A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers wants water users in four Colorado River Basin states to have more time to cut water use through a much-debated conservation program that pays water users to cut back.
The lawmakers, including Democratic Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet of Colorado, are hoping to extend funding for the System Conservation Pilot Program, saying it will help people explore more ways to respond to prolonged drought in the overstressed river basin. But some Colorado water experts question whether the program can actually deliver on its promises, and even if Congress approves the bill, time is short for potential participants to put their ideas into action before the summer growing season.
“The Colorado River’s survival depends on our ability to adapt to a drier future,” Hickenlooper, a lead sponsor for the bill, said in a news release Tuesday. “With SCPP, we spend less time hand-wringing, and more energy finding innovative ways to conserve the West’s most precious resource.”
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org.
The bill, introduced Tuesday, aims to reauthorize the Bureau of Reclamation’s ability to spend money on the pilot program through 2026.
The program has been paying farmers, ranchers and others in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to voluntarily cut water use for two years, but the funding authorization expired in December.
The Senate passed a bill to extend that authorization in December, but the effort stalled in the House, causing the program to lapse.
Now, supporters are trying again with new lawmakers in Congress, and the bill would have to be approved by President Donald Trump, who issued an order Monday for federal agencies to immediately pause spending money from parts of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The act is the Biden administration’s climate change and health care law, and it has been the sole funding source for the pilot program since 2023. Trump’s order throws billions of dollars of federal funding, lawfully designated under the act, into limbo.
When asked about the odds of the bill receiving funding in light of the executive order, Hickenlooper’s office emphasized the effort’s bipartisan support.
“SCPP allows us to learn how to make voluntary conservation work well,” Hickenlooper’s staff said in a prepared statement. “Just like any pilot program it’s an experiment, but one absolutely worth seeing through.”
The pilot program initially ran from 2015 to 2018 and paid participants — mostly farmers and ranchers — to cut their water use by fallowing fields or switching to crops that need less water.
Officials re-launched it in 2022, with $125 million in federal funds, after water storage in key Colorado River reservoirs fell to historic lows and was projected to fall even further. The move was part of the states’ response to the crisis and a federal call for states to cut back on their water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet in 2023, officials said.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual use of two to three households.
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Colorado and its three partner states in the Upper Colorado River Basin say conservation efforts like the pilot program show they’re putting in effort to help stabilize the river system.
“As drought wreaks havoc on the Colorado River system, Colorado and Upper Basin states are doing their part and stepping up to conserve real water,” Bennet said in the news release.
Other Republican lawmakers from Wyoming and Utah, who cosponsored the bill, said the program gives farmers and ranchers the resources they need to conserve Colorado River water and find new ways to address drought issues. It’s a way to keep agricultural economies strong while supporting the environment, they said in the news release.
Some critics of the program question its effectiveness, saying the water reductions are small and one-year projects are too short.
In 2023 and 2024, the pilot program has paid people across all four states about $44.6 million to cut water use by 101,400 acre-feet. That’s about 3% to 5% of the cutbacks called for by the federal government.
In 2024, the program paid about $7.2 million to cut use by 14,200 acre-feet in Colorado.
Although farmers and ranchers cut water use on their land, the “saved” water simply flows downstream to the next water user in line. (Colorado officials say the extra flows help nourish ecosystems that might otherwise face drier conditions.)
Steve Wolff, general manager of Southwestern Water Conservation District, said he’s all for water conservation but he’s disappointed the bill is being reintroduced with short-term projects.
“If you want to do true water conservation, you need to set up five- and 10-year programs so (agricultural) producers on the ground can work it into their business plans,” he said. “This one-year shot is a complete waste of time.”
Irrigators in the Grand Valley say the program slightly reduced flows to an irrigation company and harmed the local agricultural community, according to Aspen Journalism. The Grand Valley Irrigation Company announced in September that its shareholders cannot participate in the program without approval from the company’s board.
Jennifer Gimbel, senior water policy scholar for the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University, supported efforts to conserve water but once the money goes away, people start using water again. She questioned whether conservation would be enough to help the Colorado River.
“All of this was to conserve, conserve, conserve. We threw hundreds of millions of dollars at conserving,” said Gimbel, who previously held leadership positions in the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation. “It’s not going to fix the system.”