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The big idea
The federal government says failing to solve the Colorado River crisis isn’t an option. Except it is.
If you agree with The Daily 202 that part of the definition of politics is how a country organizes itself to allocate finite or even scarce resources, then it’s hard to argue that tackling the Colorado River crisis isn’t among the most important political stories in America today.
Here’s how Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau put it Tuesday: “The Colorado River Basin provides water for more than 40 million Americans. It fuels hydropower resources in eight states, supports agriculture and agricultural communities across the West, and is a crucial resource for 30 Tribal Nations. Failure is not an option.”
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But failure is very much on the menu of possibilities. A two-decade drought and heavy dependence on the Colorado’s dwindling waters has strained a century-old arrangement governing how much those states (and their massive agricultural infrastructure) can and should pull from the river.
Beaudreau’s comments came as President Biden’s administration released a review of the river’s major reservoirs, laying out what my colleague Joshua Partlow called “the painful choices” policymakers now face.
The ugly menu of options
“Amid the tables of numbers and technical jargon, in the draft environmental review, the three options the Interior Department proposes for consideration, expose the stark decision in coming months. One option would strictly follow water rights and give priority to major farming regions in California, such as the Imperial Valley, that stock supermarkets across the country with winter vegetables,” Joshua reported.
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That choice would let “a large part of the water supply of Phoenix and Los Angeles ‘get taken virtually to zero,’” Beaudreau told Joshua in an interview.
- Another option would be “distribute up to 2 million acre-feet of cuts in water usage — more than 15 percent of the river’s flow — in the same percentage across all users in Arizona, California, and Nevada, an approach that would contradict a legal thicket of water rights that date back more than a century.”
(Helpful, from Joshua: “An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, what it would take to cover an acre of land with one foot of water.”)
The federal government could also opt to do … nothing. But “climate change and the drying of the West have put the reservoirs of Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the water supply for tens of millions of people — on a path toward falling so far the dams could no longer produce hydropower or even to ‘dead pool,’ when water would effectively be blocked from flowing to the southern states,” he reported.
The government should announce the way forward on cuts by late summer.
The view from Arizona
Over at the Arizona Republic, Brandon Loomis noted: “The plan spells out proposals to modify a 2007 shortage-sharing agreement and will be open for public comment for 45 days. If adopted this summer, it will affect dam releases starting next year.”
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But the federal government still hopes the states and tribes can find some sort of consensus, Loomis reported. The affected states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
- “Representatives from the river states said they're making progress behind the scenes and are gaining confidence that they can reach a deal that does not throw out the old legal priorities or completely cut off cities and others that don't enjoy the same legal priorities as many farmers,” Loomis wrote.
Back in 2007, federal and state officials agreed on water-use cuts that become more pronounced as Lake Mead — historically the country’s largest water reservoir by volume — drops against Hoover Dam, he reported, “but so far they have not kept up with the pace of losses.”
“Since 2000, water demand and evaporation have outstripped the river’s flow by about 15%, causing a rapid decline in storage and threatening power production and even the most secure of water rights downstream” of the dam.
The view from California
“Ah, but what about the record snowpack in the West?” you ask, because you read the newspaper, so you know some officials have expressed hopes it’ll make the water crisis a little less dire. Over at the Los Angeles Times, Ian James sounded a cautionary note.
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- “Even after storms that have blanketed the Rocky Mountains with the largest snowpack since 1997, federal officials say the likelihood of a return to dry conditions means the region still needs a plan for apportioning additional water cuts if necessary over the next three years,” James wrote.
Beaudreau “pointed out that during more than two decades of drought, there have been wet years, such as 2011, followed by a return to dry conditions. The heavy snow this winter, he said, may push ‘the curve out six months or more,’” James reported.
That’s a short respite, not a solution.
Loomis provided the killer quote about the trade-offs, courtesy of University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon: “It would be unthinkable to say Phoenix is cut off so [California’s Imperial Valley] can keep growing alfalfa” for export.
Politics-but-not
What’s happening now
Inflation eases again in March, but remains at 5 percent
“New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday showed that prices rose 5 percent in the year ending in March, the smallest 12-month increase since May 2021. That’s down from the 6 percent rate notched in February and well below last summer’s peak of 9.1 percent. Compared to February prices, March prices rose 0.1 percent,” Rachel Siegel reports.
Tennessee expulsions prompt Senate Democrats to call for DOJ inquiry
“Senate Democrats are urging the Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the expulsions of two Tennessee state representatives to determine whether their removal violated the Constitution or federal civil rights law,” Matthew Brown reports.
Trump seeks ‘cooling off’ delay in case involving rape claim
“Donald Trump has asked for a four-week delay of a civil trial involving an allegation of rape by author E. Jean Carroll, claiming a ‘cooling off’ period is needed after the former president’s recent indictment and arraignment in Manhattan in a criminal case involving hush money payments to an adult-film star to silence her about an alleged affair,” John Wagner reports.
Antiabortion group asks court to let Texas mifepristone ruling stand
“An antiabortion group seeking to block access to a widely used abortion pill asked a federal appeals court late Tuesday to allow a lower court’s ruling that would pull the medication off the market to proceed,” Bryan Pietsch reports.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
Pandemic risk
China’s struggles with lab safety carry danger of another pandemic
“Beijing has embarked on a major expansion of the country’s biotechnology sector, pouring billions of dollars into constructing dozens of laboratories and encouraging cutting-edge — and sometimes controversial — research in fields including genetic engineering, and experimental vaccines and therapeutics,” Joby Warrick and David Willman report.
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- “The expansion is part of a government-mandated effort to rival or surpass the scientific capabilities of the United States and other Western powers. Yet, safety practices in China’s new labs have failed to keep pace, a Washington Post examination has found.”
The great tech reshuffling: Hubs outside Silicon Valley are thriving
“Silicon Valley has reigned for decades as America’s innovation capital, home to tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook; unicorns like Uber, DoorDash and Instacart; and start-ups fueled by the venture capitalists that populate Sand Hill Road,” Danielle Abril reports.
- “But the region’s dominance has declined since the pandemic, as lenient remote work policies and a spate of layoffs have fueled the departures of workers and cleared the way for rising investment in other tech hubs across the United States, notably Austin and Miami.”
Where did leaked U.S. secrets appear? On a chat app popular with gamers.
“In the overlap between internet meme culture and U.S. military secrets, some have traced the spread of the documents to Discord servers, which are similar to chatrooms, with names including Minecraft Earth Map, the End of Wow Mao Zone and Thug Shaker Central,” Ellen Francis reports.
Russia moves to tighten conscription law, pressing more men to fight
“When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a mobilization in the fall to commandeer reinforcements for the war against Ukraine, thousands of men fled the country or went into hiding. But tough new measures approved by Russia’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday will make it almost impossible for Russians to dodge conscription in the future,” Robyn Dixon reports.
… and beyond
U.S.-born children, too, were separated from parents at the border
“What is only now becoming clear, however, is that a significant number of U.S. citizen children were also removed from their parents under the so-called zero tolerance policy, in which migrant parents were criminally prosecuted and jailed for crossing the border without authorization,” the New York Times’s Miriam Jordan reports.
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- “Hundreds, and possibly as many as 1,000, children born to immigrant parents in the United States were removed from them at the border, according to lawyers and immigrant advocates who are working with the government to find the families.”
Rupert Murdoch and Fox Corp. board members sued by investor over ‘stolen election claims’
“A Fox Corp. shareholder sued Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch and several members of the Fox Corp. board of directors in Delaware on Tuesday afternoon, arguing that they violated their fiduciary duty to the company when they allowed Fox News to broadcast election conspiracy theories,” NBC News’s Jane C. Timm reports.
- “The derivative action — a kind of lawsuit brought by shareholders who believe they’ve been harmed by the corporation — was brought by a single plaintiff, Robert Schwarz.”
U.S. officials in Moscow haven’t been allowed to visit WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich
“Nearly two weeks after Russian security agents picked up Evan Gershkovich at a restaurant during a reporting trip, Moscow still hasn’t granted U.S. Embassy officials permission to visit The Wall Street Journal reporter in detention—a pattern that follows other cases of American citizens jailed in Russia,” the WSJ’s Louise Radnofsky and William Mauldin report.
The Biden agenda
White House prepares for legal and political battle on abortion pill
“The Biden administration, seeking to reassure abortion rights activists without provoking the courts, is privately promising an array of liberal groups that it will wage a fierce legal battle to preserve access to abortion medication, while also developing contingency plans in case those efforts fall short,” Meryl Kornfield, Rachel Roubein and Laurie McGinley report.
Biden administration declares fentanyl-xylazine mix an ‘emerging threat'
“The Biden administration labeled fentanyl mixed with a powerful animal sedative called xylazine an ‘emerging threat’ on Wednesday — a designation aimed at prioritizing federal resources to boost testing and treatment, and stanching the illegal supply of the tranquilizer,” David Ovalle reports.
Biden to remake U.S. auto industry with toughest emissions limits ever
“On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed two sets of new rules limiting emissions for all vehicles, ranging from passenger cars to tractor-trailers. The most aggressive of several options the EPA will consider could lead to 67 percent of all new passenger car and light-duty truck sales being electric by 2032, the agency said,” Timothy Puko reports.
How Wisconsin liberals set record campus turnout in the court election, visualized
“In a number of University of Wisconsin precincts, turnout was near November’s midterms and Democrats were able to increase their vote share (the percentage of votes a candidate receives out of the total votes cast) from the 2022 gubernatorial race to this year’s Supreme Court election, contributing to [liberal Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s] victory,” Dan Balz and Dylan Wells report.
Hot on the left
How pharma funds built the conservative SCOTUS majority … that now harms pharma
“The industry’s lament about judicial activism feels a bit like Dr. Frankenstein expressing outrage over the destruction carried out by his monster. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole, and many of the individual officials who signed the letter, financially supported the Senate Republicans who confirmed [federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk] to the federal bench,” David Dayen writes for the American Prospect.
Hot on the right
Republican Sen. Tim Scott to launch presidential exploratory committee
“Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) plans to launch a presidential exploratory committee on Wednesday, according to two people familiar with his plans, marking a big step toward officially entering the 2024 White House race,” Maeve Reston, Hannah Knowles and Dylan Wells report.
- “Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, has spent recent months laying the groundwork for a national campaign via early state travel and donor events. The exploratory committee will allow Scott’s team to ramp up fundraising and fund travel before he officially declares a bid.”
Today in Washington
Biden is in Ireland today. At 12:20 p.m., he will tour Carlingford Castle.
At 1:45 p.m., he will visit Dundalk and participate in a “community gathering.”
Biden will leave County Louth for Dublin at 4:05 p.m., where he will spend the night.
In closing
Never stop learning!
the past few weeks have given me so many useful life skills, like being able to spell "Protasiewicz," "mifepristone" and "Kacsmaryk" all correctly on the first try
— Grace Panetta (@grace_panetta) April 11, 2023Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.
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