U.S. Department of the Interior

A federal plan for the Colorado River means big water cuts for Arizona. The Phoenix and Tucson areas will be hit hard. City leaders say they can keep taps flowing, but solutions will be expensive.

Nevada's lawsuit against the Interior Department marks a major shakeup for water management across the seven states in the river basin.

The Department of the Interior's final Environmental Impact Statement comes after years of stalled negotiations. What you think of it depends on which groups of states you stand with: The Upper Basin or the Lower Basin.

Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington could take over management, but hunting will not immediately be on the table.

An oral history project from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has gathered video testimonies from over 360 Indigenous survivors across 19 states. The stories will be preserved in the Library of Congress.

Since early 2025, the Department of the Treasury in Utah has had 1,660 fewer employees. Other industries have expanded enough to swallow the impacts of federal cuts.

The canceled rule allowed public property to be leased for restoration in the same way that oil companies lease land for drilling. It was a key part of efforts under former President Joe Biden to refocus the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

Estevan López, New Mexico's water negotiator, said talks resumed in March, and the upper and lower basin states are using a short-term proposal from Nevada as the starting point.

It's known by the name Velvet-Wood, and the project's Canadian owner got the go-ahead back in May as the first to undergo an "accelerated," two-week environmental review, during which tribes had only seven days to reply.

State negotiators entered the meeting at a years-long impasse over how water restrictions should be managed during dry years. They now have less than two weeks until a federal Feb. 14 deadline.

Four days of negotiations in a Salt Lake City conference room earlier in January did not appear to have sparked a breakthrough.

The proposals range from taking "no action" to a scenario that might result in water cuts to the lower basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona. One alternative developed in partnership with conservation groups would incentivize proactive conservation of the river.