The Problem

America's water system is unsafe, unaffordable, and breaking in the face of climate change.

Every day, the country's water systems lose 6.75 billion gallons of drinking water, 19.5 percent of what they treat, to leaks, breaks, and bad meters, costing $6.4 billion a year in lost revenue. Meanwhile, somewhere between 4 million and more than 12 million homes still get their water through lead service lines. Roughly 5.6 million Americans are served by water with nitrate at or above half the legal limit, a level tied to elevated cancer risk, and an estimated 2.1 million more draw private well water with arsenic above the federal limit. By one USGS estimate, the untreated groundwater that 71 to 95 million Americans rely on carries detectable PFAS, the man-made "forever chemicals" that build up in the body and never break down. And between 1.1 and 2.2 million Americans live without running water or basic plumbing.

The nation has 50,000 separate water systems, each run by a different entity, each with its own budget, its own maintenance backlog, and its own capacity to respond to a crisis. Most of them are too small to finance major upgrades on their own. No private investor will coordinate 50,000 entities. No current grant program can reach them all. The result is a patchwork of crumbling infrastructure where the richest cities get by and everyone else falls further behind.

Climate change is making all of it worse.

Communities across the country are hit by extreme drought and catastrophic flooding, sometimes in the same region within the same year. Extreme weather is drawing down the water sources the country depends on. Lakes Mead and Powell, the reservoirs that store the Colorado River for Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Southern California, have fallen to about a quarter full, and Lake Powell hit a record low in August 2026. The rules that have governed the Colorado since 2007 run out at the end of 2026, and when the seven states that share it could not agree on what should replace them, the Interior Department imposed its own in August: a 10-year federal framework, with operating rules set two years at a time, starting with cuts that require Arizona, California, and Nevada to use 1.25 million acre-feet a year less in 2027 and 2028. Nevada sued three days later. Elephant Butte Reservoir on the Rio Grande fell to 1.4 percent of capacity in July 2026, its lowest level since 1971. San Antonio cut pumping from the Edwards Aquifer by 44 percent in 2025, an emergency its water authority had never declared in 32 years. In Miami, the sea is seeping into the aquifer the city drinks from, turning it salty.

The 2021 infrastructure law put billions into water systems, PFAS cleanup, and lead pipe replacement, but its last installment came in 2026. And in May 2026, the Trump administration proposed dropping the EPA's limits on four of the six regulated PFAS compounds and letting water systems push the deadline for the other two from 2029 to 2031.

The Mission

The Mission for Water has two jobs: to make every tap in America safe to drink from, and to make sure the country always has enough water to go around, even as the climate lurches between flood and drought.

As with the other missions, the Mission for Water will set national standards and give utilities generous support to meet them. The country's 50,000 water systems will stay locally run wherever they can manage it, but each will be held to one National Water Standard for leaks, contaminants, and reuse, and each will have the money and help to get there. Low-cost federal financing will hold down water bills, and a permanent assistance program will make sure no household loses water because it cannot pay.

Alongside the standards comes a wave of new water infrastructure: new pipes to replace the ones that leak and leach lead, treatment that strips out the poisons, repaired dams and levees that protect communities from floods, stormwater capture that catches rain where it falls, recharge basins that bank wet-year floodwater in the nation's aquifers as insurance against the dry years, and recycling plants that clean wastewater and use it again close to home. Every piece is already working somewhere in America: Los Angeles catches its storms, Arizona banks its river water, Orange County turns wastewater back into drinking water. The buildout will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction, engineering, and treatment operations, bring new income to rural communities that host water storage on their land, end plumbing poverty, and make the country more resilient.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation will act as the master developer, providing the long-term capital and coordination that no private investor can deliver. It will make 30-year, low-interest loans that match the actual life of the pipes and plants; buy the municipal water bonds that smaller towns cannot sell on good terms; place bulk orders that drive down the cost of leak sensors, PFAS filters, and recycling equipment; and pay the farmers and landowners who host water storage or free up water for others.

In the West, where the rivers are promised to more users than they can supply, the Mission will build water markets. Each over-promised river will be capped at what it actually carries, its water divided into shares that farms and cities can buy, sell, and lease, and its disputes settled at the table. Farmers who choose to sell or lease their water will be paid to free up what cities, rivers, and tribes need, and no farm will be forced to sell.

Congress will set the rules the money enforces, writing the PFAS limits and the lead replacement deadline into law so no future agency can quietly roll them back.

Solutions

Solution 1: The Water Guarantee

Every American has the right to water that is safe to drink, delivered by a working pipe, at a price they can manage. The Mission will guarantee it.

Three players will deliver it. Congress will write the standards and deadlines into law. The EPA will enforce them. And the RFC will pay for the work, which the country's water utilities will carry out.

Lead-Free America by 2037. Estimates of how many lead service lines remain range widely, from about 4 million to more than 12 million; the true number is still disputed, because millions of lines have never been checked to see what they are made of. At several thousand dollars a line, replacing all of them runs somewhere between $45 and $90 billion. The 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements already require every lead service line replaced by December 31, 2037, at a minimum of 10 percent per year. That deadline is under attack. Water utilities have sued to overturn it, and a federal appeals court heard the case in September 2026, so Congress will write it into law. And without the financing to back it, local backlogs in major cities will blow past that deadline and push full replacement into the 2070s. The RFC will fund the mandate so it is actually met: the worst-exposed and poorest communities finished within the first five years, and every lead service line in the country eliminated by the 2037 federal deadline, sooner where crews and access allow.

Getting the lead out of American homes is a job this Mission shares with the Mission for Homes and Buildings. The utility replaces the service line that runs from the water main to the house, and the regional American Building Corporations that run the Buildings mission remove the lead solder, fixtures, and paint inside it. Where both reach the same block, they will schedule the work together, so no family's street is torn up twice. The RFC's money will reach every utility in the country through whichever tools fit the job, from direct loans and bond purchases to lending through the state revolving funds that already channel most federal water money to small systems. Utilities already had to file lead inventories in 2024, but millions of lines are still listed as unknown material; Congress will require every utility to identify those lines by Year 2 and begin replacement by Year 3, with annual progress benchmarks that keep the federal money flowing.

Every utility taking RFC financing will replace the full line, including the stretch on private property, at no cost to the owner and on a block-by-block schedule, and will adopt the kind of local ordinance Newark used to give its crews the legal right to reach the private side of the line.

Reinstate and enforce PFAS standards. The EPA finalized maximum contaminant levels for six PFAS compounds in April 2024, with compliance due by 2029, and the Trump administration has since proposed keeping only the limits for two of them, PFOA and PFOS, and pushing the deadline to 2031. On Day One, the EPA will reopen rulemaking to restore the full 2024 standards, and Congress will then write them into law with a phased schedule: systems taking RFC financing will comply by 2031, and every affected system by 2034, paired with the RFC financing and bulk purchasing below and the controls on PFAS at its source in the Mission for Toxins, to make the schedule achievable.

Treating one system for PFAS costs $500,000 to more than $5 million up front, plus $50,000 to $500,000 a year to run. National compliance costs are estimated at $1.5 billion to $3.8 billion annually. The burden falls disproportionately on small systems that serve the fewest people and have the least capacity to pay. The proven ways to strip PFAS out of water are all forms of filtering: beds of activated carbon that the chemicals cling to, special resins that swap them out of the water, and membranes fine enough to strain them out under pressure.

Every affected system in the country will receive financing for PFAS treatment through the RFC's full toolkit: direct loans, bond purchases, and grants for the systems too poor to carry debt. Bulk procurement orders for carbon and resin systems will drive unit costs down. And the polluters will pay their share. The money recovered from the companies that made and released these chemicals, through settlements like the multibillion-dollar ones water utilities have already won against 3M and DuPont, together with the polluter-pays fee the Mission for Toxins restores, will shift the cost of treatment off local water bills and onto those companies. RFC lending carries the cost in the years before that money arrives. The Mission for Toxins sets the PFAS rules and makes the polluters pay, and this Mission builds the treatment.

Destroy the PFAS. The treatment technologies above capture PFAS and leave it intact. What comes out the other end is spent carbon, exhausted resin, and concentrated brine that still holds the forever chemicals, and today most of it is buried in landfills, where it can leach back out, or incinerated, which can release PFAS into the air if the temperature is not high enough. Emerging technologies can actually break PFAS apart, such as supercritical water oxidation, which uses extreme heat and pressure to shatter the molecules, and electrochemical treatment, which runs an electric current through the waste to do the same. These are proven today on concentrated wastes, spent filter media, and firefighting foam, but have not yet been run on the huge volumes of dilute brine a national program will generate. The RFC will bring them into wide use the way the Mission for Toxins lays out, paying companies that deliver working destruction systems at set cost and throughput targets and guaranteeing minimum purchases of the equipment, and it will fund the concentration step that makes destruction practical at scale. Once destruction is working at commercial scale and a reasonable cost, Congress will require that captured PFAS be destroyed, with the cost recovered from the polluters that made it.

Agricultural runoff and nitrate contamination. Roughly 5.6 million Americans are served by community water systems with nitrate at or above five milligrams per liter, half the legal limit and a level epidemiology links to elevated colorectal and other cancers; some exceed the legal limit outright. The burden falls disproportionately on Hispanic communities and the rural Midwest and West. There are no comprehensive national cleanup cost estimates and no direct federal funding mechanism targeting agricultural water pollution.

Nitrate treatment for affected rural water systems will be financed through the RFC. The nitrate comes from fertilizer washing off farm fields, so the RFC will also run a dedicated Agricultural Water Quality Program that pays to stop it at the source: helping farmers use less fertilizer and time it better, and plant buffer strips and cover crops that soak up the runoff before it reaches the water. Keeping the nitrate out of the water is far cheaper than filtering it back out, and the work is coordinated with the deeper changes to how the land is farmed in the Mission for Farming.

Arsenic remediation. An estimated 2.1 million Americans draw private well water with arsenic above the EPA's limit of 10 parts per billion, wells that no federal standard covers, and hundreds of small community water systems, mostly in the Southwest, still exceed the limit. Tens of millions more drink water with lower but still elevated levels that carry a lifetime cancer risk. The problem concentrates in small rural systems and private wells drawing on naturally high-arsenic groundwater across the Southwest, California's Central Valley, the Upper Midwest, and New England. The RFC will finance arsenic treatment for every affected system through the same toolkit used for lead and PFAS, prioritizing the small systems that cannot carry the cost alone, and will fund testing and treatment help for the private wells the rules have never covered. Removing arsenic is well understood. Most small systems will use simple, low-maintenance iron-based filters that the arsenic sticks to, and others can push the water through a fine membrane that leaves the arsenic behind.

End plumbing poverty. Between 1.1 million and 2.2 million Americans lack access to running water or basic plumbing. The estimates vary because the problem is chronically undercounted. While 71 percent of plumbing poverty cases are urban as of 2021, the most severe rural hotspots are concentrated on the Navajo Nation, in Appalachia, and across the rural South.

The USDA Water and Environmental Programs, the primary federal mechanism for rural water infrastructure, serve communities under 10,000 people through loans and grants. But their budget is chronically insufficient, and their scope does not match the scale of the problem.

The RFC will directly finance and coordinate the construction of water and wastewater systems for every community in the country that currently lacks them. On the Navajo Nation, where some families haul water for hours to fill tanks, the RFC will work with tribal authorities to build piped water systems. In Appalachia, where aging coal-era infrastructure has left communities with contaminated or unreliable supply, the RFC will finance complete system rebuilds. In the rural South, where "straight-piping" (discharging raw sewage directly into yards and ditches) persists because septic systems were never installed, the RFC will finance both water supply and sanitary sewer connections. Crews will be hired through the RFC's federal staffing agency on the Mission's standard labor terms, set out in the Workforce chapter, and in the remote communities where no private contractor will bid, the Federal Construction Corps, also chartered in the Workforce chapter, will take the job under RFC financing.

Keep it affordable. Water and sewer bills have more than tripled since 2000, rising at over twice the pace of inflation, and today an estimated 12 to 19 million American households, as many as one in seven, cannot afford their water. More than half a million households a year have their water shut off for nonpayment.

Congress will create a permanent low-income water assistance program, run through the states like the long-standing federal help with home heating bills, funded at the level the EPA itself estimates is needed, roughly $5 to $9 billion a year. No household will lose water service because it cannot pay.

Fair rates. The RFC's low-cost capital is itself an affordability tool. Water bills are high in large part because small utilities borrow at high rates to fix aging systems and pass the cost straight to customers. Thirty-year loans at low interest, spread over the life of the pipes, cut the financing cost of every upgrade and keep it off the household bill. Utilities that take RFC financing will adopt rate structures that keep basic water for essential needs affordable while charging more for heavy discretionary use.

What this delivers: Every lead service line in the country replaced by the 2037 federal deadline. PFAS standards reinstated by statute and enforced with federal financing. Nitrate addressed through both treatment and source control; arsenic treatment financed for every affected system and private well. Running water and sanitary sewer service for every American household by 2039, a permanent end to plumbing poverty in the wealthiest country on earth. No American loses water service over an unpaid bill, backed by a permanent assistance program. The most vulnerable communities served first.

Solution 2: Plug the Leaks

The fifth of the country's treated water that goes missing every day mostly leaks out of aging pipes; the rest slips past meters and billing that fail to capture it. Fixing it is left to thousands of separate utilities, each deciding on its own when, and whether, to replace its pipes.

A National Water Loss Standard. "Non-revenue water" is the industry term for treated water that never reaches a paying customer. It includes water lost to leaks, pipe bursts, meter inaccuracies, and unauthorized use. If a utility treats 100 gallons and only bills for 80, its non-revenue water rate is 20 percent, close to the national average. Some small and rural systems lose more than 30 percent. By comparison, the best-performing countries hold non-revenue water in the mid-single digits: the Netherlands under 6 percent, Denmark and Japan under 8 percent. The United States has no national standard for water loss. Around 20 states do not even require utilities to measure it.

Congress will write a mandatory National Water Loss Standard into the National Water Standard. The standard will count the physical leaks in the pipes, the yardstick water engineers already use. Targets will be tiered by system size and density: large, dense utilities driven toward the world-class levels that Denmark, the Netherlands, and Japan reach, and smaller and rural systems held to a realistic level of leakage they can actually afford to hit. Every utility receiving federal water financing will measure and publicly report its losses every year. Each will start with a Restoration Pathway Study, an assessment of its pipes, contamination, water loss, and recycling capacity that ends in a binding plan to meet the National Water Standard. A utility that falls behind will first get mandatory technical assistance and conditions on how it manages, meters, and reports its water. If it still cannot keep up, it will be merged into a larger system or placed in temporary receivership. Only a utility that refuses in bad faith will lose its funding, because cutting off the poorest systems would take away the very money they need to fix the problem. Utilities that beat their targets will get first claim on RFC capital for expansion.

RFC-financed pipe replacement at scale. The lead lines in the first solution are one problem; the millions of miles of aging distribution mains that leak, burst, and fail are another, and fixing them is the larger job. The capital requirement for bringing American water infrastructure to a good state of repair runs $1.23 to $1.6 trillion over the next two decades, roughly half of it pipe replacement. The 10-year build funds the most urgent share of that need and puts the rest on a financed schedule. The RFC will provide 30-year, low-interest loans to large and mid-size utilities for systematic pipe replacement programs.

Why a new lender, when water loans already exist. The country already has two federal water lenders. The state revolving funds, which Congress stocks each year and the states lend out at low rates, have carried most federal water money since the late 1980s, and the EPA's WIFIA program lends directly to large projects. Both do good work, and the RFC will build on them, lending through the revolving funds to reach small systems. But neither is built for a need this size. The 2021 infrastructure law roughly quadrupled the revolving funds, to about $11 billion a year, and its last installment came in 2026. Congress has meanwhile been taking a growing share of the funds' regular money for earmarks, one-time grants to individual projects that never get repaid into the fund: in 2026, more than half of the clean water fund and nearly two-thirds of the drinking water fund. WIFIA has lent about $24 billion in total since its first loan in 2017, and because it can cover no more than 49 percent of a project, it serves mostly large utilities. Neither program sets a standard for what the money must accomplish or buys equipment in bulk. The RFC lends at the scale of the need, able to raise capital by selling its own bonds, independent of the yearly appropriations cycle. It ties its money to the National Water Standard, and it pools orders for pipe, sensors, and filters across thousands of utilities so that each one pays less.

Intelligent leak detection. The tools to find leaks before they burst are already on the market.

Acoustic sensors (from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars depending on scale) listen for the sound of pressurized water escaping pipes. Companies like Xylem, Kamstrup, and Orbis Intelligent Systems sell networked sensors that turn fire hydrants and water mains into leak-detection nodes. Orbis deployed 30 sensors in Missoula, Montana. The pilot found more than a dozen hidden leaks, and Missoula's broader leak-detection program is now pumping 3 million fewer gallons per day. Satellite-based detection (ASTERRA, originally developed to find water on Mars) uses radar to spot treated water in soil. Portland, Oregon, ran one satellite scan and found 160 leaks in four months, triple the annual rate from traditional surveys, saving 338 million gallons per year. Ninety-five percent of those leaks were invisible from street level. AI-powered analytics platforms (FIDO Tech, CivilSense) layer pattern recognition on top of sensor data. And simple smart-meter alerts work too: New York City's program sent nearly 48,000 high-use alerts to customers in 2025, heading off an estimated 1.7 billion gallons of waste and $29 million in bills.

Utilities are not buying them. Two-thirds of utilities report having a water loss program, yet mechanical meters still outnumber smart meters. Fragmented utilities lack the budget, workforce, regulatory mandate, and institutional capacity to adopt what already exists. Every utility receiving RFC capital for pipe replacement will be required to deploy intelligent leak detection as part of the package, and the RFC will buy sensors and smart meters in bulk to bring their price down.

Leak plans alongside new supply. The RFC will keep funding new supply for communities that need it, and every utility that receives any RFC financing for any purpose will be required to have a funded, enforceable leak reduction plan running alongside.

What this delivers: A national framework to stop losing a fifth of the country's treated water. Every utility on a funded pathway to a world-class level of leakage, measured properly and tiered by system size. Intelligent leak detection deployed at scale.

Solution 3: Catch the Rain

In a single wet year, California alone lets millions of acre-feet of floodwater run out to sea that it could have kept (an acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, roughly what one or two households use in a year). A national buildout of stormwater capture and aquifer recharge will turn those floods into stored water and make communities more resilient to flood and drought alike.

Water Batteries. In a wet year, take that floodwater and put it into the ground, to wait underground until a dry year needs it. The nation's aquifers, the porous layers of sand and rock beneath our feet, are natural reservoirs far larger than anything we could build on the surface; they cost little to fill, and unlike an open reservoir they lose nothing to evaporation. Floodwater is diverted from a swollen river or canal, spread across shallow basins or over farm fields, and left to soak down through the soil into the aquifer below; years later, wells pump it back up. California does this at every scale, from the USC Village system in Los Angeles, which can capture up to 98,000 gallons of runoff per storm, to the Santa Ana River Enhanced Recharge Project, which can bank up to 80,000 acre-feet in a wet year. In the wet winter of 2023, California recharged 4.1 million acre-feet this way, more than a big new reservoir holds, and still caught only a fraction of what ran off.

A recharge system is a chain of plumbing: gates to divert the floodwater, canals to carry it to ground that will absorb it, the basins or fields themselves, and wells to pump it back out. The basins are the cheap part, on the order of $100 to $150 for an acre-foot of water stored. The expensive part is the conveyance, moving huge, short-lived flood surges to the right ground fast enough, before the flood passes. The RFC will fund the canals, gates, and pump stations that most stormwater plans skip, and in flood-prone regions the same works do double duty: the channels that feed the aquifer also carry the flood away from homes.

The cheapest storage of all is the kind that pays rural America. Flooding farm fields in the wet season and letting the water sink in uses land and canals that already exist, so the added cost is small, and California alone has millions of acres of farmland suited to it, enough to soak up on the order of 3 million acre-feet in a wet year. Through Water Infrastructure Leases, the RFC will pay farmers a guaranteed annual sum to flood their fields in wet years and to host the basins, wells, and canals. Water storage becomes a profitable new crop, priced to compete with what the land earns from farming, and the Mission gets the land it needs without eminent domain. The same acres can host clean power under the Mission for Farming's Transition Leases, with the panels and batteries on the farm running the recharge pumps. In the Western basins on shares, the same farmer can also sell or lease water through the markets in Solution 5, so a single farm can earn from hosting power, from storing water, and from the water it chooses not to use. The Farming chapter tells the full story.

What recharge can and cannot do. What recharge can reliably deliver is a flow of stored water in wet years, on the order of a few million acre-feet a year nationally, concentrated in the West and the Central Valley where floodwater, permeable land, and depleted aquifers coincide. What recharge cannot do is undo a century of over-pumping. The country has drained roughly 810 million acre-feet of groundwater since 1900, and much of that space is gone for good, because as an aquifer empties the ground compacts and the storage collapses permanently. So the Mission treats recharge as drought insurance, banking wet-year flood flows to draw on in dry years. Paired with the metering and caps on large wells and the paid water purchases in Solution 5, recharge can halt the decline, though it cannot reverse it. And in a basin on shares, water a holder banks underground can be credited to their account like water stored behind a dam.

Fix the dams, and add storage where it counts. Underground banking is the cheapest new storage, but the country also has more than 92,000 dams already, and they are aging badly. Over 16,700 are high-hazard, meaning failure would kill people, and roughly 2,500 of those are rated in poor or unsatisfactory condition. Repairing the most critical dams will cost about $48 billion, and bringing all of the nation's non-federal dams up to standard will cost nearly $210 billion. The Oroville spillway failure in 2017 forced 188,000 people to evacuate; the Edenville dam failure in 2020 cascaded into the downstream Sanford Dam and flooded several mid-Michigan communities, forcing more than 10,000 people to evacuate. The RFC will finance the repair of the deficient high-hazard dams first, remove obsolete and dangerous small dams that hold back little water and much risk, and build selective new off-stream storage, such as California's proposed Sites Reservoir, which is nearing its final state water permit, to capture wet-year flows alongside the aquifer banks. The levees that protect towns from floods need the same attention, and thousands of miles of them are past their design life. The RFC will finance their repair alongside the dams, starting with the levees that protect the most people.

What this delivers: A national infrastructure buildout that captures a few million acre-feet of floodwater in wet years and banks it underground as drought insurance. Recharge that stabilizes the worst-depleted aquifers in the West and Central Valley. The cheapest storage in the country, on-farm flooding, scaled through payments that give rural communities a new income stream. The nation's deficient high-hazard dams and aging levees repaired. And flood protection and water supply built as one system.

Solution 4: Close the Loop and Build New Supply

Two proven technologies can create water that does not depend on rain, rivers, or aquifers: wastewater recycling and seawater desalination. This solution sets where each one goes, at what scale, and how the country's fastest-growing industrial water users will run on recycled water.

Upgrade every treatment plant to advanced recycling. The United States currently reuses only 6.4 percent of its wastewater. The rest is treated to minimum standards and discharged. Advanced recycling turns wastewater into water clean enough to drink. Orange County, California, has done it for nearly two decades, and its plant, the largest of its kind in the world, now cleans 130 million gallons of wastewater a day and returns it to the aquifer the county drinks from. The cost runs roughly $850 to $2,000 per acre-foot, with large, established plants like Orange County's at the low end. The RFC will finance the upgrade of every municipal wastewater treatment plant in the country to advanced recycling capability over the decade.

Congress will set a national wastewater reuse target of 30 percent by 2039, up from 6.4 percent today. The RFC will also buy the treatment equipment in bulk for hundreds of plants at once. Utilities that invest in further recycling capacity will receive priority RFC financing. The target is ambitious but achievable: Israel reuses over 85 percent of its wastewater. Singapore recycles 40 percent and is scaling to 55 percent.

Desalination where it makes sense. Turning seawater into drinking water works, but today's plants use a great deal of energy and leave behind a salty, toxic brine that has to go somewhere. At $893 to $3,400 per acre-foot, desalination is also the most expensive water on the menu. So the RFC will finance clean-powered desalination plants on the coasts where they make sense, and invest in the emerging technology that could make them cheaper and cleaner, without counting on a breakthrough.

Water for a growing industry. America is building data centers and semiconductor factories at a furious pace, and both are enormous water users. A single large data center can use up to 5 million gallons of water a day for cooling, as much as a town of tens of thousands of people, and a large semiconductor plant can use 10 million gallons a day of ultra-pure water. As artificial intelligence expands, the demand is climbing fast: by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's projection, the direct water use of U.S. data centers is on track to reach roughly 38 to 73 billion gallons a year by 2028, several times today's level. In drought-stricken regions these facilities already pull from the same strained supplies families depend on.

Closed-loop cooling recirculates the same water, cutting freshwater use by up to 70 percent. Air cooling can go further. And recycled or non-potable water works perfectly well for cooling: one Microsoft facility in Washington cut its drinking-water use by 97 percent by switching to reclaimed water.

Congress will require large new water-using facilities that take federal support or connect to public water systems to use recycled or non-potable water for cooling wherever it is available, to meet minimum water-recirculation standards, and to publicly report how much water they use per unit of output. These are among the most valuable companies on earth, and they will build and pay for their own recycling and cooling systems. Where a facility must draw fresh water, it will pay a price that reflects the true scarcity of the resource.

Energy integration. Desalination, advanced recycling, and the pumps that move recharge water are enormous energy consumers. The Clean Power mission will provide dedicated gigawatt-scale zero-carbon power for water infrastructure. All desalination and major pumping facilities will be integrated into utility Decarbonization Pathway Studies from the start.

What this delivers: Every municipal treatment plant on a pathway to advanced recycling. A national wastewater reuse rate of 30 percent, up from 6.4 percent. Strategic desalination at coastal sites, powered by clean energy. New data centers and factories built to run on recycled and non-potable water, with their water use publicly reported.

Solution 5: Water Markets for the West

Most water in the West is held under rights that work like a place in line. Each right is a fixed amount of water, usually tied to a particular piece of land and a particular spot on a river, and ranked by the date it was first claimed. In a dry year the newest rights are cut off entirely while the oldest still take their full amount, however the water is used. The amounts were set in wetter decades, and on the West's big rivers they now add up to more water than the rivers carry. A farmer who wants to sell water to a city has to get the sale approved by a state water court or agency, where any neighbor can object and the case can take years, and a farmer who uses less than the full right risks losing it under the rule known as "use it or lose it." So water rarely moves to where it is needed most, the reservoirs are drawn down, and every shortage ends in an emergency deal or a lawsuit. Western water has been among the most bitterly fought issues in American politics for a century.

The Mission will replace that system with water markets in every over-promised Western basin, starting with the Colorado, modeled on the system Australia began building in the 1990s for its own overdrawn rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin. Each basin will get a cap its river can actually meet. The water under the cap will be divided into shares that can be bought, sold, and leased through a public registry. A Water Czar and a standing negotiating framework will settle disputes at the table, the federal government will pay every state that joins to build the meters and infrastructure the new system needs, and the RFC will stand ready to buy water from any farmer who chooses to sell. No farm will be forced to sell, senior rights holders will be made whole, the land that comes out of production will be looked after, and the farm towns that lose business will share in the proceeds.

A share is a slice of what the river actually carries. Each basin's compact, the agreement among its states that Congress ratifies, will first set aside the water the river itself needs to stay alive and the water owed to Mexico or other downstream nations by treaty. What is left is the cap, and the cap is divided into shares. A share is a permanent claim on a fixed fraction of that water, owned separately from the land and recorded in a public registry, much as a share of stock is a fraction of a company. Where today's rights promise fixed amounts the river may not deliver, shares promise a fraction of whatever it does deliver, so the promises can never again add up to more water than exists. Every existing right will convert into shares, sorted into a few classes by seniority. The oldest rights become the most secure shares, cut last in a drought, and the newest become shares that are cut first, with every share in a class cut by the same proportion. Where an irrigation district holds the right on behalf of its farmers, the shares will go to the landowners in proportion to the water they receive, and the district will keep running the canals.

No state will have to build this system on its own. The conversion rules, the share classes, and the registry will be written once, into the basin's compact, so a state adopts all of it in the single vote that ratifies the compact, the vote it has to take to join anyway. Water rights are property under state law, so no state can be moved onto shares without that vote. But once it is taken, a single basin authority, described below, runs one registry for the whole basin, the way the Delaware River Basin Commission has managed water for four states and the federal government under a single compact since 1961, and each state's water courts keep deciding disputes over individual rights.

How a water year works. Each basin's market will be run by a basin authority, an independent body appointed for its expertise that keeps the registry, forecasts the water, and enforces the rules. Each spring, once the snowpack is measured, the authority will announce how much water each class of share receives that year: perhaps the full amount in a wet year, perhaps 60 percent in a dry one, with more added through the season if the runoff comes in above the forecast. That water is credited to each holder's account in the registry. Farmers and cities then take their water the way they do now, through the same dams, canals, and pumps. An irrigation district opens the headgate to a farm, a city draws at its intake, a meter records every acre-foot, and the registry debits it from the holder's account. Water a holder does not use stays in the account and can be carried into the next year, stored behind the dam, minus a share of what the reservoir loses to evaporation, much as the lower Colorado states can already bank conserved water in Lake Mead. Taking water that is not in your account will be illegal, and the meters will show it. Because unused water stays in the account, the shares also end "use it or lose it": a farmer who conserves keeps the savings, to use later, sell, or lease. The new system will take years to reach every river. In the meantime, Congress will change the federal rules so that farmers who get water from federal projects can no longer lose their rights for using less, and the Mission will help states rewrite their own "use it or lose it" laws, as a handful already have.

How trading works. A holder will be able to sell shares outright, a permanent sale of a slice of the river. Or the holder can keep the shares and sell part of this year's water from the account, a lease for one season. Most trading in Australia is of the second kind. In the Millennium Drought of the 2000s, orchards and vineyards that would have lost their trees bought water from growers of annual crops, who could leave a field fallow for a year, and that trade cut the drought's cost to the region's farms. Each basin authority will run a public exchange, a website and phone app where any holder can see their account, post water for sale or lease, and take an offer, and where farmers who prefer to work through their irrigation district or a broker still can. Buyer and seller agree on a price, the authority confirms the water can physically reach the buyer, and both accounts update in a few days. Every sale price will be public, so every farmer knows what water is worth. Water trading in Australia averaged nearly two billion Australian dollars a year in the 2010s, and selling seasonal water has become a regular source of income for some farmers. Trading of this kind already works in parts of the United States. Farms and cities in northern Colorado have bought and sold shares of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project's water for more than half a century, and several Southern California aquifers have traded pumping rights under court-set caps for decades.

How the water moves. When a farmer upstream sells to a city downstream, the farmer takes that much less through the headgate, the city takes that much more at its intake, and the river carries the difference between them. Water sold to keep a river or a reservoir healthy simply stays in the river or behind the dam. Water can only be traded where the river or the canals can actually carry it, so the authority will publish where trades can go and how much, and turn down a trade that would ask a canal to carry more than it holds or pull a stretch of river below the flow it needs. The Colorado already runs a version of this, the hard way: under a deal finished in 2003 after years of negotiation, Imperial Valley farmers conserve water for San Diego, up to 200,000 acre-feet a year, which San Diego takes through Southern California's Colorado River Aqueduct. Shares will make deals like that routine.

The public as a buyer. Farms use roughly 80 percent of the water consumed in the West, so the fastest way to free large volumes is to buy water from farmers who choose to sell. Even a 10 to 25 percent cut in agricultural use would free more water than every city in the country recycles today. The RFC will buy shares outright from farmers who want to sell and lease water from farmers who want to keep farming, either for a dry year or for part of every season, irrigating in spring and leaving the late-summer water in the stream. Australia recovered about 1.6 million acre-feet a year this way, roughly a fifth of what farms and towns had been drawing, most of it bought from willing sellers. Water resold to cities and industries will be financed by the RFC and repaid by the buyers.

A public water trust for the river. Water the RFC buys for the river, the reservoirs, and treaty obligations will go into a public environmental water trust, which holds its shares in the registry like any other holder and is run by an independent board of scientists and water managers under rules Congress sets, the way Australia's Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder manages the water its government bought back. The trust's water comes on top of the base flow each compact reserves for the river, and its shares receive their allocation like everyone else's, cut in a drought by the same rule, so the public carries its share of a dry year. Each year the trust will decide where its water does the most good: left in Lake Mead and Lake Powell to keep them above the levels where the dams stop generating power, released downstream in the hot months when fish and wetlands need it most, sent to the river's delta, or used to cover what the country owes Mexico by treaty. Buying it is public spending on a public good. In a wet year, when the reservoirs and the river have enough, the trust can lease its spare water to farms and cities and put the money into buying more. It can never sell its shares outright without an act of Congress, so water the public buys for the river stays with the river.

A Water Czar, and one place to settle disputes. Today, when the states on a river disagree, they negotiate under a deadline or go to court, sometimes for decades. The Mission will put one standing process in place. A Water Czar, a Cabinet-level official or empowered Interior Secretary, will negotiate each basin's compact with its states and tribes, who will sit at the table as governments, and will speak for every federal agency with a stake in the river. Once a compact is signed, the basin's states, tribes, and the federal government will meet regularly as a river basin commission to work out disagreements and adjust the rules as conditions change, reviving the commissions Congress created in 1965 and the Reagan administration abolished in 1981. When a commission deadlocks, a presidential mediator will step in, the role Herbert Hoover played in brokering the original Colorado River Compact, so that most disputes are settled before anyone files suit. The basin authority stays out of these fights. It runs the market under the rules the governments set.

If a state refuses to join. No single state can stop a basin from moving. When Arizona refused to ratify the 1922 Colorado River Compact, Congress let the compact take effect among the other six states and in 1928 divided the lower basin's water itself, a division the Supreme Court upheld in 1963; Arizona joined in 1944. The Mission will follow that precedent. Congress will put a basin's compact into effect for the states that ratify it and set any holdout's share of the river by law. Inside its own borders a holdout keeps the old system, because water rights there are state property, but it gives up the federal payments and financing, its farmers cannot sell into the basin's market, and it has no hand in setting its own share. On the lower Colorado, where every user drawing from the main river already needs a delivery contract with the Interior Department, the federal government can bring those users onto shares through their contracts. And the president will take the case directly to the holdout state's voters, whose farmers and cities stand to gain the most from joining.

Federal money for every state that joins. Building a market means metering every large diversion and well, recording every right, and paying for the conversion, and the federal government will cover it. Each state that joins its basin's compact will receive one payment when it ratifies the compact and its rights convert into shares, and a second when every large water user in the state is metered and on the registry. Alongside those payments, the RFC will finance the infrastructure that saves water: lined canals and pipes where water now seeps into salty ground or evaporates and is lost for good, and the recharge basins, recycling plants, and stormwater capture laid out earlier in this chapter.

Settle tribal water rights, nationwide. Tribal nations hold some of the oldest and most senior water rights in the West, confirmed by more than a century of law, yet many can use only a fraction of what they are owed because they were never given the pipes, canals, and treatment plants to divert and deliver it. On the Colorado alone, tribes hold rights to as much as a fifth or a quarter of the basin's water. This is paper water, a right with no water behind it, and it is both an injustice and a source of the endless litigation that has paralyzed Western water for decades: dozens of tribes are still stuck in adjudications that drag on for years, and roughly 145 reservations have never had their rights quantified at all. The RFC will finance the settlements and the infrastructure that turn these rights into water tribes can actually use, coordinated with the plumbing-poverty work earlier in this chapter, closing a debt the country has owed for generations. A tribe's rights will become shares only if the tribe chooses, through a settlement Congress approves that also gives it the power to lease them. Settling and funding tribal rights is also the single fastest way to shrink the litigation that has gridlocked rivers like the Colorado: if the Mission can broker a durable, paid settlement on the most fought-over river in America, the model works anywhere.

Protect the wells and aquifers families depend on. The Mission will put meters on the large wells in every over-pumped basin and bring them under the same cap as the river, so their water is counted, shared, and traded like river water, and it will protect the shallow household wells that rural families depend on. That closes the gap that would otherwise sink the whole system: a cap on a river means little if a farm can sell its river water and then pump the difference out of the ground. Today, in most of the country, anyone with land and a well can pump as much as they like. Aquifers are drawn down faster than they refill, the emptied ground compacts and sinks (parts of California's Central Valley have dropped tens of feet, cracking canals and roads), and shallow domestic wells go dry, thousands of them in a single drought, stranding families who cannot afford to drill deeper. Only a few places manage it: Arizona has governed designated pockets since 1980, and California's 2014 law, the most sweeping statewide requirement, gives its basins until 2040. In basins whose states have not yet brought their wells onto shares, the RFC will condition its water financing on enforceable, sustainable groundwater management, starting with meters on the large wells.

Enforce the cap. Each basin authority will have its own inspectors and investigators, with the power to fine and to bring cases, so enforcement does not depend on state water agencies policing their own customers. Every large diversion and well will carry a meter that reports to the registry automatically. The authority will check those readings two other ways. Most irrigation pumps run on electricity, and once a pump is tested, its power bill shows how much water it moved, a method Colorado has accepted in place of a meter since 1994. Satellites now measure how much water the crops on every field use, every few weeks, through a free public system called OpenET. Idaho has settled water disputes on that kind of data, and its courts have upheld the decisions. When the three disagree, an inspector visits. Taking water beyond what is in your account will cost more than buying it would have, and tampering with a meter will be a crime. Penalties work. Kansas received about 60 percent of required water use reports until it began fining people who did not file, and now receives more than 99 percent. On the Murray-Darling, enforcement was weak until a 2017 television investigation exposed irrigators taking water illegally. New South Wales then created an independent regulator that uses meters, satellite images, and drones, and in 2023 it fined one cotton farm about 350,000 Australian dollars for knowingly taking nearly twice the water its meter recorded.

Keep the farm towns whole. When a farmer sells water, the costs do not leave with the farmer. The canals and pumps still have to be maintained, and the farmers who stay split the bill among fewer acres. The farmworkers, equipment dealers, and Main Street businesses lose customers. Farm towns across the West have watched this happen for a century, as cities bought up their water and left the fields to blow away as dust. The Mission will protect them in two ways. An irrigation district will be able to charge a departing seller an exit fee covering the seller's part of the canals and pumps left behind, capped so it cannot block the sale. And a community fund, paid from a portion of every purchase, will support the farmworkers, suppliers, and towns that lose business when land comes out of production.

Look after the land that stops being farmed. Dried-up desert farmland turns to dust and weeds, as Crowley County, Colorado, found after most of its farmland lost its water. Every purchase will require the seller to keep the ground covered and the dust and weeds under control, a condition the Palo Verde fallowing contracts already carry and Colorado tightened in 2026 for farm water leaving the Arkansas Valley. Above that floor, the RFC will pay for work the public gets something back from, such as planting native grasses and shrubs, restoring habitat for birds and pollinators, or managed grazing. England is making the same shift, replacing payments for simply holding farmland with payments for the public goods the land provides.

Repay the public first. Taxpayers built many of the dams and canals that carry water to Western farms, and the farm districts that use them pay the government back slowly, over 40 or 50 years, with no interest. Many still owe part of the bill. When a farmer in one of those districts sells water to a city, the farmer is selling water the public paid to deliver. So the sale will first pay back the farmer's share of whatever the district still owes, and the farmer keeps the rest. The public gets its money back, and no landowner gets rich selling water that taxpayers paid to bring them.

What this delivers: Water markets in every over-promised Western basin, starting with the Colorado: a cap the river can meet, every right converted into tradable shares of what the river actually carries, and water bought, sold, and leased through a public registry in days. A dry year that cuts every holder by a rule set in advance, and "use it or lose it" ended. Farmers paid to sell or lease the water they choose to give up, with the water bought for the rivers and reservoirs held in a public trust. A Water Czar, standing river basin commissions, and presidential mediators settling water disputes by negotiation. Federal money for every state that joins to convert its rights, meter its water, and build the infrastructure that saves it. Tribal water rights settled and turned into wet water nationwide. Groundwater metered and managed in the basins that are sinking, with shallow domestic wells protected. Farm towns supported through the transition, and farmland that stops being irrigated kept covered against dust and weeds, with habitat restored where the public gains from it.

Presidential Leadership

The president will lead the Mission by declaring that every American has a right to clean and affordable water. They will point out that the wealthiest country on earth still pipes lead to millions of homes, still leaves more than a million people without running water or basic plumbing, and still lets families lose service over a bill they cannot pay. In the West, they will promise an end to the water wars: rivers divided by what they actually carry, disputes settled at the table, and willing farmers paid to free up water. The president's task is to treat water as the national emergency it is, and to prove that a government that has let 50,000 fragmented utilities drift for decades can be made to deliver.

During the Campaign

The candidate makes it personal and concrete. The candidate will run on a promise almost no one will argue with: clean, safe water from every tap and a working connection in every home. The first-term pledge will be exact: every lead pipe in the country inventoried and its replacement underway in every city, the worst-hit cities finished, and running water reaching the first communities that have never had it. And the candidate will drink the water. In Flint, on the Navajo Nation, in the coal towns of Appalachia, and in the colonias of South Texas, the candidate will show up, drink from the tap where it is safe, point to where it is not, and name the exact year each place gets fixed.

Take on the Western water fight directly. At the bathtub rings of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the candidate will make the West a plain offer: every state gets a fair share of what the river actually carries, dry-year cuts are set by a rule agreed in advance, no farm is forced to sell its water, and every state that joins gets federal money to meter its water and build the infrastructure that saves it.

Keep it bipartisan. Everyone drinks water, and the broken systems sit in red states and blue states alike. The candidate will run on it as plumbing, competence, and fairness.

Long-lead groundwork. Fixing water is a coordination problem across tens of thousands of systems, so the preparatory work starts during the campaign. Volunteer engineers and public-works veterans will map the worst-off systems, the lead-line inventories, the utilities that will need the most help, the first recharge and reuse sites, and in the West the over-promised basins, the rights that will convert into shares, and the diversions and wells that need meters first, so the RFC can move the day it exists.

The Transition

Executive: name the people. The president-elect will name the RFC water mission-team lead, someone who has actually rebuilt failing water systems; the Water Czar who will negotiate the new compacts; the first presidential water mediators; and an EPA administrator committed to reinstating and enforcing the water standards.

Settle the first fixes and the standards. The team will pick the first wave of communities for direct-build (the Navajo Nation, Appalachia, the rural South, and the Texas colonias) and the highest-lead cities for the first replacement push, and will ready the National Water Standard, the water-loss targets, and the reinstated PFAS limits for legislation. In the West, it will set the order in which basins move to caps and shares, starting with the Colorado.

RFC: lock the tools. With the RFC, the team will set the loan, bond-purchase, and grant terms; the Restoration Pathway Study every utility will complete; the Water Infrastructure Lease that pays farmers to host storage; the payments to states that join a compact, one when a state ratifies the compact and its rights convert into shares and one when its large users are metered, and the infrastructure financing tied to measured water savings; the terms for buying and leasing water from willing sellers, with the duty to keep retired land covered and the community fund for farm towns; and the share registry and trading rules that make the water market work.

Draft the legislation. Counsel will draft the opening package: the RFC water financing authorization, the National Water Standard with its water-loss targets, the statutory reinstatement of the PFAS limits, a permanent low-income water assistance program, the conserved-water protections that end "use it or lose it," the charter for the share system and the basin authorities that run it, congressional consent for the new compacts with conversion and metering payments and infrastructure financing for the states that join, the environmental water trust that will hold the water bought for rivers and reservoirs, and the revival of the river basin commissions.

Day One

The president will direct the EPA to begin the rulemaking that restores the 2024 PFAS limits while Congress moves the statutory reinstatement, launch a national lead service line replacement drive, direct the RFC to open water applications and stand up its mission team under its existing authority, and instruct every utility taking federal money to begin its Restoration Pathway Study. A companion order will stand up the Water Czar, appoint the first presidential water mediators, and convene the basin states, starting with the Colorado, which by then will be running on the federal framework the Interior Department imposed in 2026 when the states deadlocked, with its two years of specific cuts already run out. The president's charge is to replace that framework with a negotiated compact that divides the river into shares of what it actually carries, and the order will lay out the federal support every state that joins will receive. To a public that has stopped believing the government will fix its water, the first named communities, committed dollars, and dates announced on Day One are the first evidence that the government will follow through.

The First 100 Days

In this window the legislation drafted in the transition will reach Congress, and the president will work the votes in person, because water is the rare issue that can still win votes from both parties. The goal is the whole package, from the National Water Standard and the statutory PFAS limits to the share system and the public water trust, signed into law within the first 100 days.

Operational: Years 1–10

Every lead line pulled, every community connected, every recharge basin filled in a wet year will get the president's public attention, with the safety and fairness case made fresh each time. The president will hold the line on the reinstated standards against the industries that want them gone, and will fight openly when a member of Congress or a water district moves to stall a fix, taking the argument into their own district if that is what it takes. The RFC mission team will run the financing and the long work of bringing 50,000 systems up to one standard; the Water Czar and the revived commissions will settle the allocation fights; the EPA will enforce the standards; and by 2039 the country will deliver what it should have provided decades ago: clean, safe, affordable running water in every American home.

What the 10-Year Mission Delivers

The 10-year build is on the order of $1.1 trillion in one-time capital, with a plausible range of roughly $0.85 to $1.85 trillion, about $85 to $185 billion a year, plus something like $30 billion a year in new ongoing operating cost at full scale. For scale, engineers already put the country's unmet water-investment gap near $100 billion a year, so this funds a gap they have already priced. Roughly three-fifths of the capital is lending that repays itself from water bills over the life of the pipes and plants; the rest is grant money for the things that earn no revenue and the systems too poor to borrow, namely lead lines, the poorest rural and tribal systems, dams, and levees. Against that cost sit real returns, most of them measurable: flood damage avoided, $10 to $30 billion a year in avoided health harm from lead, PFAS, and nitrate, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and a water supply the economy can count on. (These figures are order-of-magnitude estimates pending a full costing.)

The lending side of the portfolio is built to sustain itself, but only over decades. The RFC lends, utilities repay from ordinary water revenues over the long life of the infrastructure, and the returning principal and interest fund the next round of loans. That revolving engine takes decades to compound, so it pays off in the 2040s and beyond; the build itself still has to be funded now. And part of the Mission is permanent public spending by design, roughly $15 to $20 billion a year: the affordability program, the public-safety share of running dams and levees, the payments to farmers who free up water, and the subsidy for systems that will never carry debt.

Stop the Bleeding by Year 1 (2030)

• National Water Loss Standard enacted, measuring physical pipe leakage, with targets tiered by system size
• RFC direct loan programs operational for large-city pipe replacement and leak reduction
• RFC lending channeled through state revolving funds for small system access
• Restoration Pathway Studies underway at every utility taking federal money
• Lead service line inventory gaps closing and unknown-material lines being identified nationwide; replacement breaking ground in highest-priority cities
• PFAS limits reinstated by statute on a phased schedule, 2031 for RFC-financed systems and 2034 for all, backed by RFC financing and bulk procurement to make it achievable
• Bulk procurement orders placed for activated carbon and ion exchange PFAS treatment systems
• First Water Infrastructure Leases signed with landowners in priority stormwater capture regions
• Plumbing poverty direct-build program launched on the Navajo Nation and in Appalachian communities
• Intelligent leak detection programs underway, with first installations going live at large utilities
• Parallel investment requirement: every RFC-financed utility must have a funded leak reduction plan
• Conserved-water protections enacted for federal water projects, ending "use it or lose it" there while states rewrite their own laws, and the RFC's first leases of farm water signed under existing state law
• Industrial water standards enacted: new data centers and large plants required to use recycled or non-potable cooling and to report their water use
• Permanent low-income water assistance program created; no household loses water service for inability to pay
• Water Czar appointed and the basin states convened, beginning with the Colorado, to replace the federal framework Interior imposed in 2026 with a share-based compact
• First presidential water mediators appointed and the river basin commissions revived
• Federal support offered to every basin state that joins a compact: payments for converting its rights and metering its users, and RFC financing for meters on large diversions and wells and for infrastructure that saves water, paid against measured savings
• RFC water financing conditioned on sustainable groundwater management, with metering of the largest wells begun in the most overdrafted basins
• Repair program launched for the most dangerous deficient high-hazard dams

Build Out by Year 5 (2034)

• Water loss falling toward world-class levels at utilities receiving RFC financing, measured by real pipe leakage
• Every unknown-material service line identified; replacement running at or above the federally required 10 percent per year, well past the halfway mark
• Intelligent leak detection deployed at 5,000+ water systems
• PFAS 2031 deadline met at RFC-financed systems, with every affected system reaching compliance at the 2034 statutory deadline
• Stormwater capture and aquifer recharge infrastructure operational in 10+ states
• First advanced recycling plant upgrades completed; national wastewater reuse rate rising from 6.4 percent baseline
• First clean-energy desalination facilities operational on the coasts
• Running water connected to 50 percent of previously unserved households
• Nitrate treatment systems installed in priority agricultural runoff zones
• A new Colorado River compact in place that divides what the river actually carries, funds tribal water rights, and pays for the water that leaves agriculture
• Colorado River rights converted under the compact to tradable shares in a public registry run by the basin authority, with the RFC buying shares from willing sellers for the river and its reservoirs
• Colorado Basin states that joined the compact metering their large diversions and wells, with the first canal-lining, piping, recharge, and reuse projects built against measured savings
• Water fights in the Colorado Basin settled by the river basin commission and presidential mediators
• Community funds paying out in the farm towns where water has been sold
• Every water purchase carrying a duty to keep the retired land covered
• First major data centers and semiconductor plants converted to recycled-water cooling
• Low-income water assistance reaching eligible households nationwide; RFC low-cost capital holding down water bills
• Deficient high-hazard dam repairs underway and obsolete, dangerous small dams removed; levee repairs running
• Overdrafted groundwater basins metered and on enforceable sustainability plans
• Share-based compacts under negotiation on the Rio Grande, the Klamath, and the rivers that feed the Great Salt Lake
• Tribal water-rights settlements funded nationwide, with delivery infrastructure under construction
• First PFAS-destruction facilities operating on concentrated residuals, beginning the end of PFAS landfilling

The Mission Delivered by Year 10 (2039)

• Water loss down to world-class levels at large systems and falling toward an affordable standard everywhere
• All lead service lines replaced by 2037
• PFAS treatment installed at every affected public water system; compliance with the reinstated limits achieved
• National stormwater and aquifer-recharge network banking wet-year flood flows and stabilizing the worst-depleted aquifers
• Wastewater reuse rate at 30 percent or above, up from 6.4 percent
• Strategic desalination facilities serving coastal cities
• Every over-promised Western basin capped and on tradable shares, the Colorado first and then the Rio Grande, the Klamath, and the rivers that feed the Great Salt Lake, so a dry year cuts every holder by a rule set in advance
• Western water disputes settled through standing river basin commissions and presidential mediators, ending the cycle of emergency deals and lawsuits
• Every state on shares metering its large diversions and wells, with the water its federally funded infrastructure saves counted against the cap
• Water moving from willing sellers to cities, rivers, and tribes through paid purchases, held in a public trust where it serves the river
• New data centers and factories running on recycled and non-potable water, with their water use publicly reported
• Every American household connected to running water and sanitary sewer service
• No household's water shut off for an unpaid bill, with permanent assistance for those who can't pay
• National Water Standard fully enforced: leak reduction, treatment quality, reuse, and contaminant limits
• The nation's deficient high-hazard dams and aging levees repaired
• Groundwater overdraft halted in the worst basins and shallow domestic wells protected
• Tribal water rights settled and turned into usable water nationwide
• Captured PFAS concentrated and destroyed, ending PFAS landfilling
• Water infrastructure workforce self-sustaining through the Workforce mission's training pipeline, with career pathways established
• The lending majority of the RFC water portfolio self-sustaining through loan repayments over a 30-year horizon, with the grant tranche and affordability program funded as standing commitments