In December, the head hydrologic honchos of the seven states of the Colorado Basin met in Las Vegas for the 2025 Colorado River Water Users Association meeting.

I spent the week at the conference, and asked just about everyone I spoke to at the annual convention different versions of the same questions. First among these was:

At the very least, it felt like a good way to break the ice in some otherwise very tense rooms at Caesars Palace.

More than 1,500 people had gathered there, including academics, activists, water bureaucrats, entrepreneurs (perhaps cloud seeding can solve our water woes?) and, crucially, negotiators from each of the states of the Colorado River Basin.

Everybody there wondered the same thing: How can the 40 million people of the basin — people who live across seven states and 30 tribal nations, people who farm around 5 million acres of irrigated land, people who work in semiconductor fabs and dairies and who build and inhabit exurban subdivisions — share the water of the already overallocated river?

Few had any illusions of an easy answer, and just about everyone knew that negotiators were unlikely to reach a compromise while at the conference.

I thought, in this context, that people might take to blackjack or poker to blow off some steam.

While I’m sure some did, I only saw one group of people — a very tired-looking pack of besuited men and women with Arizona lapel pins — hit the tables. It was around 11 o’clock on the final night of the conference, and wisps of smoke from a cigarette trailed behind them as they wove between card games, looking for a row of open chairs and a sympathetic croupier.

I don’t actually know how to play any card games more sophisticated than Uno, so I failed to seize a chance to sit down with them. And what would they have said, anyway, besides what we all knew?

I didn’t receive a satisfactory answer to my gambling question until I landed an interview with Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — one of the main federal officials tasked with shepherding negotiations.

It was the answer that, privately, I was hoping someone would give me, because it felt too obvious to ignore.

What negotiators and the federal government hope to produce is a deal to make necessary cuts and manage reservoir releases to sustain the river after current agreements expire at the end of 2026.

The federal government has put in place a February 14 deadline to reach a deal. Negotiators already blew through a previous deadline last November.

If those agreements — namely, a set of 2007 interim guidelines — expire without a replacement, the parties of the basin would revert to operating criteria from the 1970s, under which the federal government would decide annually how much water is available for use under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

That’s not good for a number of reasons.

To name a few: The 2007 guidelines are themselves inadequate to manage the river given current hydrologic conditions, so reverting back fifty years means further separating the law of the river from the reality. All users of river water want certainty, not vacillating allocations and looming litigation. And the federal government doesn’t have unlimited authority to dictate terms on the river.

The feds can protect their infrastructure — namely, the reservoirs and dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead — but “their ability to restrict deliveries based on concerns about overall sustainability of the system is not so great,” Campbell, the ASU water policy expert, told me.

In the backdrop is a river in critical condition.

The agreements governing the Colorado River assume there’s about 18 million acre feet of water a year in the river (an acre foot is enough to provide water for about three houses for a year in the Phoenix area).

The 1922 Colorado River Compact allocated 7.5 million acre feet for the Upper Basin and 7.5 million acre feet for the Lower Basin; a 1944 international agreement allocated an additional 1.5 million acre feet to Mexico, where two states use Colorado River water; and about 1.5 million acre feet are lost each year due to evapotranspiration. Added up, that’s about 18 million acre feet of water a year.

But tree ring analysis shows that the average annual flow of the river over the last 500 years is closer to 13.5 million acre feet, Rhett Larson, a water law professor at Arizona State University, told attendees during his panel at the conference.

In other words, even in the early days of the so-called Law of the River, the Colorado was overallocated.

For decades, there nevertheless seemed to be enough water to meet that surplus demand, in part because the comparatively low-population Upper Basin states didn’t — and still haven’t — developed the demand or infrastructure to make full use of their allocation, even as Lower Basin states exceeded their share. At the turn of the 2000s, the states of the basin were negotiating what to do with surplus water, not how to distribute cuts.

But in more recent years, climate change, persistent drought and poor snowpack, plus increased demand across the basin, have laid bare the severity of the situation.

For one, there’s a baseline structural deficit of about 1.5 million acre feet in the Lower Basin each year due to evaporation, leakage and consumption. Each year, less water goes into Lake Powell than comes out of Lake Mead. But the Lower Basin states historically haven’t had to count those losses as part of their allocation, making up for the deficit with system storage. That means more depletion of the reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are already approaching critical levels — Lake Mead is only 33% full while Powell is even lower, sitting at around 28%.

And the structural deficit doesn’t account for a hydrological reality defined by climate change and megadrought. A group of researchers from institutions across the basin authored a study in the fall of 2025 that asked a simple question: What if this year is as dry as last year and consumptive use isn’t reduced? The answer: a 3.6 million acre-foot deficit.

Without cuts, Lake Powell could reach deadpool by the summer of 2027, according to some federal estimates, threatening hydropower generation and limiting the ability of water to be passed through the Glen Canyon Dam down river. (There are river outlet tubes at lower levels in the dam, but the aging infrastructure isn’t designed to handle a constant, large flow of water.)

That’s a worst-case scenario (though there are some environmental groups, namely the Glen Canyon Institute, that have long called for decommissioning the dam and restoring Glen Canyon to its free-flowing state, shifting the bulk of storage to Lake Mead). But it’s one that’s feeling less and less remote.

This context helps explain why negotiations for what to do with the river and its diversions moving forward are especially tense.

The hope is that the dire circumstances drive the states together, not apart.

But there’s also a world in which negotiations fully break down, and the parties devolve into litigation against each other or the federal government or both to ensure they receive what they feel is a fair share of the river’s declining volume of water.

The basic dispute between the Upper and Lower Basin states is fairly simple to describe.

The river’s headwaters lie in the Upper Basin. But the real economic, population and agricultural base of the region is in Arizona, Nevada and California, the latter of which is by far the river’s biggest user.

All states have a litany of conservation measures they can tout — California is using the least amount of water that it has since the 1940s; for Arizona, the least since the late 1950s — but more cuts need to be made in short order to sustain the river. Lower Basin officials have proposed taking 1.5 million acre feet in mandatory annual cuts — essentially, counting evaporative losses toward their obligation when they previously had not — but that won’t be enough to make up for the deficit, especially in dry years.

Officials from these Lower Basin states want the Upper Basin to agree to share in any cuts beyond that level in a way that is “mandatory and verifiable,” to quote Tom Buschatzke, the director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources and our state’s chief negotiator. He also wants to ensure these are “net” reductions — not cutting 200,000 acre feet here and consuming 400,000 new acre feet there.

But the Upper Basin states balk at the suggestion they should take mandatory cuts when they aren’t using close to their full 7.5 million acre-foot allocation, whether due to a lack of development or diminished snowpack in the Rockies. They may be willing to encourage or incentivize users to make cuts, but they’d rather apply their savings to their own needs.

But the Lower Basin states — particularly Arizona — say they can’t continue to shoulder the brunt of cuts. The Central Arizona Project, which ferries Colorado River water to the state’s population centers, has relatively low priority rights, a condition agreed to among Lower Basin states in exchange for support for federal funding of the canal project back in the 1960s.

Concentrating most of the necessary demand reductions in Arizona could all but wipe out the CAP, Campbell said.

Another important issue is language in the 1922 compact that stipulates the Upper Basin must allow an average of 75 million acre feet of water to make it to the Lower Basin over a 10-year period. Later agreements sent 1.5 million acre feet a year downriver to Mexico. The Lower Basin contends that the two basins must split that Mexican obligation, so traditionally, about 82.5 million acre feet a decade are released through Glen Canyon Dam (less in recent years). If the Upper Basin states can’t meet that obligation, they should have to take cuts, officials in the Lower Basin contend.

But with the multidecade megadrought, it’s likely that flows through Lees Ferry will drop below that 10-year average of 82.5 million acre feet by 2027. That would mean crossing the “trip wire” of the 1922 compact, allowing the Lower Basin to try to compel releases from the Upper Basin.

So, one thing the Upper Basin would like to see from the Lower Basin is a waiver of that compact requirement.

But Buschatzke and other Lower Basin officials have said they wouldn’t countenance that without commitments to mandatory cuts from the Upper Basin. They similarly say the Upper Basin needs to forget about entitlement to grow into a full 7.5 million acre-feet allocation.

In seemingly every possibility for agreement, there are some of the same fundamental disagreements. Arizona is also particularly concerned about the Upper Basin taking mandatory cuts because the state Legislature has to ratify a new agreement.

Some reporting that has been published in the three weeks following the conference suggests a very small amount of progress, though this isn’t the first time we’ve heard something to that effect.

The basin states and federal government are meeting once a week, including in meetings in Salt Lake City next week, in an attempt to sequester the negotiators in a room with as few distractions and aides as possible, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reported. Last week, Buschatzke told KJZZ that there had been some “movement” on a possible agreement to limit withdrawals from Lake Powell in early winter before snow melts.

But it’s hard to say from the outside looking in if this constitutes a real breakthrough, especially given the volume of reductions that may be necessary if current climatic conditions hold.

Perhaps a more likely scenario is another short-term agreement, à la the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. That’s what Nevada’s chief negotiator said he felt was likely.

This all raises an important question: What about the feds? Initially, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said he would intervene if the states couldn’t come to an agreement by Nov. 11. That deadline came and went with no action. But Interior maintains the Feb. 14 deadline has greater force.

For one, he said, new “water years” begin for Lake Powell and Lake Mead in October and December, respectively. New plans for operations of the reservoirs must also undergo a federal environmental review process, which takes months and requires public feedback.

The Arizona Legislature needs time to act, and if new Congressional authority is required, federal lawmakers will also need time to reach an agreement.

Arizona officials have led the charge in asking for federal intervention, whatever that may look like.

It’s not so much that anyone believes the federal government has a magic bullet — more, the general idea is that the feds would put options on the table that are so unpalatable for both sides that they would reach a settlement.

But that’s not to say they don’t have power — it’s more of a question of whether they can use it without throwing the whole region into litigious chaos.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. California (1963) gave Reclamation the role of “water master” in the Lower Basin, allowing the bureau to make active management decisions to protect its infrastructure. So it could significantly cut releases to the Lower Basin, for example. But the ruling is silent on the government’s ability to take a similarly active role upriver — as with many issues on the Colorado, whether you think it can likely depends on where you live.

A draft environmental analysis of several scenarios for river operations based on input from across the basin is slated to be released any day now. Interior has said that for now, it is not identifying a “preferred alternative.” But Buschatzke and other Lower Basin officials indicated during the conference that they had seen early versions of the scenarios and were not satisfied that any required enough concessions from the Upper Basin.

Interior and Reclamation have been extremely reticent to dictate terms. When federal representatives addressed the conference, they took the states to task for rehashing old arguments instead of producing something new.

Andrea Travnicek, another Interior official, told the crowd at one panel that if the current crop of negotiators doesn’t reach a deal, their states should consider sending a new batch of officials to hash things out.

But this seemingly hands-off approach, coupled with the department’s decision to not yet identify a preferred alternative, doesn’t engender a ton of confidence among those who feel negotiators need decisive prodding from on high.

For his part, Babbitt says the department needs to step in, say that “we’re in an emergency phase,” and impose proportional cuts to consumption across the basin. But he doesn’t see that happening.

I don’t mean to paint an apocalyptic scenario, though perhaps one exists — when I interviewed Terry Goddard, a former mayor of Phoenix and the president of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District board of directors, he made a reference to The Water Knife, a 2015 novel that describes a near-future Southwest dystopia.

In practice, though, cities in the Phoenix area have a variety of drought management plans and access to other sources of water, whether groundwater, water in other rivers or dams, transfer basin water and so on. Phoenix in particular is investing heavily in direct potable reuse — what some call “toilet to tap,” a term that water bureaucrats would like to avoid using.

As Larson, the ASU water law professor, put it, the question isn’t so much whether the basin runs out of water, it’s more about whether the basin runs out of cheap water. That means asking tough questions about who will pay for what uses, especially when it comes to agriculture, which uses the vast majority of water in the basin.