Federal Water Tap, March 3: Low-Income Water Bill Assistance Program Final Report

The Rundown

• Health agency publishes a final report on the impact of the first-ever federal water bill assistance program.
• EPA head wants to toss agency’s basis for regulating carbon pollution.
• Supreme Court temporarily suspends lower court’s order to resume USAID foreign aid payments.
• Reclamation sets initial water supply allocations for California’s Central Valley Project, aligning them with the president’s executive order.

And lastly, staff reductions continue at federal agencies, as do legal challenges to the administration’s orders.

“I spoke with Lee Zeldin, and he thinks he’s going to be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from Environmental, and we’re going to speed up the process, too, at the same time.” – President Donald Trump, speaking about federal spending cuts during the first Cabinet meeting. Lee Zeldin is the administrator of the EPA, which later clarified that it would look to cut 65 percent of agency costs, not staff.

By the Numbers

1,535,838: Households that benefited from the federal government’s temporary program to assist low-income customers with their water bills, according to a Department of Health and Human Services summary report. Established during the pandemic, the Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program provided at least $935 million in aid in just over three years. (Congress appropriated more than $1.1 billion for the program, but up to 15 percent could be used for administrative costs.) Program funding ran out in fiscal year 2024, and Congress has not authorized a new program.

10 Percent: Approximate share of NOAA staff who were fired or took the Trump administration’s buyout offer last week, according to the New York Times. That amounts to about 1,300 employees affecting agencies like the National Marine Fisheries Service and the National Weather Service. The Trump administration’s mass firings are being challenged in court.

News Briefs

Claiming Climate Is No Danger
Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, wants the Trump administration to scrap an agency determination from 2009 that is the basis for federal regulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, the Washington Post reports.

The “endangerment finding” has helped the EPA set limits on carbon pollution from cars and power plants.

Handing NEPA to the Agencies
The White House is proposing that oversight of environmental impact statements should reside with individual agencies, not within the Council on Environmental Quality, which has guided the reviews for more than four decades.

The interim rule goes into effect on April 11.

USAID Funding Freeze Returns
Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily suspended a lower federal court’s order that the Trump administration resume foreign aid payments from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Lawyers for the federal government argue that the lower court does not have the authority to reinstate the payments.

The lawsuit was brought by organizations that carry out foreign aid (AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition) or have members that do so (Small Business Association for International Companies). Court filings are found in this docket.

Studies and Reports

Buy American Review
The EPA could develop more detailed and clearer guidelines for states to comply with federal requirements on American-made products in their water infrastructure projects. That’s the conclusion from an EPA Office of Inspector General report on the Build America, Buy America requirements.

The agency agreed with two of the report’s four recommendations on clearer guidelines.

On the Radar

Forests for the Trees
President Trump signed an executive order to increase timber production from federal lands.

California Water Supplies
The Bureau of Reclamation released its initial projections for how much water contractors can expect to receive from the federal Central Valley Project this year.

Reclamation is setting the allocations to align with President Trump’s order to maximize water deliveries, especially to farmers in the southern Central Valley.

Allocations are adjusted heading into the irrigation season based on snowpack and reservoir levels. Shasta, the main federal reservoir, is 9 percent above its historical average for this date.

House Hearings
On March 4, a House Homeland Security subcommittee will hold a hearing on the future of FEMA. The disaster management agency is a Trump administration target. The president signed an order to establish a council that will weigh the merits of disbanding the agency.

On March 5, a House Science subcommittee will discuss threats to U.S.-funded research. The Trump administration, based on its actions, is one of those threats.

Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

Brett Walton

Brett writes about agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and the politics and economics of water in the United States. He also writes the Federal Water Tap, Circle of Blue’s weekly digest of U.S. government water news. He is the winner of two Society of Environmental Journalists reporting awards, one of the top honors in American environmental journalism: first place for explanatory reporting for a series on septic system pollution in the United States(2016) and third place for beat reporting in a small market (2014). He received the Sierra Club’s Distinguished Service Award in 2018. Brett lives in Seattle, where he hikes the mountains and bakes pies. Contact Brett Walton