Biden Colorado River official blasts Trump’s California water moves

By Annie Snider | 01/29/2025 11:43 AM EST

Anne Castle said in her resignation letter that President Donald Trump’s politicization of California water issues is undercutting delicate negotiations over the West’s most important river.

President Donald Trump’s gusher of executive actions on California water issues is undermining high-stakes negotiations over the future of the West’s most important river, a Biden administration official with a key role in those talks said Tuesday.

Anne Castle, Biden’s appointee to the Upper Colorado River Commission, raised the concerns in her resignation letter Tuesday. She said by email the Trump administration requested her resignation Monday.

Castle called it “an existential time for the river,” which supplies 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of irrigated farmland across seven states and the country of Mexico. Negotiations over rules to govern it in the coming decades are “slow, messy and cumbersome” — but ultimately the best path forward, she argued.

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“Edicts imposed from outside the Basin, such as recent proclamations concerning California water, based on an inadequate understanding of the plumbing and motivated by political retaliation, upend carefully crafted compromises, create winners and losers, and unnecessarily spawn the potential to adversely affect the lives of millions of people as well as the ecosystems on which they depend,” she wrote.

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