WATER SECURITYTrump Says He’s Sending Water to LA. It’s Actually Going to Megafarms.
The president’s executive orders on California water will help irrigate Central Valley farms. They won’t do anything to fight wildfires.
While President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of far-reaching decrees during his first week in office, one relatively niche issue has received a disproportionate share of the president’s ire and attention: California water policy. That might make sense if the remedies he’s pursuing could help stem deadly fires like those that have killed at least 29 people in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks. Indeed, the president has claimed that “firefighters were unable to fight the blaze due to dry hydrants, empty reservoirs, and inadequate water infrastructure.”
But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones.
On his first day as president, Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state. Then, on Sunday he issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law. The order also suggested Trump could withhold federal wildfire aid if the state failed to comply to his satisfaction.
But the new measures wouldn’t deliver any more water to Los Angeles at all. Instead, his attempt to relax water restrictions would move more water to large farms in the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, a longtime pet issue for the president, who attempted a similar maneuver during his first term. This time he’s going further, proposing to gut endangered species rules and overrule state policy to deliver a win for the influential farmers who backed all three of his campaigns.
None of this has any relation to wildfires in Los Angeles. For one thing, the city isn’t experiencing a water shortage. It was ferocious, hurricane-force winds that fanned the Palisades and Eaton Fires — not a lack of water to contain the blazes. While some local water tanks in the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades did run out of water, that was only because the city couldn’t pump new supplies up to the hillside neighborhood fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand during the fire, not because there wasn’t enough water available to send there.
