A deal to bring Colorado River water to Native American communities in northern Arizona, where a third of homes lack running water, is being blocked by neighboring states, caught up in a broader battle over how to divide the dwindling river.

The largest tribal water rights settlement in U.S. history — the product of decades of negotiations to secure water for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe — was on the verge of being realized before Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming stepped in to oppose it being codified by Congress.

“We have significant unresolved concerns with the legislation that may affect each of our states’ rights to and interests in Colorado River water,” negotiators for Utah and Wyoming wrote in March to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in a previously unreported letter. New Mexico and Colorado sent similar letters.

Those four states, known collectively as the Upper Basin, are at a stalemate with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada over new rules governing how they share the Colorado River, a key water source for nearly 40 million people. Congress and the White House, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, have declined to approve the settlement until all parties reach an agreement.

For 83-year-old Marilyn Tewa, the stalemate means her family will continue to go without running water. Tewa serves on the Hopi Tribal Council, where her duties include working on the water rights agreement, but her village of Mishongnovi, on the tribe’s northern Arizona reservation, lacks indoor plumbing.

Every other day, she loads 5-gallon buckets into her pickup and drives 5 miles to a windmill originally built for livestock that draws untreated water from underground.

“That’s what keeps us alive,” Tewa said, tapping the spigot on a May afternoon.

Back home, Tewa bustled about her kitchen while her daughter kneaded dough for dinner. There’s no faucet in the kitchen, which is decorated with a framed American flag and a painting of a katsina, a figure with spiritual significance in Hopi culture. Instead, the family stores water in large plastic containers. Because of the lack of indoor plumbing, the Tewa family and its neighbors use portable toilets that stand among the houses.

If passed into law, the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act would resolve the largest outstanding claim on the Colorado River while providing about $5 billion in federal funding to build infrastructure to transport the water across the reservations. The legislation would also go beyond water rights, creating a reservation for the San Juan Southern Paiute. The tribe’s effort to secure a permanent homeland was added to the settlement due to their difficulty getting it through Congress independently.

“That’s my prayer,” Tewa said, “that we get this settlement through for all three tribes.”

The tribes need pipes, pumps and treatment plants to use the water secured through the settlement. To defray the cost beyond the federal government’s expected contribution, the Navajo and Hopi plan to lease some of their water rights, almost certainly to growing towns around Phoenix. The towns would pay to use the tribes’ water for a set number of years.

While the Lower Basin states support the settlement, the Upper Basin states have latched onto this provision in particular as they stand in the way of the settlement.

The Colorado River’s upper and lower basins don’t precisely follow state borders. Some states have portions in both sections, and the line dividing the two basins cuts across northeastern Arizona and directly through the Navajo reservation. If water moves across that line, they argue, the rules governing the river give them veto power over the settlement. (It’s an open legal question whether approval from all seven states is necessary.)

The Upper Basin states fear that, in the future, water they currently control might be leased on an open market. They view any monetary transaction that moves water downstream as setting a precedent that could allow the highest bidder — possibly thirsty cities with money such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas — to buy vast quantities of their water.

In an effort to assuage that concern and close the deal, the Navajo and Hopi made major concessions over the volume of water and length of time they could lease. The tribes also offered to leave some of their water in one of the river’s drought-depleted reservoirs to help keep water levels high enough that it could continue flowing downstream. But the Upper Basin has not wavered in its opposition.

ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix reached out to the governor, senators and lead negotiator from every Upper Basin state for comment. Utah’s and Wyoming’s lead negotiators deferred to the letter they co-signed. A spokesperson for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that the tribes addressed most of the state’s concerns but that questions remain as to whether the water that the tribes would lease to Arizona cities could be counted as part of what the Upper Basin states are legally required to send to the Lower Basin. “New Mexico remains committed to finding a workable solution,” the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also said the state is “committed to finding a path forward” and pointed to the letter that Becky Mitchell, the state’s lead river negotiator, submitted to Congress. Mitchell wrote that the settlement’s leasing provisions violate laws governing the river and that the state was concerned about what the sale of water across the basin would mean for “the security and certainty” of Colorado’s share of the river.

Heather Tanana is an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s law school, where she focuses on federal Indian law. She is also a citizen of the Navajo Nation and said the Upper Basin is “trying to hide behind” how the river has traditionally been managed rather than find a way to give the tribes access to a resource that is rightfully theirs and one that they need to survive.

“It’s a fundamental human rights issue,” she said.

While negotiations drag on, the three tribes continue waiting for water they say will help them to build more housing, grow sustainable economies, better protect public health and preserve cultural practices.

The Hopi believe their ancestors return as clouds to bring the rain that nourishes their corn, but drought is wracking the region. An overreliance on groundwater has dried up springs that have been used for ceremonies and agriculture for centuries. When the settlement brings more water to the reservation, Tewa said, aquifers will have a chance to recharge, restoring the springs.

“I’m speaking on behalf of my children, my grandchildren and their children that haven’t come yet,” she said. “I hope, in the future, that they will have water.”

Fighting for Water Since Elvis Was on TV

That the settlement even reached Congress seemed like a small miracle to those involved.

The 30 federally recognized tribes with land in the Colorado River Basin are estimated to have a right to at least a quarter of the river’s flow. But there’s little incentive to hand tribes the water to which they are entitled. Their rights are the most senior on the river, meaning in times of shortage everyone else would see their water cut before the tribes. But because the tribes currently use a fraction of their water, farmers, cities and businesses are able to use the rest for free.

If the tribes were to use every drop to which they are entitled, the system of sharing the river that supports more than $1 trillion in annual economic output would collapse.

“Everybody’s getting free Navajo, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute water right now. The seven basin states are all benefiting in the absence of a settlement,” said Ethel Branch, a former Navajo attorney general who was involved in the negotiations, adding that the water had been “stolen for over a century.”

In 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that, if the federal government confined tribes to reservations, then it owed them enough water to sustain an agrarian economy on that land. But securing that promised water, referred to as “Winters rights,” has proven arduous.

Tribes were excluded from the compacts that apportioned the river. The Navajo in particular were barred from joining a seminal case quantifying other users’ rights, and members of the tribe themselves rejected a proposed settlement in 2012 when they viewed the deal as unfair. So the tribe went back to the Supreme Court, asking that the justices force the federal government to quickly settle the claims. The Navajo once again lost, with the court’s majority deciding that their treaty with the U.S. didn’t require the government to take any “affirmative steps” to deliver the water it owed the tribe.

“At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again,’” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote of the Navajo in his dissent. “When this routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Arizona politicians and tribal leaders have since concluded that they needed to combine all three tribes’ claims to finally settle their rights.

That was no simple feat. The Navajo and Hopi have long had a contentious relationship. Underlining their thorny partnership, leaders of various tribes around the region have accused Navajo, the largest tribal nation in the U.S., of flexing their political strength to the detriment of other tribes.

Arizona also historically clashed with local tribes over water. The state often inserted unrelated provisions into proposed settlements, which some tribes viewed as poison pills and had the effect of stalling the agreements.

But Navajo and Hopi struck a deal, and Arizona moved off its bargaining position. Now in lockstep, the settlement’s supporters turned to Congress, only to hit more roadblocks: The House of Representatives balked at the spiraling price tag to fund the deals; presidential administrations were unwilling to expend political capital on such settlements; and more than a dozen settlements are in the works, clogging the system. (No settlement has been enacted since 2022.)

“Partisanship has gone to a new low in this country, and Indian water settlements have gotten swept up into that,” said Pam Williams, who spent about two decades as director of the Secretary’s Indian Water Rights Office in the Department of the Interior before she retired last year.

In November 2024, as President Donald Trump prepared for his return to the White House, the tribes believed they had an opening to get their settlement through Congress while President Joe Biden was still in office.

Navajo leadership had supported the Democratic presidential ticket and feared the incoming administration would be vindictive toward them.

Every basin state’s lead negotiator, tribes’ staff and a federal representative descended upon the Arizona Department of Water Resources’ offices in Phoenix for what several attendees described as a “Hail Mary.” At the meeting, the Navajo offered a major compromise: limiting how much water they could lease and for how long they could lease it.

But the Upper Basin states showed up with a list of grievances, multiple attendees told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix, and weren’t interested in negotiating over the Navajo leasing concessions.

“It’s difficult for the Upper Basin to wrap their heads around this settlement,” said Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River lead.

In March 2026, leaders from the tribes traveled to Washington for a Senate hearing where they made an impassioned plea for Congress to pass a version of the bill that now included the concessions they had offered in the Hail Mary meeting. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who ran the hearing, expressed support for the settlement but worried its $5 billion price tag was too high, a concern echoed by an Interior Department official who testified. (The tribes and department are currently negotiating to shrink that cost.)

All four Upper Basin states submitted comments opposing the settlement. Their main concerns were about the ability to lease across the basin and whether the water for the settlement would be counted against the upper or lower division of the river.

Leasing would last only as long as it’s needed to pay for infrastructure to distribute their newly acquired water, said Navajo President Buu Nygren. It would not set a precedent, he said, because no other tribe straddles both basins.

“We shouldn’t be punished for being in two basins,” Nygren said, “because other tribal nations, other settlements have been able to lease water.”

“How Precious Water Is to Us”

During the decades that the tribes fought to access their water, they helped quench the thirst of growing cities in the Colorado River Basin.

A water intake plant on Navajo land drew from Lake Powell to cool the nearby Navajo Generating Station. The coal plant powered pumps for the Central Arizona Project, the 336-mile series of canals that sends Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.

The power station shut down in 2019, and the intake plant was handed over to the Navajo for the iiná bá-paa tuwaqat’si pipeline, which means “for life” in Diné and “water is life” in Hopi, to deliver water to the three tribes. But for now, the massive pumps remain mothballed, the building sitting musty and dark like a tomb, and the pipeline remains an engineering schematic, waiting for funding from the stalled settlement.

The irony is not lost on tribal leaders, they told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix: After helping deliver water beyond their lands, they are now blocked from using that same water and infrastructure to sustain their communities. The insult is compounded, they said, by the fact that water use is drastically lower on reservations.

“It’s not about green-grass lawns or golf courses or swimming pools,” said Crystalyne Curley, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council. “It’s just basically turning on the faucet and getting water to boil eggs for your children or turning on a faucet to wipe and clean the table or washing your hands after butchering a sheep.”

For the San Juan Southern Paiute, the settlement is also about having a permanent homeland. They have no reservation but struck a deal with Navajo in 2000 to transfer some of its land. Since the tribes already reached an agreement, it’s an uncontroversial proposition. But, without political clout to get Congress to take it up, the land transfer was pulled into the water settlement.

“​​During the COVID era, it took a lot of the tribal elders, and there are only a handful that saw the treaty signed and are really wanting to see this before their time is up,” said San Juan Southern Paiute Vice President Johnny Lehi Jr., whose father signed the 2000 agreement. Finally securing a reservation, he said, means the ability to build housing and develop an economy for a tribe that currently rents its government building.

Nearby, on the Hopi reservation, Councilmember Marilyn Fredericks grabbed a pair of hiking poles, donned a hat with a roadrunner pin on it and set out from her village on a recent spring afternoon. To stay fit as she grows older, she walks up and down the hand-carved steps of a terraced garden that used to produce food for her community.

Seven natural springs once fed the garden, but only two still flow. Ponds that stored their excess sit dry, stains on the rock now just a memory of the water. It’s been six years since there was enough to plant.

The settlement would fund a pipeline that would be “our umbilical cord,” Fredericks said. Future generations of Hopi have a right to clean, reliable water, she said. “This is evidence of how precious water is to us.”

After the Trump administration upended the world’s largest foreign aid provider last year, terminating thousands of programs and firing nearly all of its staff, its plan for the agency was clear: Eliminate it entirely.

But because it is a congressionally created agency, President Donald Trump needed lawmakers’ permission to do so. So this year, Trump officials asked Congress for permission to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and dramatically reduce federal spending on food, medicine and lifesaving work around the world. 

Congress said no. Lawmakers, who hold the government’s purse strings and have oversight of federal agencies, wanted USAID to remain, even in its diminished form. They detailed precisely how much the State Department should spend on foreign aid and for what, including $9.4 billion on global health to treat and prevent maladies like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and more than $5 billion on emergency humanitarian aid. They also insisted on regular, detailed reports about how the administration was spending the money. 

Trump signed the bill, enshrining their orders into law.

Now, eight months into the fiscal year, Trump officials are failing to follow many of those orders, ProPublica has found. Officials have delayed spending on global health, have not issued funds for some projects and have labeled money destined for humanitarian aid as “unallocated” to control how it can be spent, according to a ProPublica review of government records and interviews with legal experts, current and former government employees, and members of Congress. And when lawmakers have asked about their actions, officials often have not responded.

The White House and Congress have been battling over federal spending since Day 1 of the Trump administration, setting up a constitutional crisis — a breakdown of the division of power among the three branches of the federal government, according to several legal scholars. 

Nowhere has that crisis been more visible than with foreign aid. Last year, the administration took the unprecedented step of gutting USAID, terminating thousands of aid programs and letting funding expire, all without permission from Congress. Lawmakers did little to stop it.

Now, in defying Congress on foreign aid that Trump himself agreed to spend, the administration is quietly escalating the battle.

“It is a huge grab of power from the president, taking powers away from Congress,” said David Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University and a leading scholar on administrative and constitutional law.

USAID was created by Congress decades ago as a means of promoting American diplomacy and soft power around the world. As ProPublica previously reported, when Trump officials dismantled the agency last year, stopping payments on thousands of lifesaving programs that provided food, medicine and other supplies to impoverished nations, many people died, including children. 

Even with USAID in shambles, Congress has made clear that it expects the administration to continue providing foreign aid — in some cases, at nearly the level it did in previous years.

“It’s proof that there is still broad, bipartisan support for America showing up in the world, helping people and working with our allies and partners on shared challenges, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it directly benefits us,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, the ranking member of the Senate committee with oversight of foreign aid funds. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the committee’s chair, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But the administration has taken a variety of steps to thwart Congress’ directives. The Office of Management and Budget, run by Russell Vought, was instrumental in blocking the spending of aid money last year. This year, it has labeled both humanitarian aid and global health money as “unallocated,” meaning the OMB must approve how it is spent.

Legal scholars say such moves, and the delayed spending by the State Department, likely violate the law. Foreign aid is a prime example of why Congress made it illegal for administrations and agencies to slow-walk such funds, said Bobby Kogan, an OMB adviser under former President Joe Biden currently with the Center for American Progress. “If you spend no money for a year and all the clinics close, then those people die,” he said.

The State Department has made little effort to spend some foreign aid money that Congress earmarked for specific purposes, including family planning, neglected diseases and nutrition, according to government staff and budget documents. 

And programs have been given fewer dollars, even when Congress has kept funding steady. That includes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the hallmark HIV program credited with saving 26 million lives around the world. 

Administration officials are also spending on foreign aid at a much slower rate than they had in recent years, according to an analysis of federal funding data shared with ProPublica by Aid on the Hill, an advocacy group created by former USAID employees, although the State Department disputes its conclusions. Another group published a similar analysis last week.

Where Trump officials have made plans to spend funds, it’s often spurred outrage. Under the new America First Global Health Strategy, Trump officials are signing bilateral deals with poor countries, asking for access to health data as a condition for receiving lifesaving medications the U.S. once donated. 

Jeremy Lewin, a 29-year-old lawyer who came into government via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with no prior humanitarian experience, is in charge of foreign aid. He has said that this new strategy will not only save countless lives, but also reform the aid sector and reduce dependence on U.S. funding.

Since last July, Lewin has been “performing the duties” of undersecretary for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs, a position that must be approved by Congress, though the administration has yet to nominate him or anyone else to the job. 

But he rarely, if ever, meets with career staff and doesn’t share information about his plans, even with the people who are expected to carry them out, according to six current and former career officials. Lewin insists that he approve even routine payments, creating a stranglehold on funding and information. 

And all the while, Trump appointees have failed to answer basic questions from Congress about what they are doing. Letters from lawmakers have gone unanswered and required reports unfiled. 

To understand the administration’s compliance with congressional mandates and federal law, ProPublica reviewed administration documents, including agreements, memos, and internal communications, and spoke with dozens of current and former government officials, congressional staff, and international experts in global health and humanitarian aid. Many people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the administration. 

In response to a list of detailed questions about the concerns, a State Department spokesperson who declined to be named said they would continue to follow the president’s direction on foreign aid spending. “We are not withholding any funds appropriated to, or available to, State,” they said. “If additional funds are made available to State, we will work to obligate them consistent with legal requirements and Administration priorities.”

They said officials have regularly briefed Congress and that Lewin had recently spent four hours discussing foreign assistance. They also said they have “reduced by 80% the number of outstanding reports and letters” since Trump retook office. 

“We are working with Congress to spend appropriated balances and find the right future-appropriated level for global health,” the spokesperson said. 

In response to a series of detailed questions about this story, OMB spokesperson Rachel Cauley said, “This is patently false,” adding that “USAID was a weaponized government agency.” She did not respond to a follow-up question asking what was false.

Spending Less — or Not at All 

After nearly all of USAID’s employees were fired and the majority of its programs closed down last summer, the agency’s remnants were transferred to the State Department. Despite repeated promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving aid would continue, the State Department began winding down many of the remaining programs earlier this year.

And staff have been working with a severely constricted budget; officials gave them just half of the available money for PEPFAR, said Dr. Mike Reid, who was the program’s chief scientific officer until he left earlier this year over concerns about how the program is being run. Of the $9.4 billion for global health spending for the State Department that Trump signed into law earlier this year, Congress earmarked about $4.6 billion for PEPFAR. But staff say it’s unclear how much of that they will be allowed to spend.

Congress also explicitly directed the State Department to spend pots of money on family planning ($524 million), nutrition ($165 million) and neglected tropical diseases ($109 million), according to the bill. According to a review of government records and two people with knowledge of the department’s activities, State Department officials have made little or no effort to spend from those pots. 

In response, a State Department spokesperson said it has “continued to obligate and spend every dollar appropriated for global HIV/AIDS programs” and “we continue to implement life-saving care in global health priority areas, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and maternal and child health.”

They added: “The State Department has been in the process of slowly replacing old carry-over USAID grants with new State Department grants and contracts which have fresh funds, new terms and conditions, and better align with the new America First foreign assistance strategy.”

Global health programming in general is moving at a much slower rate than it did previously, according to the Aid on the Hill analysis of federal funding data. Of the more than $9 billion that Congress told the Trump administration to spend on global health last year, the administration had by the end of this March obligated just $190 million, 5% of what was spent on average in that period in the five years before Trump returned to office. Typically, officials would have obligated about half of the money by then. Another advocacy organization, Health Security Policy Academy, published an analysis last week that drew a similar conclusion.

The State Department said it “cannot and will not” verify any independent analysis, but disagreed with the figures, saying that it has “approved and implemented spending” for more than $7.5 billion to align with the bilateral agreements and disaster response. “You either have vastly outdated numbers or are simply mistaken,” it said, but would not elaborate.  

The agreements signed with nations around the world, a centerpiece of the State Department’s foreign aid policy, will in many cases involve sending funds directly to those governments, some of which have been mired in corruption scandals. But the specifics of the programs are still being determined, and the funding has yet to flow. 

Meanwhile, Lewin has been increasingly leaning on large international organizations to deliver aid once managed by USAID employees.

Earlier this year, Lewin funneled $3.8 billion to a small arm of the United Nations, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, quadrupling the budget of the agency. 

Trump has frequently criticized the U.N. as ineffective. But after nearly all of USAID’s staff was fired, the skeleton crew at the State Department doesn’t have the capacity or expertise to manage so much humanitarian aid themselves, according to a dozen people familiar with the new system.

The agreement with OCHA, a copy of which was reviewed by ProPublica, also does not allow the U.S. to independently audit the funds, though the U.N. agreed to run a pilot project for greater internal oversight.

Eri Kaneko, OCHA’s spokesperson, said the agency has worked quickly since December to disburse funds for “the most urgent and life-threatening needs” and that U.N. entities are “fully committed to the highest standards of accountability and oversight.”

The U.S. has been the largest donor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a multilateral organization that provides medicines and prevention measures to millions of people around the world, since its inception. Lewin recently announced an expanded partnership with the fund to provide HIV prevention across Africa. But the Trump administration last year withheld payments pledged under the Biden administration, forcing the fund to reduce the amounts it gave to nations.

So in this year’s spending bill, Congress directed the State Department to make good on its pledges, issuing specific instructions to Rubio on what to pay and when, and telling him to make those contributions “in a timely manner.” 

That hasn’t happened. 

A State Department spokesperson told ProPublica that “all current funding obligations have been met.” But according to a board member for the Global Fund, congressional staff and Friends of the Global Fight, an organization that advocates for the fund in the U.S., the administration should contribute another $661 million. 

“The State Department is underfunding the Global Fund,” Schatz said. “It’s out of compliance with congressional appropriations.” 

When the senator asked about the funding during Rubio’s recent testimony to Congress, Rubio said, “I think that will move shortly, very quickly.”

A “Fundamental Threat to the Rule of Law”

During previous administrations, once Congress passed laws to approve federal spending, the money flowed through the OMB, which in turn parceled out the funds to designated agencies, making sure they didn’t spend the funds too quickly or too slowly. 

Under Trump, the OMB, led by Vought, has repeatedly blocked funds approved by Congress from going to agencies using legally dubious maneuvers, experts in federal spending and constitutional law told ProPublica. 

As ProPublica has chronicled, Vought takes an expansive view of presidential power and has moved to give the executive branch dramatically greater authority to not spend legally appropriated money. Foreign aid has been a clear focus; after USAID was razed last year, Vought was made acting administrator and tasked with overseeing the closeout of the agency. Eric Ueland, a Vought deputy at the OMB, is currently performing those duties. 

The OMB currently has labeled more than $500 million in global health money as “unallocated,” according to its own data, which makes it impossible for the State Department to spend without first going through the OMB. It had also labeled most of the humanitarian aid money this way, but began releasing some of those funds in May. By June 11, the OMB had released all of that money to the State Department.

Several people inside and outside the government told ProPublica they fear that the administration is withholding the funds because it is planning not to spend them at all. They have good reason to be concerned: That’s exactly what Trump did last year. 

In 2025, the administration clawed back some $13 billion in foreign aid that Congress had passed into law, some of it by using a maneuver widely understood by legal experts to be illegal.

That maneuver, which Vought calls a “pocket rescission,” essentially asks Congress to cancel funds so late in the fiscal year that there isn’t enough time for them to be spent if Congress says no. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog, has said pocket rescissions are illegal, and several constitutional scholars told ProPublica the move violates the Impoundment Control Act. That law, passed in 1974 in the wake of disputes with President Richard Nixon, restricts the president’s authority to withhold, or impound, funds approved by Congress. 

A federal court initially blocked the maneuver as part of ongoing lawsuits related to the dismantling of USAID. But the administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which issued an emergency ruling split along ideological lines that allowed the clawback to continue, though it did not rule on the merits. 

The GAO has standing to take legal action on a pocket rescission. Edda Emmanuelli Perez, GAO’s general counsel, told ProPublica that her office was continuing to review potential impoundments and monitoring ongoing litigation, and that it has not made a decision to file any lawsuits at this time.

While there are still nearly four months left in this fiscal year, career officials and legal experts say another rescission — legal or not — would further erode Congress’ power of the purse, threatening the U.S. democracy. 

“If that’s going to be a regular occurrence, then we have a real fundamental threat to the rule of law,” said Cerin Lindgrensavage, a former Justice Department lawyer who works for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that fights against authoritarianism. “Congress has said spend the money, and the president doesn’t want to. The question is, who wins? Under the law, Congress is supposed to win. Right now, the president is.”

Budget watchers say there are concerning signs that the administration plans to withhold more funds. 

In April, the OMB announced to Congress that it was withholding funds earmarked for global health to pay the hefty bills for severance fees and other costs for the thousands of USAID programs Trump officials terminated last year.

OMB officials told lawmakers they were setting aside $19 billion to cover those costs, though they anticipated the total would be “substantially” less. (Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica say the figure doesn’t include the cost of the litany of lawsuits associated with the closures — or the dozens of new hires and other agency operations needed to process them.) 

The bulk of that money came from unspent funds for the canceled programs and other unobligated dollars from previous years. But $3.2 billion came from funds earmarked by Congress for global health and development programs that Trump signed into law in 2025. If it’s not obligated by the end of September, that money will expire and can no longer be spent. 

Democratic lawmakers were incensed by the OMB’s decision. In a letter to Trump officials, senators called it an “appalling admission of waste of U.S. taxpayer dollars” and demanded that the administration use the $3.2 billion as directed, “consistent with the law.” They asked for a response by May 8. As of June 16, lawmakers had not received one. 

Asked about the funds during the recent Senate hearing, Rubio claimed they were under the purview of the OMB. Schatz pointed out that Rubio had moved all foreign aid under the State Department and had just wrestled some of that money away from the OMB to respond to an Ebola outbreak. “It also demonstrates you are perfectly capable of getting money released from those closeout funds if you wish,” he told the secretary. “Ebola is an urgent priority, but so is malaria, so is TB and so is HIV/AIDS.” 

“Proposing a rescission is a Presidential authority, and we will follow President Trump’s direction as to any future rescissions,” the State Department spokesperson told ProPublica. “We are currently planning to obligate all appropriated balances, consistent with law.”

ProPublica is digging into pressing issues affecting millions who rely on America’s safety net programs — from longstanding concerns like electronic benefit transfer theft to changes in federal SNAP and Medicaid policies. We want to hear from officials and workers on the ground who help people navigate these programs, because no one knows the ins and outs of the safety net better.  

If you are a current or former state or local eligibility worker, intake specialist, or human services or social services administrator, or if you’re a current or former federal worker who has supported states in administering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Medicaid, we want to hear your thoughts about new work requirements, shifts in cost-sharing between the federal government and states, efforts to combat fraud, and what other priorities may have been pushed to the wayside. 

ProPublica’s reporting goes beyond big-picture policy coverage and dives into the ways those federal policies shape everyday life throughout the country. We know each community operates differently, and we can’t be everywhere at once. That’s why we need your help.

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Please fill out the brief form below to tell us what we should be reporting on or to stay in touch as all of these changes unfold. Our reporters read every response and may follow up with you. Your insight is what drives our reporting.

If you have questions or if your SNAP or Medicaid benefits have recently changed, we want to hear from you too. Email us at [email protected]. If you prefer to reach us via Signal, you can contact reporter Eli Hager at 301-758-2768 or Cassandra Garibay at 707-234-5175.

Arizona’s largest sheriff’s department is losing ground in its effort to comply with court-mandated reforms tied to a long-running racial profiling lawsuit and settlement, a monitor has found.

An investigation launched last year by the monitor’s team and published this month alleges a “disturbing pattern” of violations of department policy and court orders that undermined efforts to investigate misconduct and root out racial profiling in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. The findings echo allegations from a decade ago that led to contempt charges against sheriff’s office leaders.

The monitor’s investigation follows an analysis by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that found ongoing racial disparities in traffic stops by the sheriff’s office, which continue to hold back its compliance with court orders. The accusations this time center on the department’s Professional Standards Bureau, which investigates reports of misconduct.

U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow, who is overseeing the settlement, appointed Robert Warshaw as the monitor in 2014 to track compliance with mandated reforms. Among other things, Warshaw said the sheriff’s office leadership tried to pressure the bureau’s commander to reopen closed investigations into two deputies who had been disciplined and placed on the Brady list, a public database of officer misconduct. The monitor also claimed that top leadership attempted to interfere in the disciplinary process to protect employees accused of wrongdoing. When the commander resisted, he was placed on leave, investigated by an outside agency and temporarily transferred out of the bureau, the report alleges.

“What the Monitoring Team has found here is an attempt to create an internal culture where favor and reprisal are tools of control: to impact outcomes; to instill fear in changemakers; and to grant favors and position to those who bend to misguided directions,” the report stated.

As a result, the monitor determined that the sheriff’s office has regressed in its compliance with the reforms mandated in a settlement of the Melendres v. Arpaio class-action lawsuit. The suit accused the law enforcement agency of using traffic stops to arrest people on immigration charges, racially profiling Latinos in the process. At the time, the court found that when the public did report misconduct, then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio and others interfered with investigations. The court held Arpaio in criminal contempt in 2016 for continuing to make immigration arrests in violation of court orders, though he was eventually pardoned by President Donald Trump.

The constitutional violations began in 2007 under Arpaio. The current sheriff, Jerry Sheridan, inherited the settlement when he took office in January 2025. Sheridan climbed the ranks of the department to become Arpaio’s second-in-command in 2010. He was found in civil contempt in 2016 for denying knowledge of a court order to stop making immigration arrests, despite evidence to the contrary presented in court. Sheridan contends he was always truthful. He distanced himself from his former boss during his campaign and after taking office, stating that he was committed to seeing through the reforms.

The sheriff’s office filed a 78-page response to the inquiry with the court, denying any violations of court orders or department policy and labeling the investigation as “speculative” and “improper.” The sheriff’s office said the incidents in question proved that internal checks strengthened by court orders were working properly, and that the monitor was penalizing the department for following those orders and policies. The department also asserted that the sheriff’s decision to place the commander on administrative leave and refer him for investigation by an outside agency was justified and also required by court orders.

Upon taking office, Sheridan’s newly appointed staff asked the bureau commander’s advice about reviewing investigations that had been completed or were under appeal to understand if they could potentially change the outcome, but ultimately chose not to take further action, the office said.

“Because the complaint alleged criminal-nature misconduct (evidence tampering) against the current PSB Commander, referring the matter to an outside agency was the only way to avoid a conflict of interest,” the sheriff’s office said in the court filing.

In a separate statement to reporters, Sheridan questioned whether the monitor’s investigation had strayed into “areas involving management discretion, personnel administration, and internal policy disagreements that are more appropriately addressed by agency leadership.”

The sheriff’s office also questioned the timing of the inquiry’s release, two weeks before oral arguments over whether to end court oversight. Lawyers for the sheriff’s office are preparing to argue that the law enforcement agency has fulfilled all of the settlement’s requirements on racial profiling and should be released from the settlement. The monitor “discussing these issues has everything to do with providing inflammatory soundbites” to aid the plaintiff’s opposition to Maricopa County’s motion to end oversight, the sheriff’s office stated in its response filed in court.

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Snow has issued four court orders since 2013 with 368 requirements for the department. Warshaw, the monitor, tracks compliance with Snow’s orders and reports the department’s progress quarterly.

The Professional Standards Bureau remains a focal point of court oversight, largely over a backlog in misconduct investigations. Its failure to eliminate the backlog is one of the main reasons the sheriff’s office has not fully complied with orders to prove it can police itself.

Capt. Gregory Lugo has led the bureau since February 2021. He helped reduce the backlog from over 2,100 misconduct investigations in November 2022 to 371 as of May. But in April 2025, Sheridan placed Lugo on leave, sparking the monitor’s inquiry.

At the same time, the sheriff’s office referred a criminal complaint against Lugo to the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The state agency closed the investigation without finding evidence of wrongdoing, according to the monitor’s report. A separate investigator hired by the court to review the Department of Public Safety’s investigation found the allegations against Lugo were unfounded and also cleared him of any wrongdoing.

The criminal complaint was filed by a sergeant whom Lugo demoted in 2020. Lugo also had filed insubordination charges against him. The sergeant appealed the charges, which were initially sustained but overturned after Sheridan took office.

“The Monitoring Team concluded that the stated reason for Captain Lugo’s transfer was a pretext,” and that instead it was taken in retaliation for not going along with the meddling in investigations, in violation of court orders, the report said.

The monitor team also highlighted the case against a deputy who was dismissed for clocking into a sheriff’s office station when he was instead working an off-duty job. The deputy appealed. Sheridan’s second-in-command questioned the deputy’s dismissal and asked Lugo about reviewing that decision, but Lugo said the deputy was fired for timesheet violations totaling “thousands of dollars.”

The monitor said Sheridan and another member of the command staff also inquired about potentially weakening disciplinary policy to avoid firing a sergeant who was arrested for DUI. Command staff argued the sergeant should not have been fired because he self-reported the arrest. Lugo warned that change was not likely to be approved by the monitor or the attorneys involved in the settlement.

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The monitor’s inquiry into the Professional Standards Bureau has resulted in a decline in the sheriff’s office compliance with the settlement. Compliance rates, which measure the department’s progress, decreased in three of the four court orders. The biggest drops were for an order focused mainly on internal oversight and discipline, where implementation rates dropped from 95% to 70%. Compliance rates for an order directed at ending the backlog in pending investigations dropped from 88% to 68%.

Because the sheriff’s office disputes the accusations, it contends that it remains in full compliance with requirements related to the monitor’s inquiry and called the change in its compliance rates “punitive, draconian oversight.”

The costs to taxpayers of implementing the reforms has reached $350 million, according to the county. On June 22, the county’s Board of Supervisors approved an additional $36 million for compliance expenses in the upcoming fiscal year. But the court has questioned these costs. The monitor published an audit last October that determined the sheriff’s office misattributed or inflated about 72% of its settlement-related expenses.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents all Latino drivers in Maricopa County as part of the settlement, said the monitor’s latest inquiry proves that the department cannot be trusted to police itself without court oversight and called for the sheriff’s office leadership to be held accountable for the alleged violations of court orders.

“A public law enforcement agency like the MCSO cannot be allowed to operate with impunity if it is to have any legitimacy with the communities it serves,” the ACLU said in its response to the monitor’s inquiry.

Snow will hear oral arguments on Friday over the motion filed by Maricopa County attorneys. They argue court oversight of the sheriff’s office should end completely and immediately, asserting that court reforms have now gone beyond the original scope of the lawsuit and that the sheriff’s office does not racially profile any longer.

It is rare that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as “Wedges,” published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story. 

It made solving climate change seem possible, even simple. It claimed that the world didn’t have to wait for innovation because it had the tools to start work immediately.

The trick was to do a little of everything and let the effects add up. Renewable energy, nuclear power and conservation were certainly pieces of the solution puzzle. But so were a slew of steps that involved using oil, gas and coal despite the carbon dioxide emissions they would continue to produce. 

One fix that “Wedges” leaned especially hard on was carbon capture and storage, a technology that promised to grab carbon pollution from smokestacks and other sources and trap it forever underground. Do that enough, and climate change could be curtailed without upending the world as we know it.

The paper, written by scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, became a phenomenon. Former Vice President Al Gore highlighted it in his Oscar-winning climate change documentary. U.S. presidents from George W. Bush to Joe Biden incorporated ideas from it into policy. The United Nations’ panel on climate change worked it into at least three major reports over more than a decade. It was presented in classrooms at Harvard and MIT and cited more than 3,000 times in scientific papers. It was even turned into a board game.

For a generation, people learning how to address global warming were taught the ideas in the “Wedges” paper.  

What they didn’t learn was this: “Wedges” was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change. 

In 1997, BP abandoned climate change denial. Instead, the company quietly launched a far-reaching effort to intertwine oil company interests and climate science, in part by using its vast resources to shape the research that major universities undertook. 

While its chief executive, John Browne, was rebranding his company as Beyond Petroleum, BP sought out researchers who were already thinking about how to address climate change without replacing fossil fuels. The company found them at Princeton University, where it set about amplifying their work by donating $15 million to start the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The research program was framed around finding solutions to climate change while keeping fossil fuels in play, focusing heavily on carbon capture. 

The “Wedges” paper was the initiative’s first big swing. And it succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined. 

BP executives were deeply involved throughout the paper’s creation, according to an investigation by ProPublica and Drilled. Socolow and Pacala, the authors of “Wedges” and the new center’s co-directors, not only discussed ideas with the company but, in a departure from academic norms, passed drafts back and forth and welcomed extensive feedback. 

Like a book publisher shaping a clunky early draft into a bestseller, an executive at the company suggested the scientists punch up the language, which they did. Browne himself suggested wording that became a part of the title. Together they helped make wonky scientific ideas more digestible for popular consumption. BP even tried — unsuccessfully — to revise a version of it.  

“Chaps, I have had a go at rewriting the paper,” Browne’s climate adviser wrote the researchers at one point. 

Then, while the paper was being prepped for publication, BP began aggressively promoting the ideas it contained. Browne touted the framework in a speech as evidence that oil and gas had “sustainable futures” and published an endorsement of “Wedges” in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. BP inserted the paper’s ideas into its sustainability reports promoting greater efficiency and natural gas — which it argued offered a low-carbon alternative to coal. 

“Wedges,” whose ideas were turbocharged by the sort of high-level marketing scientific papers rarely get, became a regular part of thinking about climate change in classrooms and boardrooms alike. And as that happened, BP kept pouring millions more dollars into Princeton each year, in part to explicitly advance carbon capture and storage technology and, as internal documents make clear, to get the university’s help in turning the idea into a bona fide government-backed solution. 

“Chaps, I have had a go at rewriting the paper.”

Chris Mottershead, BP climate adviser

Gardiner Hill, a former vice president and climate executive at BP who worked with the Princeton program, told ProPublica and Drilled that BP took academic freedom seriously. It “did not oversee any of the publications” that Princeton put out under its sponsorship, he said. A spokesperson for BP declined to respond to two lists of questions sent by ProPublica and Drilled.

Socolow and Pacala say they were sincere in their intent to solve climate change in the best way they believed possible, at a time when it was not obvious that wind and solar would succeed the way they have today. The researchers say BP had no control over the scientific content of the paper. They rejected the view that technologies didn’t exist to start solving climate change immediately and hoped carbon capture offered, as Pacala said, a way to make fossil fuels “climate safe.” 

But “Wedges” oversold the readiness of carbon capture and storage, describing it as “already deployed” industrially. Reporting by ProPublica and Drilled has found that even today, the technology faces financial and technical hurdles and is unlikely to ever work at the scale needed to avert extreme warming. 

And the broader solution set that “Wedges” promoted, including expanding the use of natural gas, has meanwhile helped perpetuate a system in which fossil fuels remain the predominant source of energy and the emissions they cause have continued. 

“An unfortunate consequence” of the “Wedges” paper, wrote climate scientist Ken Caldeira, New York University physics professor Marty Hoffert and others in a 2013 critique, “was to make the solution seem easy.”

Moreover, for the past quarter century, as research into carbon capture and storage and other industry-friendly solutions have enjoyed robust funding and attention, other ideas that might have replaced carbon-heavy energy entirely — reducing warming and potentially saving lives — were drowned out, several researchers told ProPublica and Drilled.

“Wedges” would likely never have been written without BP’s funding, Socolow said. Scientists and ethicists say the paper may not have been seen as credible or earned its acclaim had the extent of BP’s involvement been fully disclosed. 

Neither BP nor Princeton responded to specific questions about our findings. 

This is the story of how one of the most influential climate papers in history came to exist thanks to the support of one of the companies most responsible for causing the climate crisis — and one with a deep financial stake in how the technologies described in the paper would play out. It is part of a broader investigation by ProPublica and Drilled into how the fossil fuel industry has helped steer the global response to climate change by pouring billions of dollars into research at elite universities. Since the 1990s, oil companies have sponsored research centers, kept offices on campuses, paid the salaries of scientists and, in at least one case, held veto power over what professors and scientists could study with their money. 

Today, the impacts of those efforts are everywhere, so ingrained in our understanding of what it means to solve climate change that it can be hard to conceive of another way forward. Even the U.N.’s assessment of how to deal with the threat of climate change continues to pin hope on capturing tremendous amounts of carbon pollution and burying it in the Earth. 

So little has been done to avert fossil fuel emissions for so long, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, that there is little remaining choice. 

“We’ve just wasted so much time,” he said, that meeting goals to limit global warming has become “functionally impossible.” 

2

A Place of Influence

“Establishing cooperative relationships”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

On a sunny morning in the spring of 1997, Browne took to the podium at Stanford University’s open-air Frost Amphitheater to deliver a speech unlike anything ever heard from an oil executive. 

“There is now an effective consensus … that there is a discernible human influence on the climate,” Browne, a small, professorly man with an air of British formality, told the audience. For years, BP and the other big oil companies had been part of an industry group called the Global Climate Coalition, working to sow doubt about global warming and avert agreements that would force cuts in heat-trapping pollution. Now Browne, having pulled BP out of the group, was suddenly pledging his company would be taking “substantial, real and measurable” action to fix the crisis.

Still, Browne cautioned against haste even as he urged action. If governments were too aggressive in cutting fossil fuel use, he warned, their actions would “crash into the realities of economic growth.” Instead, BP would seek to be more efficient — seizing “low-hanging fruit.” And it would experiment with capturing carbon to stop fossil fuel emissions from entering the atmosphere. 

This was the start of a long transition in BP’s branding and in the way it worked with thought leaders to shape the company’s future. 

By then, oil companies had already begun investing in universities’ climate work. Exxon started giving money for climate research to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the late 1970s. Then in 1991, the company funded the launch of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the program’s former co-director, Henry Jacoby. Chevron, Shell and BP also later supported the program, which developed influential climate-related models.

Fossil fuel companies recognized that they could benefit from spotlighting the research of prominent scientists whose ideas were aligned with their interests. And they strategized to boost the influence of those ideas in the global policy response to climate change. 

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest and most powerful oil industry lobbying group in the U.S., established what it called its Global Climate Science Communications Plan. An internal document described the importance of outreach aimed at “establishing cooperative relationships” with “scientists whose research in this field supports our position” and developing “opportunities to maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours.” 

In 1999, Browne asked his chief scientist, Bernie Bulkin, to find research programs the company could support in the U.S. Bulkin — who told ProPublica and Drilled that he had never heard of the API initiative to engage with scientists — decided to set up a climate-focused program that could test the viability of carbon capture and storage, a budding technology. 

For decades, oil companies had extracted carbon dioxide from the Earth and pumped it back underground to force more oil out under pressure, a process called enhanced oil recovery. If that process were adapted to store CO2 in the earth forever, then billions of tons of carbon emissions could, in theory, be captured from smokestacks and buried. Global emissions could be reduced without cutting fossil fuel use at all. 

A handful of scientists had been making the case that this might be doable. One of them was Socolow, a theoretical physicist who had been leading an interdisciplinary environmental program at Princeton since 1971. 

In 1997, Socolow ran a summer workshop for the U.S. Department of Energy in which he and other experts suggested that natural gas, coal and other fuels could be used to make clean-burning hydrogen. If the emissions from the process could be captured and stored away forever, it might be possible to use fossil fuels without contributing much to global warming. 

Socolow wanted to address climate change. But he was also predisposed to remedies that would not require what he described as “a priori, the sacrifice of the energy value of oil, gas, and coal.” In graduate school he studied with scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and he worried that supporting nuclear energy could lead to the proliferation of weapons. He thought solar, wind and hydro power would each present their own environmental problems.

Carbon capture and storage, though, could make switching away from fossil fuels less urgent and was something that “brings the oil industry to the table.”

The oil companies had doubts that carbon capture and storage technology would work. “Nobody had any idea what it would cost and whether there was anything practical at scale,” Bulkin recalled in an interview. Still, Bulkin thought there would be little downside for BP in trying. If it didn’t work for the climate, it might help the company produce more fossil fuels. 

Bulkin began evaluating America’s top universities. It was, he wrote in his 2019 memoir, a “determinedly elitist” selection process aimed at getting “the greatest benefit to the company.” Researchers at MIT and Stanford had pioneered work on carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery. But a colleague had heard Socolow give a presentation on carbon capture and was impressed. So Bulkin added Princeton into the mix, and in early 2000, Bulkin said, each of the universities submitted proposals to BP for funding of a program to expand carbon capture research. 

Stanford saw carbon capture and storage as a geological problem, MIT more of an engineering challenge, Bulkin said. Princeton’s labs didn’t have the technical expertise in carbon capture that the other two schools had. But Socolow came off as masterful at synthesizing energy challenges and environmental concerns, and Pacala brought deep knowledge of how carbon moves between Earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans. Together, they offered a more systemic way of thinking about carbon capture. 

That June, weeks before BP announced it was rebranding as Beyond Petroleum, Bulkin told Pacala and Socolow they had won. BP would commit roughly $15 million over 10 years to form the university’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The program would focus roughly one third on earth sciences research, one third on carbon capture and one third on policy efforts. Pacala got Ford Motor Co. to contribute $5 million more. 

When it was announced that October, the $20 million gift amounted to the largest corporate grant in Princeton’s history. 

A spokesperson for Princeton told ProPublica and Drilled that partnerships with corporations make up just over 3% of the university’s research funding but help it “address real-world problems.” Princeton, the spokesperson added, maintains policies that “prevent outside funders from exercising undue influence over research,” including not permitting sponsors to have veto power over publications. 

Representatives from Columbia University and Ford did not respond to requests for comment. A representative from MIT wrote that Exxon “did not direct the Joint Program’s research agenda.”

BP Promotes New Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative

From the start, Princeton’s contract with BP was supposed to protect its academic independence, Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled. The company wasn’t supposed to direct what its money was going to be spent on, he said. “BP can’t tell us what to do.” 

But BP and the Princeton researchers were eager to collaborate, and both Socolow and Pacala said they sought ideas no matter where they came from. “The university has an obligation to welcome all points of view, while fiercely protecting its own independence and the independence of its investigators,” Socolow said in an email. 

In late 2000, Princeton researchers, BP officials and representatives from Ford gathered at the enormous Italianate mansion of Princeton’s president. 

“We spent about two days just talking about what would be useful to us,” Bulkin recalled in an interview. Princeton scientists “threw out ideas, and we said, ‘Well, we could help on this’ or ‘That’s maybe interesting, maybe not,” he said. “Tell us more.’”

Together, the scientists and their funders hammered out an ambitious vision: According to a memo summarizing the meeting, the Carbon Mitigation Initiative would become a “world-class” program focused on basic earth science and carbon capture through “a new kind of engagement.” 

It would become “a place of influence” that would, ultimately, “help shape government research priorities.”

3

Evolution of “Wedges”

“A complete blank-sheet-of-paper rewrite”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

In January 2003, BP executives traveled to Princeton for the Carbon Mitigation Initiative’s second annual meeting. The center had much to show for its work on earth systems modeling and had made technical progress on carbon capture and storage. But Pacala and Socolow quickly turned to their newest work: a simple framework they were developing to bring CO2 emissions under control immediately using methods that already existed. 

Climate progress was in a state of paralysis. Groups denying the evidence of climate science were eroding political support for policy action. At the same time, climate modelers were suggesting it might be too expensive to fix climate change until the end of the century. President George W. Bush, in tacit agreement, pulled the United States out of the Kyoto treaty, the 1997 legally binding agreement that 192 countries signed to reduce emissions. Instead, Bush’s administration focused on expanding basic research into low-carbon energy technologies, which suggested to Pacala and Socolow that leaders didn’t think they had tools to address the crisis. 

The Princeton researchers believed they did have tools and that failing to deploy them soon could spell disaster for the climate. They’d listed the fuels, technologies and conservation approaches that would lead to lower emissions, including manufacturing cars that get 60 mpg, expanding wind and solar power, regrowing forests and developing hydrogen-based fuels. The idea was to stack them up, allowing each to account for a portion of the reductions needed to flatten the surging rate of global emissions. They diagrammed it for their BP sponsors as a big triangle beneath the rising line of future carbon emissions, what Socolow recalls describing as a “wedge,” cut up into equal-sized slices. Each one represented a strategy that could offset a billion tons of CO2 each year by the middle of the century.

Many of the approaches remained dependent on using fossil fuels and could result in still more emissions, not less. So the plan also leaned heavily on carbon capture to remove pollution and make those approaches work. “We were CCS enthusiasts,” Socolow said in an interview. 

But the researchers appeared to be stretching their own parameters to make carbon capture and storage fit. The “Wedges” framework was supposed to be made up of “ready to deploy” technologies. Yet carbon capture and storage had barely been tested, and no experts interviewed could recall a commercial power plant using it. 

Still, the Princeton group kept it at the center of the mix. 

That fall, Pacala traveled to London to present the work directly to BP CEO Browne. In the city’s Westminster district, Pacala traversed the leafy St. James’s Square and entered BP’s brick office building, where he was shown past a pair of security guards and seated across from Browne in a busy room. 

Pacala, whom a colleague described as an expert “pitchman,” presented his chart of ideas: Use oil and gas more efficiently. Replace coal-fired power plants. Reduce emissions, ultimately, by capturing them and burying them underground. Each action, he said, would take “slices” out of the total amount of future carbon pollution. 

Browne listened attentively. The straightforward framework made a complex problem seem manageable. But the “slices” terminology confused him. “They’re kind of wedges, aren’t they?” Pacala recalls him saying.   

“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’” Pacala remembers thinking. “‘You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”

From that point forward, Socolow and Pacala were thoroughly committed to “Wedges.” Days after the London meeting, they wrote the material up into a white paper for BP titled “The Stabilization Wedge: Consolidation of BP’s Environmental Leadership.” In an email to ProPublica and Drilled, Socolow wrote that the document was not a first draft of “Wedges,” but, he added, it was the first substantial write-up of his ideas. 

In the months following, Pacala and Socolow refined that work, and BP remained closely involved. 

At one point the researchers sent an early paper draft for review, and Chris Mottershead, Browne’s climate adviser, offered “scathing criticism,” Pacala recalls. Mottershead asked for a “punchy” and “non-academic” tone that might have more popular appeal. 

In response Pacala says he did “a complete blank-sheet-of-paper rewrite” and sent the revised draft back to Mottershead and Socolow four hours later. Mottershead loved it. He later replied with a question: “What is the potential for co-branding the ‘wedges paper … ?’” Socolow and Pacala declined. Mottershead wanted to change certain terms and asked for a more open-ended timeframe to reduce emissions. He was denied. Another time, he checked the researchers’ calculations, finding a single error. 

In late 2003, Browne himself borrowed from the “Wedges” thinking in a speech. A few months later, records show, Socolow solicited feedback from another member of BP’s management. The researchers also contributed ideas from their work for BP’s internal training and corporate communications. 

Then in March, Mottershead wrote his own version of the two scientists’ near final draft, stating in an email that he was attempting to “make the word ‘wedge’ the brand for the work.” 

To Mottershead, Princeton’s draft was too dense to break through into popular discourse. He pushed for language that would make the “wedges” concepts more digestible. 

“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want. You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”

Stephen Pacala, “Wedges” co-author and co-director of Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative

Most significantly, the draft shows, Mottershead tried to inject language that raised doubt about the legitimacy of basic climate science, describing that science as “provisional” and adding that “great uncertainties remain.”

Ultimately, Mottershead did not convince the authors to adopt that specific text. “BP tried to cross the line repeatedly,” Pacala said in an interview. “They were constantly trying to push their agenda. We just didn’t do any of it.”

But several edits would survive, including one that couched emissions in the context of economic growth and another in which Mottershead suggested moving a punchy line from lower in the article up to the very top. All, Pacala says, were changes the researchers would have made anyway. 

Still, the situation amounted to what several academic researchers describe as a highly unusual level of coordination on a major scientific work on climate change. Pacala went so far as to offer Mottershead co-authorship, at one point placing his name at the top of the paper. Yet Mottershead declined. In retrospect, Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled, Mottershead contributed to the paper’s style and presentation but not to its original scientific ideas. Mottershead did not respond to several messages, including a list of questions, over several months. 

The relationship “flies in the face of the idea of academic independence,” said Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford who studies fossil fuel influence in academia.

Pacala and Socolow each defended their independence in several interviews with ProPublica and Drilled, saying that it is common for sponsors to be involved in sharing preliminary ideas. Socolow wrote that he was buoyed by BP’s interest and thought it offered “a way of amplifying Steve’s and my impact.” 

Pacala acknowledged that there are “inevitable dangers of proximity” to industry but said that BP’s staff had “no control over the findings.” Instead, the researchers believed they were influencing BP by encouraging it to plan for climate change, which, Pacala said, “was a win.”

Pacala rejected the concern that BP’s influence on their thinking might be subtle, stating that people who are subconsciously influenced in this way have “weak character.” 

In fact, decades of peer-reviewed research has found that, across fields of study, industry funding tends to bias researchers whether they are aware of it or not, affecting what people choose to study and what they find. Industry-funded studies of food or drugs are more likely to conclude they are safe. In medical settings even a small gift from a drug company — like a box of doughnuts — can lead doctors to prescribe its brands more often. One of the few studies to look at the impact of oil and gas funding in academia found that reports out of fossil-fuel-funded research centers describe natural gas more favorably than renewables, whereas reports from centers less reliant on that funding do not. The influence of this funding, according to a working paper from Harvard researchers, is not always visible to those swayed by it. 

“It’s the whole subconscious bias problem,” said Harvard historian of science and corporate influence expert Naomi Oreskes. If “continued funding relies on having this good relationship and having this alignment, you are going to be influenced by it.”

At Princeton, Michael Oppenheimer, the director of Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, said that he does not believe Socolow or Pacala would have been swayed by feedback they disagreed with. But Oppenheimer, a close colleague of the two, added that Princeton doesn’t train researchers on how to navigate the influence that might come from close interactions with sponsors. 

And whether the researchers were affected by that proximity or not, Mottershead’s persistent feedback about the article’s scientific ideas “goes over the line,” Oppenheimer said. “That’s bad, that’s unacceptable.”

A spokesperson for Princeton told ProPublica and Drilled that the university provides “extensive guidance and information” to faculty and researchers about working with industry. Sponsors review drafts only to guard confidential material, the university added, or in cases where a sponsor is a co-author of a work. The university did not respond to a question about whether the extent of BP’s involvement in “Wedges” violated its policy and did not say whether it trains its staff on how to protect against more subtle influence.

Other colleagues at Princeton encouraged Socolow and Pacala to challenge BP more. In written feedback on the original draft for BP, visiting scientist Stefano Consonni said that the researchers needed to be more blunt with BP about the difficulty of and need to move away from fossil fuels in order to truly reduce carbon emissions. Bob Williams, a senior research scientist at Princeton whose detailed work on carbon capture inspired Socolow’s, warned the researchers that the draft made solving climate change “sound easier than it actually is.” 

In early May 2004, Socolow and Pacala submitted their paper to the journal Science. By then, “slices” had indeed become “wedges,” a decision Socolow says they made to “harmonize” their vocabulary with Browne’s. The paper included 15 wedges, three of which involved some form of carbon capture and eight of which involved using traditional fossil fuels, though in more efficient, or less polluting, ways. 

It described all of those wedges as “already deployed at an industrial scale,” a characterization that some experts said stretched the facts in the case of carbon capture and storage. Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled that each of the components required for carbon capture and storage were in use and just needed to be combined in a new way. He conceded the paper’s description was a “communications compromise.” 

And the researchers made a key assumption — one that left room for the continued use of oil and gas — about how much carbon pollution the atmosphere could absorb while still avoiding disastrous warming. The number was in the mainstream at the time, but BP officials made it clear to the researchers that they supported it. 

In an email to Socolow after the paper’s submission, Mottershead celebrated, writing that the target meant that “around 50% of primary energy could still come from fossil fuels.”

This, Mottershead wrote, was “THE key piece of the framework for politicians and business, in my view.” Socolow acknowledged, in another subsequent email, that the figure would keep the fossil fuel industry a “part of things for at least another 50 years.” 

In the July/August 2004 edition of Foreign Affairs, Browne published his own lengthy essay, titled “Beyond Kyoto,” in which he introduced key elements of the “Wedges” framework. 

Then, in mid-August, Science published the “Wedges” paper. 

In a small-type footnote that comprises “References and Notes,” Socolow and Pacala list BP and Ford as sponsors of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative and thank Mottershead as a BP employee, along with several other scientists. 

But it is not clear that anyone understood the depth of their collaboration. In response to emailed questions, Science pointed to its policy stating that anyone contributing substantially to an article must be listed as an author. The journal does not have a policy about sponsors providing editorial feedback on drafts. And in a statement, a spokesperson wrote, “Science cannot assess authorship questions based on third-party descriptions of contributions.” 

Science also pointed to a conflict disclosure essay from 2004, which describes a “check off form” the journal supplied researchers to gauge potential conflicts. The journal said it did not keep copies of forms from that time. 

“Obviously there’s a conflict of interest here,” said Oxford’s Franta, pointing to BP’s financial interest in climate policy that might arise from the paper’s conclusions. 

“The issue is how well it is managed,” Pacala said, noting that “almost every researcher” with outside funding grapples with such issues. “Of course there is conflict of interest.”

Regardless of whether explicit conflict disclosures were in place or were met, said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who studies climate policy and activism, there were norms and expectations around interactions with sponsors. BP’s repeated input on the “Wedges” paper throughout its development, she said, was simply “wrong.”

“That is not how science is supposed to happen.”

4

A Credible Success

“How to save the world in fifteen easy steps”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” exposed millions of viewers to the fact that fossil fuel use was pushing the planet toward disaster. Gore soberly presented the earth’s dwindling ice, rising seas and increasingly violent weather. And then, toward the end, he shifted to optimism. Americans need not despair, he said, because “we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” Behind him as he spoke, the opening words of Socolow and Pacala’s paper — the same ones Mottershead had suggested moving to the top — appeared on a screen. 

Papers published in Science often enjoy a media moment before fading into obscurity. “Wedges” was different. Its simple, optimistic message — polished with the help of BP’s sophisticated public relations expertise — had an irresistible allure. And the media loved it. “How to save the world in fifteen easy steps,” read one headline the day it was published. “The 15 ways to stop global warming revealed!” read another. 

Socolow gave dozens of interviews and spoke at institutions including the American Petroleum Institute, Lehman Brothers and the United Nations Conference of the Parties, where representatives from more than 190 countries coordinate international climate action. When the Bush administration released a major climate change technology strategy document in 2006, it highlighted the “Wedges” framework. “‘I get it, we don’t need pie in the sky,” Socolow recalled an administration official telling him. 

“Wedges” fast became part of the zeitgeist. In 2006, Pacala and Socolow wrote a popular article about it for Scientific American. BP, in lockstep, took out a full-page ad. In 2007, Princeton released a “Wedges” game online, which Pacala built a prototype for from planks of wood in his garage. High school students, business leaders and policymakers played it. University professors folded Princeton’s climate plan into their lessons across the country. Geoffrey Supran, a climate disinformation expert at the University of Miami, says that the paper was “mandatory reading” when he was a grad student at MIT.

“This was a paradigm paper for a whole generation of university students and grad students,” said Franta, who was also taught the “Wedges” paper as a graduate student at Harvard. “It was like, ‘This is how you solve climate change.’”

Had a BP executive’s name been on the top of “Wedges,” the paper’s message would likely have been less credible and its release met with more skepticism as a product of oil industry interests, several academics told ProPublica and Drilled. 

“Would Gore have used it if he knew?” asked Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego, referring to the details of BP’s involvement. “Many were already skeptical of the wedge paper’s reliance on CCS,” he said. “If they saw the hand of BP behind it, that skepticism would have grown.”

A spokesperson for Gore distanced him from Socolow and Pacala’s work but did not directly address the question of whether knowledge of BP’s role in the paper would have changed his opinion of their findings. Pacala said in an interview that he thought broader disclosure of BP’s partnership would have made the paper more credible, not less. 

Branded as Princeton research, the paper’s influence continued to expand, boosting the university program’s renown and Pacala and Socolow’s stature. 

In 2007, Time magazine touted the scientists as “innovators” in its “Global Warming Survival Guide.” Socolow was offered a seat on a National Research Council committee on climate policy. He testified before the Senate Finance Committee, where, in a 2007 hearing, he touted a BP carbon capture and storage pilot project as evidence that the technology was “commercially mature.” He argued that the U.S. should offer tax credits for coal power only if those plants used carbon capture technology. A year later, Congress inserted a significant carbon capture subsidy into the tax code — though it didn’t require coal plants to adopt it.

Pacala, meanwhile, was selected as chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committees focusing on emissions monitoring and on carbon dioxide removal. In 2021, when President Joe Biden appointed him to serve on his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a White House press release cited the “Wedges” paper as Pacala’s standout accomplishment.  

The paper would go on to see an explosive degree of exposure. According to Supran’s lab at the University of Miami, the roughly 3,000 peer reviewed papers that cite “Wedges” have themselves now been cited over 210,000 times, demonstrating a ripple effect rare in the universe of published science.

“That is not how science is supposed to happen.”

Dana Fisher, sociologist at American University

“Wedges” “certainly did help them a lot,” Bulkin said of the two scientists’ swift rise. “And of course, it increased the reputation of CMI and of Princeton as leading thinkers about climate change.”

This was exactly what was intended. And the benefits cut both ways.   

BP’s investment in Princeton had proven an enormous success. “Wedges” “drove strategy” within the company, according to a 2014 internal memo. After the paper was published, BP announced it would double down on carbon capture and storage demonstration projects. It also said it would spend $8 billion over 10 years on four other wedge strategies: solar, wind, hydrogen and natural gas. (The company had nearly $240 billion in oil-and-gas-related revenues in 2005 alone.) 

As BP’s initial commitment came to a close, Princeton and the company worked out a deal to keep it going. Princeton’s proposition was that it would continue to do work that would grow political and regulatory support for carbon capture, effectively using the university’s reputation to advance BP’s policy interests. “The few research groups perceived by the public as relatively unbiased will have a major role to play,” Pacala and Socolow wrote to BP in a 2007 funding document.

In response, Pacala says that Princeton was “advancing its own interest to provide to the public unbiased information.” Any “partial alignment” with BP was coincidental. 

Another funding document stated that with BP’s support, Princeton sought to become “the world’s premier institution in climate and energy” and suggested its graduates could one day work for the company. In addition to carbon capture, the documents showed the initiative’s work had expanded in earth sciences, climate modeling and policy.

Jeff Greenblatt, a former researcher for Socolow who contributed to the “Wedges” paper, said the researchers had engaged in “a delicate dance” between maintaining their intellectual integrity and pleasing BP. “I’m sure that if they included that fossil fuels were not part of the solution to a significant extent, they probably would have seen their last year of funding,” he said. “That’s just the reality of these kinds of things.”

Socolow, in an interview, agreed that BP’s funding was likely conditioned on his support for maintaining fossil fuels. “There was a synergy,” he told ProPublica and Drilled in January. When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.” 

BP extended its funding for Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative three times. It was originally slated to sunset in 2010 but was renewed through 2015, then 2020 and finally until 2025. All told, the company gave Princeton’s program more than $56 million. 

Meanwhile, for all of the paper’s popular acclaim, many fellow scientists say “Wedges” missed its target. 

“We thought it was wrong,” Caldeira, the climate scientist and former researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told ProPublica and Drilled. His research showed that far more carbon needed to be dealt with than “Wedges” acknowledged and that effective solutions would require much more research. 

Two years before “Wedges” was published, Caldeira and Hoffert, the NYU professor, published their own research in Science concluding that a “radical restructuring of the global energy system,” was needed. They thought that few of the technologies “Wedges” focused on were mature and described “severe deficiencies.” In 2013, they explicitly criticized Pacala and Socolow’s analysis in a rejoinder article titled “Rethinking Wedges,” in which they wrote that “Pacala and Socolow gave us a way to believe that the energy-carbon-climate problem was manageable.” 

To a lot of people, Hoffert said, “Wedges” served a purpose. “You have to give people hope” that climate change could be solved without radically disrupting society, he said in a recent interview. “Yet in the end,” he added, if that hope is gained by convincing people they can continue without getting rid of fossil fuels, “you’re gonna be driving the car over a cliff.” 

The fact is, he added, BP “got their money’s worth.”

Every year, about 90% of Central Oregon’s Deschutes River disappears into networks of canals and pipes traversing high desert. Between April and October, what’s left in this major river — one of the largest spring-fed waterways in the U.S. — looks more like a creek trickling out of Bend, Oregon.

Six irrigation districts — quasi-public corporations — divert the water to green up the properties of about 7,500 landowners in one of the state’s driest regions. Of the six, none is as powerful as the Central Oregon Irrigation District. It has rights to use more than half of the Deschutes’ volume — more than all the other districts combined. And under state law, in times of scarcity, most of the others must cut back to protect COID’s share of the river. 

During the last drought, state water law forced commercial farmers downstream to fallow their land while COID diverted four times what its landowners’ crops consumed, an Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis of state data found. 

Our analysis showed similar ratios across both wet and dry years, roughly aligning with estimates of what COID told the state its crops required. While state water managers did not dispute our analysis, the irrigation district said it didn’t trust the satellite-based data we used, which Oregon lawmakers backed to study water availability.

COID landowners are doing exactly what the law encourages them to do, state legislators said. To keep rights to the water, districts have to prove to the state that their customers are consistently using it “beneficially.” In the district, our reporting found, more than 9 out of 10 acres were pasture — grass for grazing or landscaping, or hay for livestock — considered beneficial under the law.

Oregon and other Western states have so far rejected any legislation that restricts what people can grow or how efficient they must be: Opposition to change is strong because water rights are a form of property rights. Water rights also raise property values and can bring agricultural tax breaks.

If lawmakers took on bedrock water law, “we’d get crushed by the powers that be and we might even not be reelected,” said state Rep. Ken Helm, the Democratic co-chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources and Water.

“What should we do? I think we should leave more water in the river. Legally speaking, that doesn’t have to happen,” he said. Helm, a land-use lawyer, grew up in Bend and has watched the region transform. “Affluent people are moving into Central Oregon for reasons that have nothing to do with growing a crop,” he said.

As things stand now, COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell said he “can’t tell people what they can and can’t farm, if it’s allowed.” The district’s job is to distribute water to its customers and to “deliver it much more efficiently and sustainably in the future,” he said.

The question is how.

Oregon has pushed three main solutions: 

1. Pipes

COID delivers most of its water through open canals built 120 years ago. Blasted from porous lava rock, the canals have to be completely full for gravity to push water across the district’s more than 42,000 acres. Nearly half the water evaporates or seeps into the ground under the canals before reaching its destination. COID’s state water rights factor this in.

Replacing the canals with pressurized pipes could save a lot of water. It could also take 50 years and cost more than $700 million. The district is in the final planning stages of what could be a $360 million project to pipe a main artery leading to more than a thousand landowners between Bend and Redmond, Oregon. Few make their living as farmers, our reporting found. In exchange for federal and state funding for piping, COID has pledged to send water downstream to farmers outside the district.

The plan has gotten broad support, especially from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley: “Repeated severe droughts make every drop of irrigation water highly valuable, and the best way to preserve irrigation water is to pipe it,” he told OPB and ProPublica.

The catalyst for focusing on COID, he said, was a threatened species of frog, which lives exactly where irrigation districts have long siphoned water, destroying its habitat. To stave off lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act, the districts agreed to leave more water in the river over time. 

As it switches from canals to pipes, COID is supposed to send the water it saves to a neighboring district that will have to take less from the river as part of the plan to restore the frog’s home. That district, North Unit, serves a valley famous for commercial farms, but it’s already water-poor. It has rights to far less water from the Deschutes than COID does. Evan Thomas, a fifth-generation farmer and leader of North Unit, put the stakes plainly at a March public meeting in Redmond: “This pipe has to go in the ground by 2028 or North Unit, all of Jefferson County, basically quits farming.”

But even those who acknowledge that piping is a critical solution note that it won’t stop COID from diverting more water than its customers need — or from sending that water to a lot of residential properties growing grass and pasture. Last year, the nonprofit Central Oregon LandWatch pushed for a bill to put limits on overwatering. Helm and Republican state Rep. Mark Owens started drafting legislation, but they never introduced it. Owens, a hay farmer in Eastern Oregon, said irrigation districts weren’t happy with the proposal. “I weakened,” he said. “We weren’t going to get it through the building. We lived to fight another day.” 

2. Sharing

The Deschutes has never had enough water for all the landowners who laid claim to it more than a century ago, said Deschutes River Conservancy Executive Director Kate Fitzpatrick. Leaving water in the river for fish and wildlife wasn’t even considered a legal, beneficial use of the resource until the 1980s. 

“So that’s what we’re working with,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re not going to win the game by pointing fingers at who’s doing what with the water.”

With more demand than supply, her nonprofit works with irrigation districts to roll out incentives for landowners to be more efficient or share voluntarily. One program pays landowners to dry up land so COID will leave more water in the river. But the district limits participation, and the program’s efficacy has plateaued for decades, state data shows. 

State lawmakers last year also created a pilot “water bank” program. The concept marks a big change in the law and could allow COID landowners to keep what water they need and rent out the excess to farmers downstream without losing rights to it. 

But since Oregon’s governor signed the bill into law nearly a year ago, COID and other key players haven’t signed anyone up. That’s because the canal system fails if it doesn’t have enough water in it, Horrell, the district’s manager, said. Piping could allow the district to scale up these other solutions in the future, he said.

There’s another problem, too: To rent out part of a water right without completely drying up their property, landowners would need to measure their use precisely — something many don’t want to do.

3. Data

COID said it doesn’t measure or report the volume of water it delivers. This is typical across Oregon, where the vast majority of water goes to agricultural lands. But policymakers and experts have long said the state can’t tackle water shortages unless it knows how much the people with irrigation water rights use on their properties. 

The Legislature’s attempts to require meters on all individual farms and wells have faced fierce public backlash. “At one point my office was getting a call a minute,” Owens, the state representative, recalled of an effort last year. The fear, he said, is that the state will use data to take away water rights or to try to charge by the gallon. 

Owens has given up on trying to force statewide metering for now, he said. 

On his own Eastern Oregon hay farm, he started a pilot project that uses a weather station and satellite data to track how much his fields drink. He can look on his phone and see how many days he should irrigate the following week, he said. He also led the charge for Oregon to invest in a cutting-edge study to apply this technology to statewide water planning. Scientists with the Oregon Water Resources Department co-authored a report with researchers from the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute. It provides estimates over nearly 40 years of how much water crops consumed on every irrigated field in Oregon. The data, which OPB and ProPublica used in our reporting, was published last year. Horrell said such data has too many variables and is not ready to guide how the district monitors water use.

State managers are not currently using that data to regulate how water is used, but instead to account for where it goes, Oregon Water Resources Department Director Ivan Gall said in a recent interview. He said tight state budgets have so far kept his agency from sharing it “with the public and decision makers in a way that is understandable and meaningful.”

Owens and Helm said they tried and failed to make it easier to learn from critical data about Oregon’s water — how much there is, how clean it is, where it’s coming from and where it’s going — but a pilot project ground to a halt after state funding dried up last year.

Chris Casad awakens each day before dawn on the Central Oregon property he bought nine years ago, the farm where he once grew tons of potatoes before water shortages forced him to fallow fields and take a job feeding someone else’s cattle on someone else’s land. 

At 38, he’s got tractors older than he is. His two kids are under 5. His wife, Cate, has two jobs. They’re staring down a pile of debt from their 85 acres and its unending supply of things in the process of breaking. 

The crisis for their farm started in drought — three summers during which starving grasshoppers descended on the area’s remaining crops, tepid reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry and the springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest recorded flow.

But the death knell for Casad’s crops was Oregon’s century-old law, which protects some water users at the expense of others. 

The couple saw the state cut their community’s share of irrigation water from the Deschutes in the name of that law. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. “There were a number of suicides, let alone people who closed up shop, older farmers just not wanting to waste their life’s worth of work and their savings on just trying to keep it going,” Casad said.

At the same time, a few miles upstream, state law encouraged landowners to soak some of Oregon’s most expensive real estate and least productive farmland, a ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting analysis of water use has found. These water-rich Oregonians live in the Central Oregon Irrigation District, a quasi-municipal corporation — part public utility, part homeowners association — that manages and distributes the lion’s share of the Deschutes’ water.

Six irrigation districts together take more than 90% of the river in Bend from May to September. COID is, by far, the most powerful. It has rights to more than half of the volume of the river because when the state was carving up the Deschutes, back in the early 1900s, COID was near the front of the line with a plan to use the water. And in Western water law, that place in line — senior rights — guarantees that when drought hits, your share is protected. 

That same law also says COID can keep taking all that water as long as it can prove that landowners in the district are putting it to “beneficial use.” Waste is forbidden.

But Oregon policymakers have such loose definitions of what’s beneficial and what’s waste that, during the drought, our reporting found, only 1 of every 4 gallons COID took from the river was absorbed by crops. 

The news organizations shared our analysis of state-commissioned satellite data with both officials who manage water for Oregon and with COID. While the state did not dispute the numbers, irrigation district leaders said they didn’t trust the state data, which Oregon lawmakers created to study water availability. COID also said that the drought years were anomalous; however, our analysis across wet and dry years showed crops drank a similar share of the diverted water each year. 

Other records from the district and the state describe how most of the water percolated into the ground, evaporated into hot, dry air, or drained off fields into scrubland and desert. Some fed the aquifer. Some went back into the river downstream, where environmental regulators have found waterways warmed and polluted. 

And that one gallon that quenched crops? Almost all of it went to grass and pasture. 

“We’re Just Wasting Water” 

Casad grew up in Bend, the region’s biggest city, where he watched developers slice farmland into subdivisions. The lumber mill became a shopping mall anchored by an REI. An economy once dependent on timber and agriculture turned instead toward tourism and recreation.

Canals from the Deschutes still wind through Bend’s neighborhoods of single-family homes, and then to the estates, farms, ranches and destination resorts on the city’s outskirts. Among those sits a horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike fame, one of the wealthiest families in the world and, our analysis found, one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, its website shows. A manager declined to comment on how it manages water. 

Another long, gated driveway leads to an 80-acre property that was once dry scrubland. Cinematographer Byron Garth bought water rights from another landowner through COID a decade ago to irrigate part of the property. 

The water helped him transform a rocky hillside into an “exclusive compound paradise,” as an auction listing last year put it, with a 6,300-square-foot mansion with radiant heated floors, three guest houses, a 10,000-square-foot garage and a swimming pool — all surrounded by a carpet of soft green grass. 

For a few years, Garth used his water rights to grow hay for about 15 alpacas and goats, but in the end, he said, “it was cheaper to just mow it.” Garth said he did have reservations about using so much water during the drought, but he reasoned that somebody had to use it. 

“For the aesthetic value,” realtor Jen Bowen said about the grass last year, as she gave OPB a tour of the estate shortly before Garth sold it for $4.8 million.

“I think most of us would agree — it’s nicer to look out over a lush pasture than it is the high desertscape,” Bowen said.

One of the district’s thirstiest developments is Ranch at the Canyons, a gated subdivision of dozens of multimillion-dollar Tuscan-style mansions whose residents mutually own an equestrian center, a luxury wedding venue, a winery and a nonprofit farm run by “dedicated ranch management and local farmers.” A development manager did not respond to a request for comment. Its website promises homeowners “the peaceful rhythm of agricultural life — without the work.” 

A similar property listed for $15 million invites its future owners to imagine more than a residence or a cattle ranch, but “a Playground for Ambitions, for Imagination, for Dreamers, and for Doers.”

Our analysis of the most recently available state data, covering 2015 to 2022, found that more than 9 out of every 10 acres in the district were growing grass — pasture and hay fields for livestock as well as landscaping. 

Casad started his life as a farmer in the district, but he was not one of those grass growers. He began leasing land near his hometown in 2010, and within a matter of years was turning a profit, annually growing thousands of tons of organic potatoes, pulling them from the earth with a gargantuan harvester he called “the white whale.” He liked the idea of farming in a region that once sold 1 of every 4 bags of potatoes in the state. He leased more land, sold out at farmers’ markets, supplied a local brewery with spuds for its fries, and welcomed school field trips, “just to show kids what a working farm is, where their food comes from.”

COID’s water was a boon.

“It was just always on,” Casad said. 

But the glut of water became a problem. He couldn’t just cut off the flow without risking his landlord’s water rights. So he did what others in the district do: figure out a way to use the “overabundance” or capture it in ponds. When one pond was full, Casad started digging a second one so the excess water wouldn’t inundate his neighbor’s property.

On more than a third of COID’s acreage, landowners irrigate their crops by intentionally flooding the fields. Water flows directly from ditches across the land — saturating plants, pooling and running off as it evaporates or seeps into the ground. 

Water experts are quick to point out that water running off fields or leaking out of canals filters into aquifers or drains back to the river. That is not waste, they say, because it recirculates in the river basin. 

This recycling takes time, while the consequences on the Deschutes are immediate. Farmers are drying up acreage and, for about 40 miles downstream of Bend, fish habitats suffer, state scientists told us. Once irrigation districts take their 90% of the river during the growing season, average remaining flows over the last decade have been about half what the ecosystem needs, according to stream gauges and state conservation targets. “The river always loses,” former state biologist Brett Hodgson said. 

The fact that much of the irrigation water is, in some form or fashion, recycled elsewhere doesn’t put COID landowners like David Fisher at ease either. Fisher said he flood irrigates about 60 acres of his property to grow hay and pasture for cattle.

“We’re just wasting water. Really. We are,” remarked the 72-year-old butcher shop owner. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tree hugger or one of those people that think that we should stop this for the frogs or the fish. But there’s got to be a middle of the road.”

“Waste Is Like Pornography”  

Both how much water the district uses and what its landowners are growing have the state’s blessing. Oregon, like other Western states, says that as long as irrigation is put to “beneficial use without waste,” no one can take your water rights.

But growing anything is considered a beneficial use as long as it’s planted, irrigated and not a native species or noxious weed. Policymakers and courts have labeled so few uses as waste that one of the most well-known legal precedents was set 90 years ago by a California court, said Colorado-based water law attorney Sarah Klahn. The case forbade the use of irrigation water to drown gophers. 

Water rights are a form of property rights, Oregon-based water law attorney Karen Russell said, and although the law is designed to adapt to changing times, the courts have typically allowed past practices to dictate how much water landowners can use.

In the eyes of Oregon courts, “waste is like pornography,” she said: “You know it when you see it.” 

So it doesn’t matter if landowners are watering the prized crops that decades ago were celebrated by the Deschutes Basin’s annual potato festival, when local women vied to be crowned “Miss Spud,” or the grass and hay for today’s “Playground for Ambitions.”

This is the point COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell, who is in charge of the district’s day-to-day operations, tried to drive home at a town hall meeting in Redmond last March. The moderator read a question asking about incentives that might make “hobby farms” more efficient. Horrell bristled at the term, calling it a label intended to “shame and coerce us into change.” 

“We as district managers don’t get to decide whether we like somebody growing carrot seed or somebody having two llamas and a Prius in the driveway,” he shot back. “If you’re using your water beneficially and growing a beneficial crop, that is what we manage. We don’t have the right to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

The district is vigilant about ensuring one thing — that landowners are growing a non-native crop, which the district checks through field visits and by aerial reviews, COID’s Deputy Director of Water Rights Jessi Talbott said in a recent interview. 

Every summer, a COID-hired plane flies over the district’s more than 70 square miles of fields, an area larger than Salem, Oregon’s capital city, looking for brown patches. If landowners aren’t using the water exactly where they are supposed to at least once every five years, the state can cancel unused water rights. Oregon regulators have canceled irrigation water rights just four times since 2020, and none of those were in the COID. 

“Nobody else in the state does what we do to try and encourage use,” Talbott said. 

Since 2021, the district has sent more than 1,000 letters to landowners warning them they were in danger of losing water rights. The intent of the letters isn’t to scare people, but to educate them about water stewardship, Talbott said. If landowners suspected of not using water don’t take action, COID can and will confiscate rights itself, she added, but this rarely happens.

Casad’s landlord got a letter from COID in 2016, after aerial surveillance spotted “specific dry areas” on the property, district records show. Casad and his wife, Cate Havstad-Casad, had turned one rocky corner into a compost pile and parking area for their equipment.

“In order to satisfy the powers that be seeing that we’re using the water, there was an entire season where we had to water that compost pile and equipment yard,” Havstad-Casad said. 

By the next year, a COID inspector’s report noted “enough growth to avoid confiscation.” In 2023, on another property, Andria Truax and her husband Dan Baumann got a COID warning letter that sent them into “panic mode,” they said. The couple owns a nursery raising drought-tolerant landscaping plants on a 10-acre property near Bend. 

“We’re supposed to keep some of these areas green that are next to impossible to grow anything on,” Truax said. 

They didn’t want to douse rocky soil and fight back the weeds that immediately sprang up. The irony struck her because “farmers are getting cut off from water downstream and meanwhile we’re being told to water more.”

Still, to protect their water rights and property values, they turned on the sprinklers. 

COID doesn’t tell people to water rocks or compost piles, Talbott said in an interview last year. In a more recent interview, she said OPB and ProPublica’s finding that only about 25% of the district’s diversion was consumed by crops was “infuriating.”

“We do so much to educate our patrons and for them to use the water right and make products out of it, feed the community, feed cows, whatever is in alignment with water law,” Talbott said. 

In the same meeting, Horrell said the district not only doesn’t overdeliver water, but some properties don’t get enough. COID doesn’t directly measure how much water landowners use, only how much land they’re irrigating.

In its water management conservation plan, which covers 2015 to 2020, COID approximated how much water crops required, based on surveys of its landowners about what they were growing — largely pastures — and federal weather data. Those averaged estimates showed crops required about 27% of what the district took out of the river annually. That roughly mirrors our own finding of what crops actually drank, based on the state’s study of satellite data. 

Horrell and other district officials did not respond to multiple questions about the numbers in COID’s own conservation plan. 

“They Have All the Cards”

State leaders have long wrestled with how to divvy up the Deschutes Basin in the face of increasing drought, booming population and growing demand. Bend and Redmond, the basin’s two largest cities, are facing uncertain future supplies; during the drought of 2022, COID diverted over 12 times more water than both cities combined, with their then roughly 132,000 total residents. While farms are, by far, the biggest water users in the nation, the COID’s contribution to the state’s agricultural economy is among the lowest in Oregon. The region leads other Oregon counties only in horse sales.

Republican state Rep. Mark Owens, a hay farmer from Eastern Oregon and one of the state’s leading voices on water management, said the district’s hobby farmers are getting excess water “which they do not need, should not have to utilize and should not be delivered to them.” Oregon, he said, is long overdue to look again at how it manages water. 

The beneficial use rule was designed, he said, to build up rural economies, and “it’s what allowed some of our communities to prosper.” But now, “you have a group of folks that employ nobody, harvest nothing, so how are you actually providing a public benefit for that water?” he said. “So is there something broken? Yeah, there is.”

How, he asked, “do you get the most crop per drop?” 

Rather than mandates, the Legislature has turned to incentives, like authorizing programs that pay people to leave water in the river without losing the right to it. Baumann and Truax eventually did just that with a sliver of their water rights. But the state doesn’t dictate how irrigation districts use those incentives. COID’s board of directors has capped participation so that very few properties are eligible. 

Horrell said the district has to limit enrollment in water-sharing programs because its 120-year-old delivery system will fail if the canals aren’t brimming full.

The district’s hundreds of miles of open, unlined waterways rely on gravity to push huge volumes out of the river and propel the water that ends up on fields more than 30 miles away. When COID has reduced the volume of this “carry water” too much in the past, Horrell said, farms at the ends of the system suffered. 

But the district acknowledged in public meetings and in our interviews that all the water leaking and evaporating along the way is wasteful. To change that, it’s seeking more than $700 million in public funding to replace the canals with new, pressurized pipes. It’s already gotten more than $65 million for piping since 2015.

“There is no dispute that we all want a better, more equal, more balanced water delivery system that benefits our river, our partners, districts, cities. That’s a given,” Horrell said, “How we get there is what we argue about.”

COID is a business, he emphasized, one that he said does need to become more sustainable as the climate changes.

COID’s rights allow it to take even more water from the Deschutes than it does. Even so, Horrell pointed out, it has voluntarily scaled back over the last decade of droughts. Thanks to piping, he said, it sends some water to downstream farmers when it doesn’t have to.

But, he said, that “doesn’t mean that it is not ours.” 

The Deschutes, like rivers across the country, is owned by the public, and taxpayers are spending big to conserve it. But irrigation districts still have all the power, said environmental advocate Yancy Lind, who contributes to a state-supported water planning group with districts, cities and state managers.

“We live in the West and in the West, water is power and the irrigators have the water. It’s that simple,” he said. “They have all the cards. We’re just trying to pull little crumbs out from them.” 

“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”

After seven years of leasing land in the COID, Casad headed north to nearby Jefferson County and the North Unit Irrigation District, where he now lives. He moved because he could afford to buy there and the land was more fertile — it produces more than half the world’s supply of carrot seed. Plus he wanted to live among people like him, dedicated farmers, someone like Jos Poland, “a tough dude” and the lifelong dairy farmer who became his new neighbor.

The move came with one big tradeoff. Casad went from a district with plentiful water to one that has long had to make do with less. North Unit is the first to be cut off during a drought. Compared to the COID, even in a wet year, North Unit promises half as much water per acre, and it loses an even higher percentage in leaky delivery canals, but its crops still consume a much higher percentage of what the district takes out of the river, our analysis found. 

North Unit’s farmers pride themselves on that efficiency. Drive through Casad’s neighborhood and you’ll see rows of water-saving sprinklers, and pumps churning to recycle and reapply the runoff captured by specialized ponds. “It’s the only way we’ve been able to survive,” said one of the district’s longtime farmers, 80-year-old Gary Harris.

Casad knew this, so he calculated that half as much water on fertile land would be enough.

And it was, until the drought hit in 2020. To keep his farm going, he started drying up two acres of land for every acre of potatoes he planted. Down the road, Poland’s organic cow pastures died. He had to sell half his herd. 

“I was losing money so fast that I couldn’t afford to feed my animals,” Poland recalled. “That threw me in a big depression.” He struggled to get out of bed. Casad started helping him with the dairy, working through the night on his own farm. 

“I remember watching the lights of the tractor out the window,” Cate Havstad-Casad said. She was pregnant with their first child, sitting in the bathtub having contractions, she said, but she waited hours to call her husband inside “because I understood the pressure on his shoulders.”

Casad wept as he dredged up memories of the drought. “Some of this stuff you just bury,” he said. “You bury it down deep.”

During those years, which overlapped with the pandemic, Jefferson County Commissioner Kelly Simmelink said he heard from farmers dealing with falling commodity prices, rising operational costs, “and then the real fact of water availability — I don’t know how you continue.”

As the drought wore on, the suicide rate in Jefferson County nearly doubled. “Our farmers and ranchers face immense pressure,” he told the Legislature in early 2023, successfully urging it to launch a state-funded suicide prevention hotline for agricultural producers. 

Two years into the drought, Casad learned at North Unit’s spring meeting that he would have to cut back his water use even more. For every acre of vegetables he could plant, four would have to go fallow. He called his wife to break the news when she was out of town. 

After she hung up, she sat alone in her hotel room and broke down.

“It doesn’t have to be this way” she said through tears in a video diary she recorded at the time. “It is Oregon water law which will give a very wealthy person with a hayfield that they literally mow and leave in the field and do nothing with because their life has nothing to do with the land, …  that person will get twice as much water as any professional farmer will get in North Unit.”

Casad no longer grows potatoes. The bins where he once stored them sit empty in the barn. Now he grows mostly hay and grass for cattle — crops that he said need less water. 

But rough years are coming for farmers in the Deschutes Basin. This year Oregon’s snowpack is one of the lowest it’s been in recorded history. That snow takes years to percolate and it’s what feeds the mountain springs powering the river. More than half of Oregon counties have already declared droughts. 

The Casad farm is still paying down the debts from the last drought. Chris Casad worked part-time at a feedlot this winter. Now he’s a school bus driver. 

To his two young children, his “whale” of a potato harvester has never been anything other than a slide, their playground for make-believe. 

The modeled pathways, what we call projections, for deployment of carbon capture and storage are from text and tables in the International Energy Agency’s Energy Technology Perspectives and World Energy Outlook reports, and from correspondence with the IEA. The 2008 and 2010 projections are from the IEA’s Blue Map scenario; a second 2010 projection is from the Net Zero by 2050 scenario; 2018 is from the Sustainable Development scenario; and 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 are from the Announced Pledges, Stated Policies and Net Zero by 2050 scenarios. Some of these scenarios represent pathways designed to achieve a specific temperature or concentration of CO2. Other scenarios represent what is possible based on current policies or pledges. Pathways from years where underlying data was not provided in the IEA’s report were excluded.

In response to emailed questions, a spokesperson for the IEA said, “The IEA’s long-term modelling and scenarios are not designed to predict future deployment of technologies; the different scenarios we produce are intended to explore the potential implications and trade-offs of different policy, technology and investment choices.” The agency said that solar power has succeeded in part because of successful policy support for it, especially in China, and that CCS has lagged because of a lack of similar support. It added that CCS remains a part of the solution portfolio for industries that might otherwise be hard to decarbonize. The spokesperson noted that a record number of CCS projects are under construction.

Data for the actual CCS capacity derives from the IEA’s CCUS Projects Database. We defined large-scale projects as those with the estimated capacity to store at least 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. The data comprises only projects that were completed and that permanently store CO2, rather than those that utilize CO2 for enhanced recovery of oil and gas or other uses, since those uses can create more carbon than they store or have looser requirements for monitoring.

Of the 12 completed CCS injection projects, 11 remain operational and one has been decommissioned. The annual total for carbon stored assumes the projects operated at their stated capacity each year since launch, which few have done. The comparison to the volume of CO2 emitted by a single large power plant is derived from data provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The projections for solar power production are from the IEA’s World Energy Outlook reports. Data depicted is from the Announced Pledges, Current Policies, New Policies, Net Zero by 2050, Reference, Sustainable Development and Stated Policies scenarios. Data was limited to projections from IEA reports from every other year to make the chart less cluttered.

Data for the actual deployment of solar energy was taken from IEA’s World Energy Outlook and Energy Technology Perspectives reports.

Data comparing projections and deployment of carbon storage and solar energy was initially compiled by researchers Rory French and Lindsey Gulden.

The 6 billion tons target figure is derived from the 2024 paper “The feasibility of reaching gigatonne scale CO2 storage by mid-century.” It reflects the median quantity of subsurface carbon storage among scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report scenario database that have a greater than 67% chance of limiting warming to 2°C.

The IPCC said it does not develop or run the models that create the scenarios in its database, and noted that the Assessment Report includes information contextualizing and questioning the models’ assumptions around solar and CCS deployment.

The estimate of 768,000 square miles of land needed to grow biomass comes from the Sixth Assessment Report’s Technical Summary, which states that the cropland area needed to keep warming below 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot is around 199 million hectares in 2050.

The estimate of 68,000 miles of pipeline is sourced from the 2021 Net-Zero America report.

To calculate how many large-scale CCS reservoirs would be required to meet the 6 billion metric tons target, we assumed the projects would bury as much as the largest carbon storage project has in its largest year, the Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project in Australia, which injected 2.7 million tons in 2019. That figure came from the 2025 annual report from the London Register of Subsurface CO2 Storage, produced by Imperial College London.

To calculate the total annual cost for CCS projects by 2050, we multiplied the $85-per-ton subsidy the U.S. offers industry in its 45Q tax credit by 6 billion tons.

China’s 2025 military budget is sourced from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The U.N.’s humanitarian and development aid budget for 2024 comes from the U.N. Systems Chief Executives Board for Coordination’s expenses factsheet.