**Clock Ticking Down on Colorado River Negotiations: What’s at Stake for California?**
The clock is ticking down to a federal deadline on Tuesday for California and six other Western states to reach the broad strokes of a deal dividing up supplies from the parched Colorado River. Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation—the river’s federal stewards under the Department of the Interior—have threatened to impose their own plan if the states can’t agree on how to manage the river after 2026, when its current rulebook expires.
Dire projections for yet another dry year have heightened urgency, as well as tensions, in the ongoing negotiations. Major reservoirs in the basin could plummet to alarmingly low levels, underscoring the need for action. Yet, after two years of fraught negotiations, the states remain at an impasse. The lower basin states—California, Arizona, and Nevada—are clashing with their upstream neighbors: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico.
A key point of contention: how much each basin must scale back their use of the overtapped river as climate change further squeezes supplies.
“We’ve been in a holding pattern, and we need to land this plane by Tuesday,” said J.B. Hamby, California’s chief negotiator and chairman of the Colorado River Board of California.
California’s dependence on the Colorado River raises the stakes even higher. The state takes more than half of the power generated by Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam and draws more water from the river’s main stem than any other state in the basin. California has also been relatively insulated from shortages thanks to senior water rights long seen as bulletproof.
Now, as the deadline approaches, big questions loom: How real is the threat of missing the deadline—and what would the consequences be for California?
## Blown Deadlines on the Colorado River
For decades, federal officials have threatened to intervene if basin states fail to reach agreement. The possibility of lawsuits has motivated major deals that currently govern the river’s operations. Actual federal intervention is far rarer, though the U.S. government has stepped in before—albeit on a smaller scale.
In the early 2000s, Southern California was forced to stop using surplus Colorado River water when other states demanded their fair share. The Interior Department set a deadline for California’s water agencies to cut a deal or face immediate cutbacks. The Imperial Irrigation District—the largest user of Colorado River water in California—initially balked. As a result, the Interior Secretary cut California’s supplies, sparking a round of court battles and, ten months later, a new deal.
In recent years, though, deadlines and threats from Washington have seemed to lose their edge, with basin states missing deadline after deadline with little federal response. Last week, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs urged more assertiveness from the Trump administration: “As we approach critical deadlines, we need the Trump administration to step in, exert leadership and broker a deal,” she said at a water conference.
Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, noted that negotiations may have become too contentious for deadlines to matter, blaming fracturing relationships between basin states as the river’s drying conditions raise the stakes. “We have less water, and it’s caused more rippling problems,” Koebele said. “You’re cutting a smaller pie, for more people.”
## Risks to California’s “Water Savings Account”
The upcoming deadline isn’t the final one—it’s an interim milestone as federal officials work to lock in a plan before the current river rulebook expires. Scott Cameron, now acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation, said at a conference in June that if there’s no deal, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is prepared to take charge as water master. That role gives him the power to declare a shortage and demand cutbacks in the lower basin.
However, the Trump administration has not specified what steps it might take. An Interior Department spokesperson said, “All parties should remain focused on the difficult but necessary work required to reach a seven-state agreement.”
If no plan is in place by late 2026, the rules could revert to those from the 1970s, according to an analysis by Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. This worries Bill Hasencamp at the Metropolitan Water District, because it would upend Metropolitan’s long-standing ability to bank water in Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, for dry spells.
Metropolitan imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River to supply 19 million people across six Southern California counties. Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources, says the district has socked away about 1.5 million acre-feet of water in Lake Mead over the last 20 years—enough to supply 4.5 million households for a year. The district saves Colorado River water when Northern California reservoirs are abundant and draws on these stores when state supplies dry up.
Under 1970s-era rules, water suppliers could no longer add to their savings account; Metropolitan would need to use banked stores within ten years or risk losing the water. Hasencamp estimates those reserves could disappear even faster if California faces deeper cuts.
“Under a new regime, the feds—if things get dry enough—could cut us back,” Hasencamp said. “We could access that storage, but we might need it to offset cuts on the river that could come to us. So it’s a very undesirable situation.”
## A Megadrought and an Uncertain Future
Ultimately, experts agree that the greatest risks to the basin states come from nature itself. The Colorado River remains in the grip of a megadrought. Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute, called August’s projections for reservoirs Lake Powell and Lake Mead “beyond awful.”
Udall said the latest projections remain dire, with one scenario showing “both Powell and Mead entering uncharted territory by the end of Water Year 2026.”
“That’s the new reality,” said Scott Cameron, acting head of Reclamation, at a meeting in Arizona over the summer. “There are real risks to both the lower basin states and the upper basin states if we don’t collectively do something differently than we’ve done in the past.”
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https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/11/november-colorado-river-deal/