See the full article below carried in yesterday’s Politico California Climate Newsletter, written by Camille Von Kaenel. Thanks to Camille for the permission to re-print and to Jon at SF Baykeeper for being so right in this piece.
Newsom and Trump both want to be water king
02/05/2025 09:00 PM EST
THE ART OF THE DEAL: President Donald Trump said he’d withhold wildfire disaster aid to California unless Gov. Gavin Newsom goes his way on water. Newsom appears to have gotten the message.
The governor has been working hard to show he also wants to send more water to the state’s farmers and cities ahead of his trip to Washington, D.C., today, where he met with lawmakers and Trump to make the pitch for federal recovery funds for the Los Angeles fires.
It’s not a huge policy pivot for the governor, whom environmental groups have long lambasted for waiving some environmental rules in the sensitive Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to export more water and pushing for a tunnel there to reroute more flows south. But Newsom’s tone has shifted, in line with his strategy to work with rather than antagonize the president, and he’s being more blunt than before.
“For as long as I’ve been involved in California water, we’ve been waiting for this particular circumstance,” said Johnny Amaral, chief of external affairs for the Friant Water Authority, one of the biggest recipients of federal water deliveries in the Central Valley. “We’re at a moment now where the state administration and the federal administration are both saying, ‘I will be better at exporting water than the other guy.’”
So far, there isn’t a deal. GOP Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who met with Newsom today, said shortly after that some sort of conditions on disaster aid “wouldn’t be unreasonable” as a way to get the rest of Congress on board. He also said that he didn’t think there would be a deal on water quite yet: “It’s two guys watching what the other guy’s doing right now,” he told POLITICO’s Josh Siegel.
Trump and Newsom talked, in private, for over an hour and a half Wednesday afternoon in the Oval Office. In a video posted to social media afterwards, Newsom said he had a “successful day.” A press release from the governor’s office emphasized Newsom’s requests for federal aid and “appreciation for the Trump Administration’s early collaboration.”
The stage is set. When Trump put out executive orders targeting California water management, Newsom’s message was that the orders were misguided not because they might override state law, but because they might actually result in less water deliveries.
Then Newsom followed up with an executive order of his own on Friday echoing Trump’s own directives almost word for word. Newsom’s order directs state agencies to “maximize” ways to capture rain from the rainstorms hitting California, including by bypassing existing rules to send as much of the flood waters underground for later use as possible. The order also tells state agencies to report back to the governor’s office on any rules or laws that could be suspended to store even more water. (Federal agencies have a similar task.)
Environmental groups called the order a “page from Trump’s playbook.”
“He’s definitely competing with Donald Trump on who can destroy the Bay most,” Jon Rosenfield, senior scientist at the San Francisco Baykeeper, said of Newsom.
The atmospheric river that hit California over the past couple of days gave Newsom and Trump a real-world opportunity to flex their water muscles.
California state officials touted their increased pumping to divert storm water into aqueducts for use by cities and farmers. The increased pumping, they detailed, is allowed under the new rules for operating the state’s water infrastructure that the Newsom and Biden administrations wrote to replace Trump’s.
And the Trump administration took advantage of the coming storm to dump water from two Central Valley reservoirs downstream, which Trump praised as “beautiful water flow” despite local farmers saying the move emptied the irrigation water they depend on during the summer.
The tweet from Newsom almost writes itself: “Hey farmers, Trump’s wasting your water, and I’m not.” But Newsom stayed mum and let Trump claim his victory. — CvK
###