Rep. Harriet Hageman says California's crumbling infrastructure, environmental red tape, and refusal to build new water projects are draining the Colorado River dry, and forcing upstream states to pay the price.
The Wyoming Republican laid the blame squarely on Gov. Gavin Newsom and decades of policy failures in Sacramento, arguing that California's growing thirst for Colorado River water now threatens agriculture, food security, and the livelihoods of communities across seven Western states. Hageman, whose home district includes the small town of Pinedale in western Wyoming, told Fox News Digital that California's refusal to modernize its own water supply has turned a regional resource into a political weapon.
The Colorado River runs through seven states, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah in the Upper Basin, and California, Arizona, and Nevada in the Lower Basin. Roughly 40 million Americans depend on it for drinking water, irrigation, and power. When the seven states failed to update their existing water-sharing agreement, the Trump administration stepped in and forced steep cuts on the Lower Basin states for the next two years.
Newsom praised that order as "a necessary step," but Hageman sees something different: a state that neglected its own house for decades now expecting its neighbors to absorb the consequences.
Hageman framed the dispute in personal terms, drawing a line from the irrigated pastures of rural Wyoming to the sprawling cities of Southern California.
"The system is now becoming very, very stressed because California has not kept up with the infrastructure demands and needs of its citizens. Pinedale, Wyoming, may be a long way removed from Southern California, but when there are calls on the river and when there are demands that we reduce the amount of water that we are able to use in order to meet a demand downstream, that isn't fair."
Her point is straightforward. Under the legal framework governing the Colorado River, downstream demand can trigger restrictions on upstream users. When California's demand grows, not because of population alone, but because the state has failed to develop alternative supplies, ranchers and farmers hundreds of miles away feel the squeeze.
California's water infrastructure has gone largely unchanged since the late twentieth century. The state has one new reservoir project in the pipeline, projected to cost $6.8 billion and not expected to be finished until the mid-2030s. That is one project, a decade away, for a state its own officials call the world's fourth-largest economy.
Hageman reserved some of her sharpest criticism for the environmental organizations that have fought desalination plants and new dam construction in California. The Sierra Club has opposed desalination as an alternative water source. Another group, Tell the Dam Truth, has gone further, advocating not just against new dams but for tearing down existing ones. The group's website states that California should "stop new dam construction" and "decommission dams to restore the biodiversity and carbon sequestration currently inundated in river valleys across the state."
Hageman did not mince words about those groups:
"They're very backwards people. I kind of look at them like flat-Earthers. They're very backwards people in the way that they approach things. They ignore the fact that humans are also part of the natural environment, and they ignore the benefits of what we can create by building this much-needed infrastructure."
Desalination, removing salt from ocean water to make it drinkable, is proven technology used in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and parts of the American Southwest. California sits on the Pacific Ocean. Yet environmental opposition and regulatory hurdles have kept the state from building desalination capacity at anything close to the scale its population requires. The result, Hageman argues, is that California keeps drawing from the same shared river instead of developing its own supply.
The dispute is about more than municipal taps. Hageman tied California's water decisions directly to the nation's food supply, arguing that Sacramento has gutted the state's agricultural sector by redirecting irrigation water to cities and industry.
"California could grow almost all the food we need in the United States, but they've really decimated their Ag industry because they've taken irrigation water away from their Ag industry to try to meet municipal demand and industrial demand elsewhere. So really it's just, it's a whole parade of bad decisions that are being made."
She cast the stakes in national-security terms:
"Food independence is a national security issue. We do not want to become food dependent on Mexico or Central America or bringing all of our food in from other countries. We have the resources to grow healthy, high-quality food right here while also protecting our environment."
That argument carries weight beyond Western water politics. California's Central Valley is one of the most productive agricultural regions on the planet. When irrigation water gets diverted to meet urban shortfalls that better infrastructure could prevent, the downstream effect is felt at grocery stores and kitchen tables nationwide.
California officials pushed back on Hageman's characterization. A spokesperson for the California Natural Resources Agency told Fox News Digital that the state's Colorado River usage is at its lowest level since 1949 and that urban water agencies have cut their demand for imported water by 50 percent since 2000.
"California's Colorado River use is at its lowest since 1949, and our urban water agencies have reduced their demand for imports by 50% since 2000. Even with that, we continue to invest billions of dollars to increase water supply as we face changing conditions driven by climate change."
The spokesperson also dismissed Hageman's emphasis on desalination as a serious fix.
"Suggesting we move the world's fourth largest economy entirely to desalinated water is a deeply unserious proposal that ignores the underlying issues facing all users of the Colorado River. All Basin states must share the responsibility of caring for the Colorado River for generations to come, and that means real conservation from all seven states."
Those numbers deserve scrutiny. California may be drawing less from the Colorado River than it did in 1949, but the state's population and economy have grown enormously since then. Reduced usage from a historical peak does not mean the state has solved its supply problem, especially when the one major reservoir project on the books is a decade from completion and carries a $6.8 billion price tag. Cutting demand by half since 2000 while still needing the Trump administration to impose emergency cuts on your neighbors is not the success story Sacramento wants it to be.
Newsom himself acknowledged the severity of the situation when the Trump administration imposed its cuts on the Lower Basin. He called the order "a necessary step to protect a river that 40 million Americans depend on, at a time when climate change is driving a regional water crisis that makes every drop of water count." He added that "California continues to lead the way forward, growing our economy while cutting our Colorado River water use to the lowest level since 1949."
But his next sentence gave away the game. Newsom said any "long-term solution must share responsibility fairly across all seven states in recognition of the new reality of the Colorado River."
Hageman's entire argument is that California has been shifting responsibility to other states for years, by refusing to build desalination plants, blocking new dams, letting infrastructure decay, and draining agricultural water to cover the gap. Calling for "shared responsibility" after decades of underinvestment is a way of asking Wyoming ranchers and Arizona farmers to keep subsidizing California's choices.
The seven states could not agree on an updated water-sharing framework on their own. That failure forced the Trump administration to act. And while all seven states bear some share of the challenge, only one of them borders the Pacific Ocean, sits on the world's fourth-largest economy, and still cannot build a desalination plant without getting tied up in environmental lawsuits.
When a state with California's resources and coastline keeps coming back to a shared river because its own political class won't build anything, the problem is not the river, it's the politics.
