead the states to sue the Bureau of Reclamation and bring this to court," she said. "And that could take a really long time to solve."
Arizona, which is facing some of the most severe cutbacks, has been especially vocal about the feds getting more involved in negotiations—a stark departure from years past, when the states would have wanted to make these decisions themselves.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, pushed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to host all the Colorado River governors in Washington D.C. in late January.
"Having the secretary there to hear from us directly, like what we need to see a deal that's fair — and I think especially with the secretary having been a governor and sort of being able to understand it from our perspectives — was really helpful," she said.
She said she felt the governors left the meeting with an understanding of how they could be involved in the ongoing negotiations, and appreciated Burgum's role as a facilitator and convenor for that conversation.
"I guess we'll know when the negotiators get back in the room, if that actually had some impact there," she said of the meeting. "But I think we all left the room feeling like we were at a better place… I don't know that we're at a place where we will have an agreement by the deadline, but I think we'll be much closer to one than we would've been otherwise."
Though some water users are eager for stronger leadership on the river, they say it's a risky move to invite more federal involvement.
Jim Lochhead, who used to be Colorado's top river negotiator, said he worried that the river's myriad problems would become even more political than they already were. He said the Trump administration is unpredictable, and has created a lot of uncertainty around other water issues in the West.
"We saw a veto of the Arkansas Valley pipeline by President Trump," he said, referring to a project in Southeastern Colorado that would have delivered water to communities east of Pueblo. "We see money being withheld from the state of Colorado. So who knows what this administration might do?"
But there are also questions about what Reclamation can even do. In an environmental impact statement released last month, it outlined a few alternatives for how the agency could proceed, while emphasizing that it would prefer the states to come to an agreement themselves. Several of the alternatives include actions that the agency doesn't currently have the legal authority to carry out, meaning it would need to go to Congress for additional powers, or renegotiate longstanding deals with states.
"It's politics," said Koebele. "It's recognizing that the situation we're in is so different that we're even testing the limits of Reclamation's authority."
In the end it might not be the federal government's hand forcing the states to make a deal, it could be pressure from Mother Nature. Record low snow totals this year in the river's headwaters mean the hard decisions are coming sooner rather than later.
This story was produced in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder Center for Environmental Journalism.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
Copyright 2026 Aspen Public Radio
