4/11/2025
WT Staff
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April 7, 2025 225 pm EDT
The US needs safe drinking water: Do we need to say it?
Is drinking water inherently safe? What good is drinking water if it is not safe? An independent news agency alleges a leaked federal government memo cancels the term "safe drinking water" for its departments and agencies. WT asked US Department of Agriculture for a response, more to follow.
As environmental scientists and water resource managers have been cut from US government, industry lobbyists have been promoted to the highest levels of public administration. The task of water security now falls heavily upon the States and non-profit environmental groups like New York's Riverkeeper. The Supreme Court has recently reduced the burden for municipalities and industry to ensure clean water. As of March 4, polluters may discharge contaminants on the basis of what is most efficacious, rather than what the receiving body can accommodate while maintaining the intended purpose, drinking water included.
The US Department of Agriculture has long supported principles of soil health, traveling and teaching farmers and ranchers that best soil management for food production is also that which is best for moisture infiltration and retention. These features of agricultural soil to act as a carbon filter for water are influenced by farm management practises, promoting flood, drought and wildfire mitigation properties as well as higher quality crops.
More than a decade ago, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service staffer Ray Archuleta shared a demonstration of agricultural soil science on social media that changed the direction of this writer's career. At that time, working with grain farmers to maximize both yield and quality, the realization came that success was closely tied to moisture management. USDA taught a generation of farmers the soil that filters and stores moisture is going to produce the most food.
According to a conservative policy document entitled Project 2025, clean water, safe water has nothing to do with food production. The specific policy advice to USDA begins on page 289, to curtail past administrations' "efforts to put climate change and environmental issues ahead of the most important requirements of agriculture—to efficiently produce safe food." The conservative advice goes on to say that USDA "should not place ancillary issues, such as environmental issues, ahead of agricultural production itself."
Is it possible to produce safe food without clean, safe water?
Agricultural soil has the capacity to either securely contain or to release into water the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides applied for crop production. Agriculture, therefore is a critical pathway for clean water, or the opposite, of water contamination.
Lake Erie is the source of drinking water for 12.5 million people in the USA and Canada. The reduction of harmful phosphate pollution is imperative to slow the growth of the resident HAB, the Lake Erie cyanobacteria colony grows in line with phosphate shedding into Lake Erie, the single largest source of which is non-point source contamination from a single watershed in Ohio. Unfettered use of phosphate and the spreading of raw hog manure in the Maumee River watershed will blow up efforts to reduce phosphate, sparking more harmful algal blooms in the drinking water supply. The Toledo water crisis of 2014 impacted half a million people that could not consume the tap water. Note cyanotoxins in drinking water cannot be removed by boiling, the only way to manage HABs is to not feed them in the first place.
Besides the agricultural soil management, the USDA National Forest Service is a tremendous natural feature protecting drinking water quality across the USA. The National Forest Service claims 20% of US drinking water originates within 193 million acres of managed public forest and grasslands. Following the White House Executive Order of Mar 1 to immediately expand domestic timber production, we asked USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins for more details on which parts of the National Forest are to be placed into logging blocks, and how drinking water will be protected within a rapid expansion of logging. As the response did not include a mention of water protection, we asked a second time.
Given forest, crops and grasslands contribute as much as 40% of the precipitation volume for the regional summer rains by way of transpiration, we need to understand the potential impacts of the loss of substantial forest area on US drinking water (and on food production). As environmental scientists have been cut from the federal work force, these questions are becoming more challenging to answer. More to follow.
See our prior coverage, Will the expansion of domestic logging create a need to find water security elsewhere?
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