[env-trinity] Politico: DOGE is hobbling Trump’s plan to unleash California’s

[Tom Stokely]

    Can anyone verify that it's the Carr PowerHouse and Clear Creek Tunnel repairs that this article mentions as being shut down by DOGE?

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/28/trump-california-water-doge-00206796 California 
 
 DOGE is hobbling Trump’s plan to unleash California’s water 
 
Sharp staffing cuts at the Bureau of Reclamation are causing panic among the farm districts that Trump says he wants to help.
               
 Among those fired are employees who were working on a power plant upgrade near Shasta Dam in Northern California. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP 
  
By Annie Snider and Camille von Kaenel

02/28/2025 04:49 PM EST
    
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SACRAMENTO, California — DOGE-ordered firings at the federal agency responsible for delivering water to farms and cities across California are getting in the way of President Donald Trump’s order to maximize the state’s water supplies.
 
The Bureau of Reclamation’s California office has lost 10 percent of its staff due to buyouts and orders by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to fire short-tenured employees, according to three people close to the office who were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation.
 
DOGE’s cuts are already hurting Reclamation’s ability to move water through a sprawling system of pumps, canals and reservoirs to roughly a third of the state’s farmland — and impeding the agency’s ability to ratchet up deliveries in line with Trump’s demand, the people said.
            
The sharp cuts being leveled on Reclamation mirror those being imposed by the Trump administration across the federal government as Musk’s team of aides and other agencies have sought to slash spending. But their impact on a dusty corner of the federal bureaucracy that has taken outsized importance in the president’s mind offers a case study in how DOGE’s bulldozer approach stands to upend one of the president’s dearest policy goals.

Trump’s long-running feud with state Democrats over water restrictions escalated in January when the president falsely linked hydrants that had run dry during the Los Angeles wildfires to those restrictions. His first month in office was marked by an obsessive focus on the state’s water issues, with the White House issuing not one, but two executive orders on the topic and ordering an abrupt water dump from a pair of dams.

Reclamation’s terminated employees — some 100 of the agency’s 1,000-odd staff in California — include civil and mechanical engineers, plant mechanics and resource managers responsible for land acquisition and permitting, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

Among those fired are employees who were working on a power plant upgrade near Shasta Dam in Northern California, according to one of the people, a Reclamation employee. That facility, which helps move water through the federal system, has been sitting disassembled for weeks after the Trump administration froze funding for it under an order halting spending tied to the bipartisan infrastructure law. That funding may soon be released, but now key staffers hired to do the work have been fired, the Reclamation employee said.

Agency staff say the impacts were avoidable. “We could have made the 10 percent cuts, if we’d been allowed to, much more easily, with far less impact to the mission,” the agency employee said. “Instead, it’s been this baseball bat that’s been taken to it, and the targets that they’ve hit are mission-critical.”

The firing of probationary employees hit Reclamation’s California office particularly hard because it had staffed up over the past year to fill what had been a 30 percent vacancy rate. Now, Reclamation as a whole is drawing up plans for a 40 percent reduction in staffing on orders from DOGE, the three people said.
         The cuts have alarmed the agricultural water districts that Trump has long aligned himself with, spurring more than a dozen of them to write Interior Secretary Doug Burgum this week to defend the staff and call for a “strategic and thoughtful” approach to any additional cuts at Reclamation, which his department oversees.
“The elimination of Reclamation’s staff would merely compromise its ability to fulfill its mission of delivering water and power without significantly promoting the goal of increasing the federal coffers,” the letter says.

Interior spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said by email that short-term impacts to operations at the Shasta power station are being “mitigated” and “immediate mission fulfillment is not expected to be affected.”

“We will always prioritize our resources to ensure we are delivering reliable and safe operations of these facilities,” she said.

Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not reply to requests for comment.

The backstory

Trump has been infatuated with California water issues for nearly a decade, frequently lambasting the tiny endangered fish at the heart of the state’s fish-versus-farmers water wars and mocking Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state Democrats over water policy.

Within his first week in office, Trump issued two executive orders directing agencies to maximize California water supplies, and dispatched DOGE employees to a Bureau of Reclamation pumping plant in the state’s water hub.

DOGE claimed victory on social media after that visit, when Reclamation restarted a pump that had been offline for maintenance. Many employees at the federal agency saw that announcement as a meaningless publicity stunt. So they were shocked when the White House shortly thereafter ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to hastily release water from two Central Valley dams — a move that wasted the water and nearly flooded downstream farms, according to local officials.

Now, DOGE’s staffing moves are having very real repercussions on Reclamation’s ability to carry out Trump’s stated goal of delivering more water.

The fallout 

The impact of the staffing shortage on water deliveries to farms could soon be even more severe due to planned staffing cuts related to the pumping facility DOGE employees visited last month.

Near the Jones Pumping Plant is a facility that catches endangered salmon before they can enter the pumps that export water to Central Valley farmers. Its operations are essential to carrying out Trump’s order to maximize water deliveries, since federal environmental rules — including those crafted by the first Trump administration — only allow the pumps to run if the fish collection facility is active.
          
Seven staff there are within their first year of employment. Agency leaders intervened to shield them from the first wave of firings, but some of them are on the list to be fired soon in a second wave of terminations, the Reclamation employee said. Four of the employees physically operate the facility, while three are fish biologists.

“The kinds of things that we’re being directed to try to maximize supplies is critically dependent on the optimal functioning of that facility,” the employee said.

Morale at the regional office has hit rock bottom, the three people close to the office said, with further firings and retirements expected. The region’s director, Karl Stock, is among the employees who took a deferred retirement, they said. Stock, an agency veteran who joined Reclamation in 2001, declined to comment.

The cuts are putting the California water suppliers that have celebrated Trump’s water promises in a difficult position as they ask for policy changes to get more water while reckoning with the risks to basic functions.

The fourteen local water officials who sent the letter to Burgum this week primarily manage small water agricultural districts in the northern part of the Central Valley — not the powerful water districts in the southern San Joaquin Valley whose lobbyists include Trump’s former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who remains close to his new administration.

In their letter, they endorsed the goal of overall efficiency and said they want to see the “badly outdated” water infrastructure system improved, especially by loosening the environmental rules limiting how much water can be pumped out of Northern California rivers.

But, they wrote, it is mostly their local water agencies — funded by water sales to individual farmers — who pay for the Bureau of Reclamation’s services through contracts for water deliveries — not federal taxpayers. Power production at the dams also generates significant revenue for the federal Treasury Department.

“It is important to note that elimination of Reclamation staff will not further the goal of achieving significant cost savings to the American people,” they wrote.

Not only do the job cuts imperil Trump’s agenda to increase water supplies, they wrote, but also the agency’s basic contracts to deliver water to its paying customers. The Central Valley Project operated by the Bureau of Reclamation moves water through a 450-mile series of dams, aqueducts, pumps and pipes from the wetter, far northern part of California to some of the state’s driest regions in the heart of the agriculturally rich southern San Joaquin Valley, irrigating roughly a third of the state’s farmland, or three million acres.

The future

Reclamation earlier this week forecast it would be able to provide 75 percent of the summer water under contract with agricultural water districts in the northern part of the Central Valley and 35 percent in the southern part of the Central Valley.

But delivering on that promise requires careful modeling to determine when runoff is expected to flow down rivers and into reservoirs as well as the ability to physically maintain and operate the pumps that move water around the state.
         
“It is critical that Reclamation retains experienced staff to continue fulfilling its mission (and its contractual obligations) of delivering reliable water and power supplies to its paying contractors,” the letter says.
 
The authority managing water for cities in the Sacramento region, meanwhile, echoed some of the same language in its own letter and raised an additional alarm bell about the risk to downstream communities, like Sacramento, that depend on the Bureau of Reclamation’s dams to prevent flooding.
 
“It is my assessment that the organization is already extremely lean on staffing, and further workforce cuts would jeopardize its mission and place the American people, who live in or near key federal water facilities such as dams, in danger,” wrote Jim Peifer, the executive director of the Sacramento Regional Water Authority.
                 
   - Filed under: 
   - California, 
   - Donald Trump, 
   - Water, 
   - Elon Musk, 
   - DOGE
                
DOGE is hobbling Trump’s plan to unleash California’s waterSharp staffing cuts at the Bureau of Reclamation are causing panic among the farm districts that Trump says he w...





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