Trump's release of California water is ill-advised and ineffective

On January 28st, 2025, under the misguided guidance of President Trump, the United States Corps of Engineers gave a notice of just one hour to California officials that soon, two major California water reservoirs would be opened to allow water to flow southward at maximum capacity. During the hour, officials scrambled to notify farms downstream of potential flooding. [1]

The Trump Administration has repeatedly blamed California for allegedly maintaining insufficient water flow from Northern to Southern California, which, the Trump Administration insisted, was the primary cause of water shortages in North Los Angeles fire hydrants. [2] In specific posts on X, Trump demanded that "Governor Newscum [sic]" immediately expand water flow from Northern to Southern California due to California being a "dry, starving, burning State." [3] Therefore, for the purposes of this debate, and for judging the success and wisdom of Trump's aforementioned policy, I would like to put forth that the Trump Administration's apparent rationale for the water release is that it would be sufficient to solve the issue of water shortages in Los Angeles fire hydrants, which has hindered proper wildfire response and control. However, due to California's seasonal droughts it would also be reasonable to discuss the merits of the aforementioned policy in the question of generally maintaining a more adequate supply of water for Southern California.

In order to show that Trump's water release policy is ineffective, I will show in this section that there is a large gap between the rationale of the policy and the actual results thereof. 

In an excerpt from factcheck.org, a hydroclimatologist and a co-founder of the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick, commented that "...reservoirs in Southern California are more full now than they normally are for this time of year. And the problem has been that no urban water system is capable of providing enough water for massive urban wildfires..." [4] Gleick's statement implies that while there have been significant infrastructural roadblocks to effective firefighting, none of them had anything to do with the volume of California's North-to-South water flow. Therefore, the real problem was one of delivering water across the city of Los Angeles to fight the urban wildfires, not one of accumulating enough water in Southern California reservoirs.

This would imply that in the sense of solving the issue of water scarcity in the recent firefighting operations, opening water flow from North to South has been sparsely (if at all) effective for achieving that. Therefore, in this sense, the policy may be called ineffective. Seeing as Gleick also mentions that Southern California already has a larger-than-average-volume of water in its reserves, this would imply that the issue of drought and general water scarcity in Southern California does not significantly, or at all, improve from obtaining more water from the north. In addition, water strategist Barry Nelson called the water release "dumb" also noted that the reservoirs which Trump has opened were not connected to Southern California. [5] In conclusion, even IF, Trump's general policy of maximizing water flow from California's North to the South was broadly effective, the specific action in question would not yield such results because the water would never reach Southern California in the first place.

To finish this section, Trump's policy of opening water flow in California can be said to have been enacted not for the sake of faithfully assisting Los Angeles in solving water scarcity or performing large-scale firefighting operations, but for the sake of having acted on the national issue itself. This seems especially evident as, visibly, the Trump administration did not perform the necessary research to fully determine the causes of California's water scarcity before deciding to resolve these causes. Instead, the Trump Administration opted for a rather flashy and bold, but not necessarily effective, solution.

In order to determine whether Trump's policy of opening California's water flow was ill-advised, it is essential to look at both the apparent short-term and implied long-term outcomes of the policy.

In addition to saying that opening California's water flow is ineffective at solving any current issues regarding water scarcity in Southern California and that it could actually plausibly cause a destructive flood, Nelson also noted that the water accumulating in the reservoirs was specifically being conserved during Winter so that it could come into use in Summer, when the brunt of California's drought would always arrive. [5] This would imply that the Trump Administration's decision to pursue the policy in question was extremely shortsighted and could potentially leave farmers in California with no good options for irrigation during Summer, which could, in turn, severely affect the output of California's agricultural industry. Dan Vink, a long-standing water manager in Tulare County, elaborated on the issue by saying the following: “A decision to take summer water from local farmers and dump it out of these reservoirs shows a complete lack of understanding of how the system works and sets a very dangerous precedent." [6]

In conclusion, by implementing the policy in question, the Trump Administration would blatantly meddle in the water conservation policy in California and defy the warnings of actual qualified experts on the topic of water management and enact a short-sighted and rushed policy the effects, merits and boundaries of which have not been properly researched. This would be sufficient to determine that Trump's water release policy in California is ill-advised.

The Trump's administration policy of opening California's water flow was, at best, ineffective in solving for California's issues pertinent to water scarcity, and at worst, ill-advised in that it was implemented recklessly and brought with itself far more risks than benefits.

[1]  www.politico.com/news/2025/01/31/trump-california-water-00201909

[2]  https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113793724958051185

[3] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113800079508041805

[4] https://www.factcheck.org/2025/01/trumps-blame-claims-about-wildfire-response/

[5] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/expert-describes-trump-ordered-northern-california-water-release-dumb/

[6] https://sjvwater.org/trumps-emergency-water-order-responsible-for-water-dump-from-tulare-county-lakes/