Low water levels, high demand force a reckoning for the Colorado River
If you lean over the top of the Glen Canyon Dam to get a full view of the concrete pillar that buttresses one of the largest dams in the United States against its second-largest reservoir, half a dozen water elevation markers will come into view. But when engineers were building Glen Canyon Dam in the mid-20th century to create another reservoir on the Colorado River, they never thought that the water would be this low. Beneath the lowest marker, there is still more than 100 feet of exposed dam before the structure disappears beneath the deep teal water of Lake Powell.
The elevation in early October was 3,518 feet. That’s less than one-quarter full, lower than the prior all-time low set in 2023. By early next year, the reservoir could hit “minimum power pool” for the first time, which means the water is too low to power the dam’s eight hydroelectric turbines. Dam employees say they have no operational experience for what they’re facing now.
And what Lake Powell – and the entire Colorado River – is facing now is nothing short of historic. Since 2000, the American Southwest has experienced its driest period in at least 1,200 years. Many scientists tie the length and strength of this “megadrought” to warmer temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions, which have also subsequently decreased precipitation and snowpack while making soil drier and evaporation rates higher.
States that use water from the Colorado River haven’t yet agreed on a long-term plan to manage the shrinking flow and drying reservoirs. Some say it’s time for a dramatic new strategy in the thirsty (and growing) American Southwest.
But the ever-growing Southwest, and its 40 million people in seven states who rely on water from the Colorado River, have continued to draw as much water as ever. For the past 25 years, they have taken out more water from the Colorado River than what has gone into it – exceeding the river’s annual supply by an average of 1 million acre-feet, which is equivalent to the amount of water used by at least 1 million suburban houses annually.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/StaffThe jurisdictions that draw from the river – Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, California, and Nevada, as well as Mexico – have been able to live above their water means for so long because of the river’s two big savings accounts: Lake Mead, which also hit a record-low in August, and Lake Powell. As recently as 1983, both reservoirs were at full capacity. Dam workers and locals in Page, Arizona, have passed down stories from the 1980s and 1990s of boaters driving right up to the dam’s concrete rim, the elevation markers fully covered by water.
At the time, engineers fretted about the safest way to move so much water to the other side while maintaining the dam’s integrity. Now, they face the opposite problem. If the water continues to fall after dropping below minimum power pool, the reservoir could hit what is known as “dead pool,” meaning the trapped water is too low to flow through the dam by gravity alone. If Lake Powell reaches dead pool, the water in the reservoir would become shallow and warm, causing fish die-offs and algae blooms and becoming filled with sediment. This would also mean, of course, that the millions of people living below the dam would have no water flowing downstream.
The most recent 10-year plan that dictates water allocation among the seven basin states, tribal nations, and Mexico expires at the end of this year. Some river advocates say the federal government needs to consider drastic changes – including rethinking Lake Powell’s existence.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/StaffEvery drop of water within the Colorado River is still governed by the Colorado River Compact, a water-sharing agreement signed by all seven states in 1922.
After much back-and-forth, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover proposed a deal. The seven states would be divided between the upper basin (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah) and the lower basin (Arizona, Nevada, and California) with the dividing line at Lees Ferry, Arizona, just south of Glen Canyon. Each basin would be able to take 7.5 million acre-feet of water from the river each year. (Tribal nations were not included in the compact’s allotments, but an annual 1.5 million acre-feet were later committed to Mexico.)
These allotments seemed more than reasonable given the annual water flow at the time. But modern tree ring analyses show that these precompact years were some of the wettest on record. Although about 16.5 million acre-feet has been allocated through this century-old agreement, the average annual flow through Lees Ferry since 2000 has been under 12.5 million acre-feet.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff“This past year has been the worst that we’ve ever seen on the Colorado River in anybody’s lifetime,” says Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School and expert in water law. “What we need of course, and everybody knows this in their heart of hearts, is we need a long-term plan.”
That long-term plan could and should, depending on whom you ask, include assessing how all the Colorado River’s water is currently used. Almost all water scientists and activists point out that more than half of the river (52%) goes to irrigating agriculture. It’s not the Las Vegas Strip that’s primarily responsible for draining the river (cities in the Colorado River basin have reduced water use by 18% since 2000, despite population growth). It’s the fields of hay for cattle: 26% of the river goes to farming alfalfa, as much as one-fifth of which is shipped overseas to countries such as China and Saudi Arabia.
Or, says Mr. Squillace, the seven states could scrap the “Law of the River,” the term for the century’s worth of compacts, laws, and court decisions that have allocated the Colorado River’s water with such precision that the river now runs dry at its mouth in Mexico. Instead, he says, they could adopt a “simple solution.” He suggests that a federal entity such as the Bureau of Reclamation assess how much water is available each year depending on that year’s snowpack, and then divide that among the basin states.
But, it does not yet seem as if any big rethinking of the river system is in the works.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/StaffAfter years of deadlocked negotiations, with the basin states blowing deadline after deadline to come to an agreement, the Interior Department released its own framework for a 10-year plan this summer, with specifics to be determined every two years, as well as an outline for 2027-2028.
According to these plans, the lower basin (California, Arizona, and Nevada) could be forced to cut its water usage by 40% annually through 2036, and 21% over the next two years. Nevada has already sued the Interior Department.
The incoming two-year plan also directs Lake Powell to maintain a minimum elevation of 3,510 feet, giving 20 feet of room to keep the dam operational.
“It’s been very frustrating to watch the states’ inability to talk about a consensus approach with everyone giving something up and understanding that you have to do more with less,” says Mr. Squillace. “The water just isn’t available.”
From any point on Lake Powell – whether at the rocky edge of its cliffs, or on a houseboat cruising over the cool waters, or standing atop the dam – the infamous “bathtub ring” is visible. Where the water once lapped against the sandstone walls has been turned white, offering a constant reminder of the shrinking lake.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/StaffNot that locals or visitors aren’t reminded in numerous other ways. The low water levels have led the National Park Service to close 14 of the lake’s 15 boat ramps and launch locations to motorized vessels. Social media videos went viral this summer showing hourslong lines of boat trailers waiting to launch at the remaining Stateline ramp, which has had to be extended as water levels drop. Currently, the lake’s elevation stands about 2 feet above the National Park Service’s minimum safe elevation for use at this last standing ramp. Tourism is down across Page, say local businesses, with visitors hesitant to rent an expensive houseboat for vacation when the water levels are dropping so precipitously.
“This has always been a vacation spot, but now it looks a little different,” says Beth Henshaw, who founded the local tour company Pronghorn Expeditions this year with Jaden Games. Originally, their plan had been to start a kayaking guide business, but that felt unpredictable as well as physically difficult (many kayak guides now have to carry gear down muddy banks due to water levels, rather than drop into the lake directly), so they pivoted to more land-based recreation. Now, they offer hiking and driving tours around the lake, one of those specifically focused on Lake Powell’s changes and threats to the water system.
“We’ll look at a map, and it says you’re standing underwater, but you’re not; you’re hiking,” says Ms. Henshaw. “From a recreation standpoint, it’s really fun to see it change. We get to really explore. From a residential standpoint, it’s concerning.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/StaffThe changes at Lake Powell over the past two decades have come with this duality for many scientists and environmentalists. Water levels dropping so precipitously threaten entire Western communities and economies, but many can’t help but be awed by how quickly Glen Canyon has recovered ecologically as the water receded.
Over the past 20 years, Davis Gulch, a canyon off the Escalante River leading into Lake Powell, has gone from fully inundated with water to a mucky mudscape. “Then you start to see the little shrubs come up knee-high,” says Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, and soon there were 30-foot willow trees with beaver ponds and birds flying overhead. “Over the course of five years, the place completely transforms, and it’s like, ‘Was there ever a reservoir here?’” says Mr. Balken. “It recovers so quickly, it’s hard to believe.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/StaffAll of this has fueled a longtime campaign to consolidate both reservoirs into Lake Mead. Those who would like to drain Powell point to the fact that 11% of the Colorado River’s water is lost to reservoir evaporation. Combining the two bodies of water is not only physically possible (if Lake Mead took in all of Lake Powell tomorrow, it would still be less than half full), but also logical, they say, arguing that it never made sense to have these two distinct reservoirs in the first place. The reality is that they already act as “one giant storage facility,” says Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University.
But consolidating Lake Powell into Lake Mead would devastate recreationists who have enjoyed the area for generations, and the town of Page would lose most of its economy as well as its energy supply. Lowering levels in the reservoir would make the water entering the Grand Canyon warmer, likely disrupting fisheries. And engineers say decommissioning a dam is difficult and expensive.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/StaffBecause of the original natural beauty of this place, with its hidden side canyons, petroglyphs, and cottonwood trees, the flooding of Glen Canyon for Lake Powell has always been controversial. American explorer John Wesley Powell (for whom the reservoir is named) described the area as “a land of beauty and glory” during his 1869 survey.
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A century later, efforts by the Sierra Club’s first executive director, David Brower, to protect Dinosaur National Monument from a potential dam led to the compromised development of Glen Canyon Dam, which the environmentalist called “the greatest sin I ever committed.”
But imagining a future for the canyon without the reservoir has felt “pretty hypothetical,” says Mr. Balken. Until now. “We are now exiting the hypothetical and entering a brave new world,” he says. “From our perspective, there is a huge opportunity to foster the rebirth of a national park.”
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Is nature priceless? This study spotlights its huge value for the world’s economy.
Rampant biodiversity loss poses a growing global economic risk, according to a report released Wednesday by the Paulson Institute, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund. But policy shifts, including financial mechanisms that support the environment, could reverse the trend, the groups claim.
“We’re never going to be able to calculate the full value of nature,” says Henry Paulson, former U.S. treasury secretary and founder of the Paulson Institute. “But one thing we know is that if you don’t put a value on it, its value is zero. We need to help people understand what the real cost is.”
Although more than half of global gross domestic product (or $58 trillion) is dependent on nature, according to the accounting firm PwC, the world is on track to lose up to half of all species by 2050. And there is a large gap – as much as $1.13 trillion a year – between what is currently being spent to protect biodiversity and what is needed, according to the “Financing Nature 2026” report.
Much of the world’s biodiversity is at risk, yet natural ecosystems are foundational to every national economy. A new report by environmental groups highlights how policies can make a difference.
More than 85% of the world’s wetlands are gone, according to researchers, and North America has already lost more than half its grasslands. If critical ecosystems collapse – think fisheries, timber, and others – it could cost the world more than $2.7 trillion per year by 2030.
Some environmentalists have long bucked at the idea of putting a price tag on nature, and they worry that trying to save nature by thinking about profits furthers the same mode of thinking that contributed to its degradation in the first place. But Mr. Paulson points to a number of case studies, included in today’s report, where the right economic incentives have prompted real changes on the ground.
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In England, for instance, an agriculture subsidy reform has furthered environmental stewardship by giving financial incentives for protecting soil health and other important biodiversity efforts. Croatia has created biodiversity sensitivity maps to coordinate the locations of their renewable energy development. And in 2024, Ecuador and Bank of America executed a $1 billion debt-for-nature swap, refinancing some of the country’s debt while generating more conservation funding that will help manage 4.6 million hectares of protected areas.
“People will look at protecting nature as a luxury,” says Mr. Paulson. “That it’s a niche, and it comes at the cost of our economic security, our national security, and jobs, rather than the fact that it underpins all this. It’s the foundation for our economy.”
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The EPA may soon deploy AI to regulate toxic chemicals. It’s not telling the public.
The Trump administration is moving to deploy custom artificial intelligence products to speed up approvals for new applications of toxic chemicals and pesticides. But it has failed to share details of these AI tools with the public as required by both federal law and the administration’s own regulations, a Monitor review has found.
The new AI products for chemicals and pesticides are part of a larger push by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, who has declared “Make America the AI Capital of the World” to be a core pillar of the agency’s mission.
However, they are not listed in the EPA’s most recent public registry of “current and planned uses” of AI. The online directory is mandated by Congress to ensure the public can provide feedback on proposed AI tools before they are rolled out and assess whether the government is protecting personal privacy, civil rights, and public safety as it deploys powerful new technologies.
The Trump administration is designing AI tools to vet chemicals and pesticides for safety. Critics question whether the administration is meeting legal standards for transparency.
The lack of transparency is likely unlawful, environmental advocates and legal experts tell the Monitor. They say it leaves the public in the dark about how decisions are being made about the use of potentially dangerous chemicals.
“The taxpayers have a right to know,” says Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, a nonprofit watchdog organization that defends government scientists, land managers, and whistleblowers who expose environmental wrongdoing.
“Otherwise,” Mr. Whitehouse says, “we’re entering a whole new world where government becomes further removed from the American people and captured by tools that very few people understand and that have inherent biases and flaws.”
Critics say the EPA’s failure to disclose details about AI tools that vet toxic chemicals and pesticides is part of a larger pattern by the administration.
In July, when the Monitor asked the Department of Health and Human Services about an AI product designed to evaluate the sponsors of unaccompanied immigrant children, evidence of it disappeared from the agency’s website.
This year, Emma Lurie, an incoming computer science professor at Barnard College in New York, led a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and from Haverford College that reviewed official disclosures of 5,000 federal AI products – from license-plate readers and social media scanners used by immigration agents, to customer service voicebots at the IRS and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
They found that more than 100 AI products were “out of compliance” with either federal law or Trump administration regulations. Among them was an EPA tool to help prioritize inspections of facilities that generate large amounts of hazardous waste.
“Faster is not always better,” Ms. Lurie says. “In a democracy, understanding how high-stakes decisions are made is essential. We want decisions made with AI tools to be trustworthy and reliable, in the public interest.”
In an emailed response to questions from the Monitor, the EPA press office said it would be “premature” to release information about the use of AI tools to vet chemicals and pesticides because they were not yet deployed.
“The processes for chemical assessment and pesticide permitting are technical and complex,” the agency said. “While [the] EPA would like to use AI to enhance these processes in the future, it is essential that any resulting regulatory products are accurate to ensure these actions are protective. The agency is continuing to deliberate on how these tools can be best deployed to ensure their use is accurate and protective.”
The EPA declined to respond to many of the Monitor’s questions, including one about the AI tool that prioritizes inspections of hazardous waste facilities, which has been deployed, and Ms. Lurie’s team found did not comply with the law.
President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, which sets policy around the federal government’s use of AI, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The agency touted the use of AI to assess chemicals and evaluate pesticide permits in its most recent budget request to Congress, as part of a $120 million effort to “leverage AI to improve EPA processes.”
More than 400 workers were tasked to be part of this effort, according to the budget document.
But when PEER and the Free Information Group filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act in March, seeking details of the chemical assessment tool – including any prompts and data involving the herbicide dicamba and known toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and benzene – the EPA responded that none of those records existed.
The environmental groups also asked for copies of user manuals provided to EPA staff as well as predeployment monitoring records for the AI tools. The EPA said those didn’t exist either.
According to a slide-deck presentation produced by an EPA scientist and viewed by the Monitor, the agency’s chemical assessment tool would use AI to review scientific literature about an existing chemical to determine its potential relevance to new uses. The AI tool would extract data and appraise the quality of that data to produce a “judgment and narrative rationale” to explain why the AI determined a new use should be approved or not.
That recommendation would then be reviewed by agency scientists, who would make a final decision, according to the slide deck.
In August 2025, Sean Watford, the EPA scientist who created the tool, crafted an assessment of the AI product’s effectiveness. But while an overview appears on the EPA website, the full document has not been made available to the public.
The previous month, in July 2025, Mr. Watford and another EPA scientist, Daniel Schoeff, had spoken about efficiencies created by the chemical and pesticide AI tools at a forum hosted by Amazon Web Services in Washington.
According to a blog post about that event, the AI tool to vet pesticides combined a number of Amazon products with Anthropic’s Claude software to produce “99 percent potential reduction” in processing time.
“Tasks that previously took four months now take seconds,” the blog post states.
Assessments of potentially toxic chemicals could happen 85% faster than before. “Tasks that previously took months can now be completed in hours or days,” the blog says, claiming Amazon’s Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude could replace 500 hours of EPA scientist staff time.
Final decisions about chemical safety would still be ultimately made by humans, according to the blog post.
However, PEER and the Free Information Group worry that the EPA has significantly reduced the number of humans it employs, jettisoning nearly one-quarter of its workers during the first six months of 2025 alone.
Last September, the EPA began shuttering its Office of Research and Development, which employed independent scientists who evaluated toxic chemicals.
Dr. Watford, the computational toxicologist who designed the AI bot to assess chemicals, was among the employees who departed.
“My specific concern is that when you say, ‘get to the right answer,’ who gets to determine what the right answer is?” asks Kevin Bell, of the Free Information Group. With fewer government scientists, the EPA will be increasingly reliant on tests carried out by chemical manufacturers who are motivated by profit, he adds, rendering any human review of AI decisions inadequate.
In its response to questions from the Monitor, the EPA press office said many scientists from the closed research office had been “re-deployed to other program offices across the agency, where they are conducting mission-critical work.”
“Whether related to the future deployment of AI or other areas in which they may have experience, EPA will continue to rely on the skill sets of its career staff and scientists to fulfill its mission of protecting human health and the environment and ensure any tools used are fit for that purpose,” the EPA said.
Jacquelyn Martin/APIn a recent interview, Mr. Zeldin touted reducing the administration’s backlog of more than 14,500 pesticide reviews by almost half. The EPA told the Monitor that this was done without the use of AI.
Mr. Zeldin, a former congressman from New York with little background in environmental regulation, has made AI adoption and deregulation twin goals of his tenure. Less than two months after being sworn in as administrator, Mr. Zeldin launched what he called “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” with 31 actions, including reconsideration of regulations for coal, oil, and gas production as well as reconsideration of wastewater and air-quality standards.
“He gets it approved, and he gets it approved fast,” said President Trump of Mr. Zeldin at a “Steel Across America” event on the White House lawn on Sept. 8, during which he also called the administrator “one of our real superstars.”
“High-impact” AI tools
Under Mr. Trump, the Office of Management and Budget issued guidance last year that requires products that have a “significant effect on rights or safety” to undergo additional scrutiny.
Agencies must perform independent assessments of these “high-impact” tools prior to deployment, test their veracity and design protocols to mitigate risks. Agencies must also conduct “ongoing monitoring” and have an appeals process that includes human review.
In their Freedom of Information Act request, PEER and the Free Information Group asked for copies of assessments EPA performed on “high-impact” AI tools in 2025. The EPA denied that request, saying sharing “documentation on potential impacts on ... privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties” would “harm agency decision making if released.’”
Research carried out by Ms. Lurie and her colleagues found that of the 43 cases of AI the EPA publicly disclosed, only two were deemed “high-impact” and therefore subject to the assessments and oversights required.
Both of the “high-impact” cases, deployed in 2025, were “not in compliance” with the law, according to Ms. Lurie’s analysis, because they did not include key details about the products, including whether ongoing monitoring of its impact had been established.
Last week, PEER and the Free Information Group filed an appeal to the EPA’s general counsel arguing that “because chemical reviews affect public health, EPA should immediately provide answers about its AI programs.”
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As of Monday evening, they had not received a response from the agency.
This story has been updated with the correct name for the Free Information Group.
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Where have all the Atlantic hurricanes gone? El Nino's might brings record slow storm season
The Atlantic is quiet — record quiet — this hurricane season thanks to an enormous El Nino that crushes storms before they get going.
No Atlantic hurricanes have formed yet this year and none are likely to form for at least another week, even though this would normally be the peak of the season, according to the National Hurricane Center. Only five relatively weak and brief tropical storms have spun up this season.
On Saturday, 2026 set a record for the longest a season has begun without a storm that has reached winds of 64 mph (103 kph) to qualify as a hurricane — at least in the satellite era, said Nick Novella, a meteorologist at the government's Weather Prediction Center. Before the 1950s there were a few years where no hurricanes were recorded this late in the season, but meteorologists don't trust those records because ocean monitoring wasn't complete.
Overall hurricane activity using a measurement that factors in the number of storms, their strength and how long they last is also at a post-1950 record low, according to Colorado State University hurricane expert Phil Klotzbach. Storm activity in the Atlantic is only 7% of normal for this time of year.
People shouldn't let down their guard because it just takes one storm, even during an El Nino, to be catastrophic. Several experts pointed to 1992, which kicked off late but nastily with devastating Hurricane Andrew.
El Ninos spawn storm-stunting conditions
“It’s really staggering, just how inhospitable the Atlantic is to anything that could form a tropical cyclone right now,” said Kristen Corbosiero, a University at Albany atmospheric science professor. “Anything that tries to form is just getting this triple whammy” of winds that decapitate a storm, dry air that starves it and downward pushing winds that basically stomp it.
Those three forces are classic impacts of El Nino, the natural and temporary warming of parts of the equatorial Pacific that warps and warms weather worldwide, five experts told The Associated Press.
"It's just hammering the Atlantic. It’s just impressive,” Klotzbach said. “We haven’t even had anything really even close to a hurricane.”
The biggest El Nino effect in the Atlantic is record-strong wind shear, which is when strong easterly winds hit a storm system at low levels while strong westerly winds push it the other way at upper altitudes. The result is that they “tear apart” the storm, Corbosiero said.
In the area between Africa and the Caribbean where the strongest storms normally form and head west, that wind shear is about 45 mph (74 kph) more than what a tropical cyclone can withstand, Corbosiero said. That's an unheard of level, she said.
“Their heads are cut off before they even have a chance,” said University of Miami hurricane expert Brian McNoldy.
Keep an eye on the Gulf
The one area where wind shear hasn't been high has been the Gulf of Mexico and those storms tend to really get going later in the season, so there could still be some strong ones coming to that region, Corbosiero and others warned.
Along with the dry air that starves the storm, African dust is choking it and there are fewer “seeds” of stormy weather that could develop, all classic El Nino signs, the experts said. And in the Atlantic, high pressure is pushing the air downward, which also hinders storms from forming, they said.
This is all despite warm waters — the world's oceans have been record hot for 100 days — that normally feed storms. It shows the power of El Nino to overcome that, Klotzbach said.
The trouble is the Atlantic waters, while warm, haven't warmed up nearly as quickly as the atmosphere above, which got hotter quickly as part of El Nino, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel. His research found what matters more than just the water temperature is the difference in temperature between the air and the water; because hurricanes are powered by the flow of heat from the ocean to the air, the higher that is, the less storm activity there will be.
The waters of the Atlantic are a few months behind the atmosphere in feeling the El Nino effect. But next year, as the El Nino winds down and cools closer to normal, the warm water will persist, which will increase the odds for next season to be extra busy, Emanuel said.
The opposite issue in the Pacific
Just as El Nino traditionally dampens Atlantic hurricane season, it tends to rev up tropical cyclone activity in the Pacific, with moist air and little wind shear. And so far this year, storm activity in the eastern Pacific is nearly double normal, with hurricanes lasting much longer than usual. In the central Pacific, activity is about 40% more than normal.
“It's just a party out there, one right after the other in the eastern Pacific,” Klotzbach said.
While the Atlantic has had only five small tropical storms, there have been 16 named storms in the eastern Pacific and 20 in the central Pacific.
Hawaii has been hit twice. El Nino tends to push storms farther west than other years, Corbosiero said.
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Because scientists have long known about El Nino's effects on storm activity in both oceans, forecasters months ago predicted a slow Atlantic hurricane season.
“I don't think anyone really foresaw it being this quiet,” McNoldy said. “This is quite remarkable.”
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‘Cold weather’ Massachusetts now must problem-solve for rising heat
As Massachusetts nears the end of another record-breaking summer of extreme heat, policymakers are responding to a new reality: It’s not just a cold-weather state anymore. It’s a hot one, too.
Massachusetts has warmed by nearly 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the beginning of the 20th century. By 2050, experts predict the number of 90-degree days could double or triple compared to historic averages. New England is warming faster than much of the United States, according to a 2025 study published in the journal Climate.
Municipalities and state governments in Massachusetts are taking measures to protect people from the rise in summer temperatures.
Traditionally, cold-weather places like Massachusetts didn’t have to worry much about having too many 90-degree days. But as temperatures keep warming, those places now must work to mitigate the effects of extreme heat.
Massachusetts appointed its first heat resilience officer – the second state in the nation with such a position after Arizona. Lawmakers proposed a bill aimed at protecting workers in extreme heat. It would require that workers have access to drinking water and cooldown breaks, and that employers have heat-illness prevention plans when temperatures reach 80 degrees. The city of Chelsea launched its newest “cool park,” which features shaded picnic tables, a splash pad, and a communal rain barrel.
“I think Massachusetts just kind of set the benchmark ... and that’s fantastic,” says Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at Yale School of the Environment and the executive director of the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions. “We need more states to step up and do this.”
In the contiguous United States, July was the warmest month ever recorded (since 1895), averaging 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 3.3 degrees higher than the 20th-century average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Northeastern U.S. is known for having long, freezing winters, but as the region warms, it comes with hotter summers and prolonged heat waves.
“One of the first things that people ask me is, ‘Why are you researching heat when Massachusetts is cold?’” says Patricia Fabian, a professor of environmental health at Boston University.
Ms. Fabian, who has done heat research in Massachusetts for the last 10 years, notes that the heat landscape is changing. “So if you look to cities in the Southwest or in the South that have had heat always, there’s a certain construction for homes that allow for ventilation; there’s air conditioning in every single building,” she says. However, houses in the Northeast weren’t historically built to combat extreme heat.
Alongside Massachusetts and Arizona, some local governments have designated heat chiefs, including Miami-Dade County and Los Angeles.
The Commonwealth’s heat resilience officer, Katie Schlick, will lead efforts to coordinate with state agencies and “work with communities to prepare for rising temperatures, protect public health and reduce the impacts of extreme heat,” according to a statement from the governor’s office.
Although her position is in the state government, it will be funded for the next two years by The Boston Foundation, a community foundation.
“Often what philanthropy can do is de-risk something so [the] government can try it,” says Keith Mahoney, the foundation’s vice president for public affairs.
Mr. Mahoney said he heard from government officials that they were interested in having a heat resilience officer but weren’t sure they had the funds to create the position. The Boston Foundation, he says, prioritizes investments that make systemic change.
In the short term, philanthropy might “unlock the potential for a position that wasn’t possible before,” says Mary Buchanan, a community resilience planner at Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation. “I would hope that there is a plan for the long term because the problem is not going away, and it’s probably just going to increase in importance.”
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Ms. Fabian says she hopes the position expands in the coming years. “I think heat resilience is a great place to start,” she says. “And then sort of expanding into thinking about other extreme weather events would also be a good direction to go.”
Ms. Schlick, who couldn’t be reached for an interview, will report to the state’s climate chief, Melissa Hoffer, and the commissioner for the Department of Public Health, Robbie Goldstein, according to a news release. She is a graduate of Yale University and has previously worked for the U.S. Climate Alliance, and was a special assistant to the White House national climate advisor under the Biden administration.
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Rare ‘super El Niño’ spikes ocean temps to new record
Ocean surface temperatures in July were the hottest ever recorded, the European Union’s Copernicus climate monitoring service announced Monday. Monitoring stations in the non-polar ocean captured an average temperature of 20.96 degrees Celsius (or 69.73 degrees Fahrenheit). It surpasses the record set in 2023.
This monthly ocean temperature record is just one of many weather anomalies that the world will see this year, say climate scientists, as a rare “super El Niño” upends air and ocean temperatures around the globe.
El Niños are natural climate phenomena that occur every 2 to 7 years when the normally predictable trade winds that blow east to west over the equator slow down. These winds typically push warm surface water with them to the western Pacific ocean around Asia and Australia, which then allows colder, deeper water to rise to the surface in the eastern Pacific, around the Americas. But when the winds slow down, the warm water that’s typically pushed west can slide back east, spreading the warm water across a greater share of the ocean.
Why We Wrote This
Oceans are already unusually warm because of climate change, scientists say. Now, a rare “super El Niño” has pushed ocean surface temperatures to their highest July levels in recorded history. Scientists expect the phenomenon to upend air and ocean temperatures around the globe.
Scientists say climate change has been increasing the world’s ocean temperatures over the past few decades. While there is a scientific debate about how global warming affects the strength or frequency of El Niños themselves, researchers generally agree that these events are taking place on a baseline affected by climate change: warmer oceans, an atmosphere that is hotter, and, depending on the place, either increased drought or increased atmospheric moisture. This July also tied with 2024 for the second-warmest air temperatures, according to the European Union’s Copernicus, behind the record set in 2023.
SOURCE:
Copernicus Climate Change Service
In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declares it an El Niño year when surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean warm 0.5 degrees Celsius (or 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal. According to the NOAA, there is more than an 80% chance a “very strong El Niño” will occur at the end of this year, which “would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950,” according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
While changes of 1 or 2 degrees in ocean temperatures may not seem like a lot, they can be enough to affect fragile oceanic ecosystems. During prior “super El Niño” years – 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16 – scientists chronicled mass coral bleaching and “bottom-up” cascading effects: phytoplankton declines with the loss of colder, nutrient-rich waters, which leads to less food for fish and seabirds.
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Humans are also likely to experience dramatic El Niño-triggered events on land, as the shifting ocean temperatures change typical atmospheric patterns. Increased droughts are expected off the western Pacific, as more floods and hurricanes roil the eastern Pacific. But specifics are difficult to predict.
“Every El Niño is not the same,” said Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service. “Each one is unique with its own imprint on our weather.”
The US needs more electricity. Can the grid deliver?
In many ways, America’s bureaucracy-laden electric grid has been like an old farm wagon – slow-moving, showing its age, and still operating under the assumption that electric demand grows slowly and consistently. Now, industry and government want to hook that wagon up to a Ferrari.
The artificial intelligence industry is building power-hungry data centers across the country in a race to keep ahead of surging AI demand. At the same time, non-AI sectors, such as electric vehicles and new construction, are also dialing up demand. That dynamic is shaking the electric power industry to its core.
Yet the biggest obstacle to meeting that demand is not more electricity generation. It’s modernizing the regulatory and infrastructure choke points that are slowing the construction of new power plants and keeping already available energy from reaching the people who need it most.
Why We Wrote This
Efforts to modernize the aging electric grid, amid surging demand for power, are running up against challenges, including bureaucratic delays.
How big is the challenge, and what are the obstacles?
Upgrading the electric grid is a major challenge. The United States last year installed 53 gigawatts of new electric power capacity, the biggest annual increase since 2002, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This year, that number could reach a record 86 GW. Still, such increases might not be enough to meet the surging demand, and obstacles remain.
Many Americans don’t want power plants built or electric lines strung near their homes. And building a traditional power plant is costly. So electric power companies and regulators are cautious, hesitating to construct plants unless future demand is guaranteed.
The AI industry, by contrast, turns on a dime. And while it’s booming now, there’s no guarantee that the boom won’t turn into a bust if the industry consolidates into one or two winners. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is bureaucratic delay in modernizing the grid, which can cause planned energy projects to be canceled altogether.
What’s being done to add capacity?
Power plants are being built rapidly. In some cases, AI companies are building their own plants to power data centers, bypassing the grid entirely. To get local approval, they’ve also signed pledges that their projects won’t raise local utility bills.
SOURCE:
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Energy Information Administration, Edison Electric Institute
The Trump administration is moving to ease environmental and other regulations so that power plants can be built more quickly. For the first 11 months of 2025, the nation installed some 4.2 GW of gas-fired generating capacity, more than double the capacity from the same period a year earlier, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That is enough electric capacity to power millions of homes.
Another potential winner is nuclear power in the form of small and midsize plants that can be built more quickly than traditional big power plants. “Nuclear is having this amazing wave of investment,” Evelyn Wang, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director at the federal government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, said at a Houston energy conference in March.
But the biggest winner might be green energy, despite the administration’s attempts to slow or kill such projects. Many companies have embraced solar and wind power installations because they are quick and relatively easy to put up. In that same 11-month period last year, the nation added 10 times more solar than natural gas capacity, and wind was double the natural gas total. The demand for power is such that wind and solar are shifting from serving as alternative sources of energy to being part of the nation’s energy core.
Industry analysts say it’s still early days, and it’s not yet clear which of the competing technologies will emerge as winners.
Isn’t green energy fickle, dependent on the sun and wind?
Yes, solar and wind are intermittent energy sources. But power companies are getting around that by deploying battery storage to capture that power when it’s produced and feed it onto the grid when it’s needed. In states like Texas and California, the speed of battery deployment “is truly extraordinary,” says Sally Benson, a Stanford University professor who served as chief energy-transition
strategist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden presidency. Since 2019, California’s battery storage capacity has exploded by some 2,000%. On many nights, from about 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., the state’s No. 1 source of electricity is stored energy from lithium-ion batteries, she says.
When will capacity catch up to demand?
Delays connecting new power plants to the grid are hampering progress. At the end of last year, planned facilities totaling more than 2,060 GW of power and storage had hookup applications pending. The queue is long, and the approval process is slowing.
Because of that delay, most of those plants won’t get built, concluded the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in a recent report. Of power developers’ applications filed between 2000 and 2019 to connect projects to the grid, only 13% of the proposed new capacity had reached commercial operations by the end of 2024. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the average wait time for approval has doubled to more than four years.
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A related problem: insufficient transmission lines to carry the energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. Various estimates suggest that in the next four years, the nation will have to expand transmission systems by 60%, the Department of Energy reports. By 2050, the nation might need triple today’s capacity.
“The grid is old, and it needs to be fixed,” says Roger Diwan, a vice president for S&P Global Energy. “And there is a little bit of pain in doing that. [But] the fact that we have large customers who are merging, who want [more energy] faster, but also are capable of providing the capital for it, is very important. And in a way, it will solve a lot of the problems.”
Here’s where Trump has canceled wind farms – and how states are pushing back
President Donald Trump’s opposition to offshore wind farms is well-documented. In the early 2010s, he sued the Scottish government when it gave permission for a company to build turbines in sight of one of his resorts. In public testimony over the years, the president has called wind turbines “monstrosities.” He has fretted about their environmental impact, decried their noise, and lamented their impact on tourism.
He lost his case in Scotland. Now, as U.S. president, he has more leverage.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to undo his predecessor’s efforts to establish a wind power industry off the coast of the United States. Since March, he’s struck five agreements with private companies to cancel at least nine offshore wind leases – a strategy that rings of Mr. Trump’s tendency toward dealmaking and that environmental policy analysts say no president has employed before.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump has directed the U.S. government to pay billions to halt wind energy projects. The deals involve redirecting funds toward fossil fuels and other conventional energy projects. In response, some states have sued.
Clean energy advocates have decried the agreements. They argue that blocking wind projects will hobble the country’s ability to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving a warming climate, while also eliminating a technology that could reduce energy prices. The Trump administration, by contrast, has argued that the president’s shift back to fossil fuels will reduce costs and boost energy reliability.
Carolyn Kaster/AP/File
“It’s the government saying that we’re going to incentivize these developers to voluntarily give up their offshore wind leases, so that they could use that money instead to invest in fossil fuel or conventional energy projects,” says Austin Gae, who studies energy policy at Advancing American Freedom, a conservative think tank. “I see this tug-of-war from one administration to the next.”
In the first deal, the Trump administration agreed to refund TotalEnergies, a French energy company, $928 million for two offshore wind leases. In exchange, the company reinvested that money into fossil fuels. Subsequent agreements have followed a similar model, involving wind farms from Maine to North Carolina to California, at various stages of development. In all, the Trump administration has, since March, pledged to refund more than $2.7 billion.
“These buyouts, which use taxpayer dollars, really hit consumers twice,” says Phelps Turner, senior attorney for U.S. energy policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “They prevent the development of low-cost sources of electricity – that is, offshore wind. And second they’re being paid for by taxpayers.”
Whether Mr. Trump’s new strategy could impact other renewable energy sources remains to be seen, Mr. Turner says. The legality of the approach is unclear, and not all renewable energy projects require lease payments that could be refunded. In general, the president can only spend money that Congress has appropriated.
Taken together, the canceled wind projects could have powered some 7 million homes across the country, according to project documents. All of the leases, which the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issues to companies to develop renewable energy in coastal waters, were awarded under President Joe Biden. His administration had set a goal of developing at least 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power, which it called “enough to power 10 million homes,” by 2030.
During its four-year tenure, the Biden administration issued leases for at least 23 offshore wind farms, compared with five during Mr. Trump’s first term and 24 under Barack Obama, according to documents from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Although the Trump administration has pledged billions to cancel the wind leases, the companies also seem to be losing money. While the agreements say the administration will reimburse companies after they reinvest in “conventional energy projects,” up to the value of their original leases, that doesn’t cover expenses that companies incurred beyond the original lease payment.
For example, an agreement with Invenergy over a farm off the coast of California says the company spent nearly $27 million for “preliminary project development” and almost $724,000 for “annual lease payments” that companies must pay in addition to their initial fee. The agreement only requires the government to repay the $111.7 million Invenergy first paid to acquire its lease.
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The reimbursements draw from the taxpayer-supported Judgment Fund, which federal law allows the government to use to settle court cases.
SOURCE:
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, U.S. Department of the Interior
In June, seven states in the Northeast sued the Trump administration, accusing it of violating federal law, in part, by misusing the Judgment Fund. The Trump administration has not yet responded to that suit. Earlier this month, those same states, plus Delaware, filed notices of intent to sue the U.S. Department of the Interior over other canceled offshore wind leases. Those actions come after judges ruled against the government in five separate legal cases over a work stoppage it issued to farms off the East Coast last year.
In New England, which has emerged as the country’s epicenter of offshore wind, advocates and climate researchers have argued the technology is crucial to reducing high costs and improving reliability. In February, a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that two offshore wind farms would have reduced the risk of demand-driven blackouts by 55% during the winter of 2024-25, when energy needs spiked for heating. Massachusetts leaders have said that Vineyard Wind, a farm operating near Cape Cod, would save Bay Staters some $1.4 billion over the next 20 years.
Utah residents react as Trump slashes national moments
Many southern Utah residents are reeling this week from news that President Donald Trump has signed proclamations to dramatically shrink two national monuments here – the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.
In a signing ceremony Monday in Washington, D.C., surrounded by Utah’s Republican political leaders, the president announced that he would reduce the size of the monuments by nearly 90%, cutting 3 million of the almost 3.5 million acres.
“We’ve done something that was, I think, very desperately needed,” President Trump said during the signing. “It was very unfair to the people of Utah. And now fairness has been brought back.”
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s says his move to dramatically shrink to Utah national monuments will open the land to needed energy extraction. Opponents say they are “heartbroken,” and they expect a new fight over the importance of federal lands.
The president said his proclamations would give Utah residents more ability to use the land. But locals here say the reasons for shrinking the monuments don’t hold up, and that the land has never been more accessible to the public than it has been with its national monument designation. The only difference for this expanse of wilderness now after Monday’s orders, say lawyers and locals involved in the fight to protect the area, is that the land is open to leases for mineral and energy extraction.
The land is still owned federally, despite the longtime fight by Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox for bringing Utah’s vast public land system back into state control.
“They are preying on people’s misunderstanding about how public lands are managed and how these laws are because access was never denied with or without a national monument,” says Morgan Sjogren, a local author who is starting up her own guiding business, but now worries about its future. “The focus has been on these very divisive attitudes about public lands that are old.”
Then-President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument in 1996 under the Antiquities Act, a law from the turn of the 20th century that allows presidents to unilaterally set aside public land as national monuments to protect landmarks or objects of “historic or scientific interest.” Nearby Bears Ears, an area of cultural significance to tribal nations, was designated as a monument by President Barack Obama in 2016.
Ever since President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act in 1906, every president (including Mr. Trump) except for three has designated national monuments. There are now 168, including protected marine areas. Many of these monuments later became some of the country’s most iconic national parks: Arizona’s Grand Canyon, Maine’s Acadia, and Utah’s Zion all started as monuments.
But the sweeping power of the Antiquities Act has long been a focus of conservatives who disagree with the federal government’s control over so much public land in the West. During his first administration, Mr. Trump ordered his Interior Department to review all national monuments over 100,000 acres – and he soon set his sights on southern Utah. In 2017, Trump ordered the largest ever reduction in national monument protections, cutting Grand Staircase-Escalante by almost half and Bears Ears cut by 85%.
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Opponents immediately filed lawsuits. But before those cases progressed, President Joe Biden came into office. He restored both monuments to their original sizes in 2021.
The same legal disputes are likely to soon start up again, as debates over the Antiquities Act continue. The “crux” of the legal question, says Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is if the law allows presidents to not only establish national monuments, but also shrink previous designations.
Voters signal opposition to AI data centers in local primaries
In local elections across the country on Tuesday, voters proved data center opposition has transcended party politics. Republican voters in counties that supported President Donald Trump in 2024 by double-digits, for instance, showed that even within a party that typically aligns with pro-business and anti-regulatory policies, data center support can be a career-ending move.
Data centers, facilities that require sizable chunks of local energy, water, and land to fuel the artificial intelligence race without generating the tax income or jobs that are often promised, have become a political flash point in America over the past year as voters flood town halls, city and county committee meetings, and campaign events to voice their opposition. The pushback has been bipartisan, with residents in Los Angeles County’s Monterey Park becoming the first to vote to permanently ban data centers earlier this month. Virginia’s Democratically-controlled state legislature and Democratic governor ended a budget standoff over the state’s data center tax breaks on Monday, agreeing on a new tax on data centers for their energy consumption.
And in GOP primaries Tuesday, many Republican lawmakers who had supported data center expansion found themselves without jobs.
Why We Wrote This
Voters expressed their opposition to the construction of data centers in local elections across the country. Traditionally pro-business Republican incumbents were ousted in primaries after supporting local data center projects.
Utah’s most powerful state lawmaker, Republican State Senate President Stuart Adams, lost reelection after more than two decades in the state legislature, trailing primary opponent Stephanie Hollist by more than 8 points. As chair of Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, Mr. Adams helped fast-track approval for the Stratos Project: a “hyperscale” data center planned for Box Elder County in northwest Utah, which at full build would be one of the biggest data centers in the world and consume more than double the amount of energy that the state of Utah currently uses per year.
Rick Bowmer/AP/File
Two of the three Box Elder County Commissioners, who have also faced backlash for their unanimous approval of the project, faced Republican primary contests Tuesday and lost. This was a “message vote,” says Brenna Williams, who has helped lead local opposition, rather than a well-researched one by voters, given that the two commission challengers have not denounced the project and could support it more than the incumbents.
“The commissioners, the Senate, the House, will they get the message after Tuesday that we don’t want it?” says Ms. Williams, who has helped organize the Box Elder Accountability Referendum, or BEAR, a legal push to let voters have a voice on the project.
A BEAR-commissioned poll, conducted by an independent firm, found that more than 70 percent of the county opposed the county’s data center plans. A Gallup poll from March suggests a similar opposition rate nationwide: 7 in 10 Americans said they opposed data center construction in their local area, far more than the 53% who said they oppose a nuclear power plant in their community. And this sentiment was shared across parties, with 75% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans strongly or somewhat opposing local construction of data centers.
The Trump administration has declined to set nationwide recommendations or requirements for data centers. And while Congress considers bipartisan bills that would protect locals from data center-induced high energy bills, there has yet to be any concrete guidance from the legislative branch either. This means that local officials across the country have been at the forefront of the issue, granting approval, setting parameters, and in many cases, the focus of opposition campaigns.
In South Carolina, the Spartanburg County Council has faced so much criticism for approving tax breaks for a local data center that the council withdrew other similar tax breaks. Then on Monday - the day before two Republican council members faced primary opponents - the council took the first step towards passing a 12-month moratorium on new data centers. But the moratorium vote wasn’t enough to save them. On Tuesday, both incumbents were defeated in Tuesday’s primary, and a third Republican on the council, the chair, declined to seek reelection citing the data center controversy as a factor in his decision.
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In Calvert County, Maryland, the three incumbent Republican commissioners, whose votes have prevented a county moratorium on data center activity in the county from passing, all lost to Republican challengers who have voiced opposition to unabated data center construction.
“The message was heard throughout the county—we will stop data centers!” Patti Stueckler, a Maryland real estate agent who unseated one of the incumbents, wrote on her campaign Facebook page Wednesday morning. “Now on to November!”
Hot chicken is OK, but soda isn’t? Battle over SNAP scrambles red-blue politics.
Move over, left versus right. Welcome, rotisserie chicken versus Coca-Cola. A food fight over restrictions on government nutrition assistance is generating controversies and court battles, all while scrambling traditional political boundary lines.
Legislators across the country, in states both red and blue, have spent the second Trump administration passing unprecedented restrictions and exceptions to the foods that lower-income Americans can buy with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the program formerly known as food stamps. Less than halfway through President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the SNAP program, has approved 23 states’ requests for “junk food” restrictions.
These approved restrictions, known as “waivers,” grant states the authority to ban SNAP shoppers from purchasing soda or sweetened beverages, with several other states including other items such as candy or energy drinks. This helps “put real food back at the center of the program and empower states to lead the charge in protecting public health,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins signed some of the waivers into action last August. “This is how we Make America Healthy Again.”
Why We Wrote This
Both parties have been enacting state-level bans on using SNAP benefits for soda and candy. On Monday, a federal judge said the new rules violate federal laws governing the food program.
But one of MAHA’s major achievements faced a major setback on Monday, when a federal judge sided with food stamp recipients in five waiver states who sued to halt these bans on certain foods. In a 68-page decision, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed that these waivers violate federal laws guiding SNAP, writing that Ms. Rollins sought to waive “the very definition of ‘food’ as it was laid down by Congress.”
“The idea that taxpayer funds should not be used to purchase junk food should not be controversial,” the USDA tells the Monitor in a statement. “USDA will not be backing down from the fight to Make America Healthy Again, including for families and communities reliant on SNAP.”
In its pending battle to reinstate these restrictions, the Trump administration might have some unlikely allies. Unlike other debates over the size of SNAP, which has been a target of Republican lawmakers, elected officials from both parties have recently focused on the nutritional side of SNAP.
Along with the surge in soda and candy bans, the first of their kind, there is Congress’ Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act, which passed the House with broad bipartisan support and has gone to the Senate as part of the larger farm bill legislation, which includes SNAP. If signed into law, this bill would allow Americans to use SNAP funds for rotisserie chickens – a food product that would help time-stressed Americans put a healthy meal on the table, say congressional Republicans and Democrats alike – despite SNAP’s longstanding “no hot food” rule.
Proponents say these changes ensure that America’s tax dollars are helping the country’s most vulnerable grocery shoppers prioritize nutritious foods while banning the unhealthy foods that President Trump’s MAHA cohort has rallied against. To others, there’s something immoral in dictating what SNAP shoppers can buy, and the challenges to implementing these new rules may prevent hungry Americans from using their benefits.
Lynne Sladky/AP/File
“It happened in such rapid succession – the waivers being proposed and then accepted. We went from no states having any kind of waivers to now 23 states. We were all kind of shocked,” says Cindy Leung, a professor of public health nutrition at the Harvard T.C. Chan School of Public Health. “There is a lot of chaos trying to implement these policies, and that's trickling down to SNAP participants and affecting their program participation. ... It’s like the Wild West.”
The changing politics of food restrictions
This isn’t the first time localities have petitioned the USDA to implement SNAP restrictions. In 2004, Minnesota petitioned to implement a statewide ban on using benefits to buy soda or candy. A few years later, in 2010, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg requested a New York City ban on sugary drinks like soda. Both times, the USDA denied the requests, citing potential confusion and possible stigmatization – the same two reasons that many food policy experts cite in their criticism of the waivers today.
In a sign of just how much the politics on this issue have been scrambled, Mr. Bloomberg’s soda ban at the time was held up by Republicans as an example of Democratic overreach. Former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin drew laughs at a conservative conference in 2013 when she sipped from a Big Gulp of soda on stage.
“Oh, Bloomberg’s not around, our Big Gulp is safe,” joked Ms. Palin to the cheering crowd.
Now, most of the approved waiver states are Republican-led, but Democrat-controlled Colorado, Hawaii, and Virginia all have soft drink restrictions set to be enacted later this year. At least four more states – Mississippi, Alabama, South Dakota, and Wisconsin – have waivers either submitted or in the process of being submitted, and more than a dozen other state legislatures have considered laws to bring about their own waivers.
“This is pretty unprecedented both in terms of the number of states ... and the kinds of restrictions states are taking up,” says Ben Chrisinger, a professor who studies food access at Tufts University’s Department of Community Health. “It’s widespread.”
Because of that, some food policy experts worry the waivers’ confusion could be widespread as well.
Take Louisiana: Small chocolate candies are no longer eligible for SNAP funds, but chocolate chips for baking are allowed. Because Utah’s definition of “soft drink” is “any nonalcoholic beverage that is made with carbonated water,” carbonated lemonade is not allowed, but regular lemonade is allowed. Iowa’s waiver is particularly complex, with a slice of ready-to-eat cake potentially permitted depending on if a fork is provided in or out of the container. And in many states, super sweet drinks are allowed as long as they contain at least one drop of milk, and candy is allowed if it includes flour.
“We're getting bogged down in how we define candy or processed food,” says Kate Bauer, director of the Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health Policy at the University of Michigan. “The reality is that our general definitions of those things are OK, but the reason people aren't consuming the diets we would like for them to consume is food cost, scarcity, and stress, and we have done nothing to address those issues.”
Will some stores stop accepting SNAP cards?
To many like Dr. Bauer who study food security and nutrition, another worry is that new rules could curb access to nutrition assistance that is already being squeezed.
Last year, Congress passed President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that tightened the number of people eligible for SNAP by increasing work requirements for eligibility and making some noncitizens, such as refugees and asylees, ineligible. Since then, there have been SNAP participation declines in every state and a 10% drop nationally from the previous year. The USDA’s most recent SNAP participation numbers show just under 38 million people receive some level of SNAP benefits, which comes out to roughly 1 in 10 Americans – a decline from just about 1 in 8 Americans last year.
Some experts worry that health wasn’t the true motivation behind the junk-food restrictions, but rather an effort to push participation rates down further. Americans may choose to forgo benefits that they qualify for because of confusion, and some retailers may rethink accepting SNAP benefits for the same reason. A September report from grocery and food industry groups suggests that these new restrictions could cost supermarkets hundreds of millions of dollars and convenience stores up to a billion in both upfront and ongoing costs, such as updating check-out technology to flag newly banned items. States will have their own SNAP rethinking to do, given that the OBBB has set up a cost-sharing system that will require states to pay a percentage of the program – for the first time ever – if their rate of improper SNAP payments is above 6%.
Defending the waivers to the USDA, governors across the U.S. argue the SNAP program is intended to help Americans afford nutritious foods, not to subsidize unhealthy foods.
“I think the program was always set up to tell Americans what to eat, which is healthy foods,” says Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has advocated for similar kinds of waivers for over a decade. “To me, it is a nutrition program.”
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Though Dr. Leung agrees with the soda restrictions, she says restrictions alone likely won’t “move the needle on nutrition,” and would be more effective when paired with incentives. She points to the USDA’s SNAP Healthy Incentives Pilot in 2012, when SNAP users in county in southern Massachusetts received 30 extra cents in benefits for every SNAP dollar spent on fruits and vegetables and ended up buying far more of these foods than SNAP users outside this pilot program. Similarly, Dr. Bauer points to studies that showed how SNAP users bought healthier foods when SNAP benefits were expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A key component of the program is that we treat SNAP shoppers like everyone else,” says Dr. Chrisinger. He notes that the SNAP Equal Treatment Rule requires retailers to treat SNAP shoppers the same prices and terms. “Adding these extra restrictions creates a risk of spotlighting people at checkout because of the choices they are making in a way that the rest of us just pass through.”
Why the latest farm bill matters, from SNAP benefits to crop insurance
Every five years or so, Congress passes a new farm bill: a big collection of laws that guides agricultural policy within the United States. The bill covers every part of the food cycle in the U.S., from when seeds are planted to when Americans sit down at the dinner table.
There are three main areas of the bill. The commodities section includes several safety-net programs, such as crop insurance, and guarantees prices on some crops to help farmers manage a risky industry. The nutrition section, which has become the largest share of the farm bill over the past few decades, includes the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. And the third section covers the environment, dedicating money toward conservation programs that encourage farmers to remove land from agriculture production, plant “cover crops” that improve soil quality, and grow buffer strips between farms and waterways.
Throughout the years, these three sections have helped build a big enough coalition of legislators – who represent rural, urban, Republican, and Democratic areas – to get the sweeping, expensive farm bills passed. But this big-tent approach hasn’t been enough to supersede the increased partisanship in Washington. After the 2018 farm bill expired in 2023, Congress kicked the can down the road for a new bill, passing one-year extensions in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Why We Wrote This
Throughout the years, the three sections of the farm bill have helped build a big enough coalition of legislators to get the sweeping, expensive legislation passed. But this big-tent approach hasn’t been enough to supersede the increased partisanship in Washington.
This year is shaping up to have its own challenges. The U.S. House passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 at the end of April, and the Senate is expected to release their version of the farm bill this week. Legislators face a deadline of Sept. 30, when the most recent extension expires. Many also face pressure from constituents – midterm elections are a little over a month later.
“It’s never been easy to pass a farm bill,” says Patrick Westhoff, who recently retired from leading the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, “but it’s gotten more complicated to get them done.”
How has the farm bill changed over time?
Farm bills have defined U.S. agriculture for almost a century. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the first farm bill, the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1933, as part of New Deal programs to provide relief during the Great Depression. To address overproduction and increase crop prices, the federal government paid farmers to actually grow less food; they also bought up crop surpluses and gave that food to hungry Americans. And to prevent another dust bowl, which was caused in part by farming practices that didn’t protect soil, the bill encouraged soil-conservation programs.
The legislation has grown in size and scope since the 1970s. Crop insurance, which made up almost 9% of the cost of the most recent farm bill in 2018, has become increasingly common. In 2024, 89% of acreage of the eight major U.S. crops (barley, corn, cotton, oats, rice, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat) was covered by insurance through the Federal Crop Insurance Program, more than double the acreage protected in 1990. That protects farmers from financial losses due to weather and price changes. Farmers can buy insurance policies at a subsidized rate through this federal program, which compensates them for losses from either below-average production yields or revenue.
But the biggest expansion has happened within the nutrition assistance sector of the bill, which now makes up almost 80% of the farm bill’s price tag. SNAP, which was first included in the 1973 farm bill, has steadily expanded, and then increased dramatically in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. The overall program cost doubled between 2019 and 2022. In 2025, nearly 1 in 8 Americans received SNAP benefits.
What is different about the 2026 farm bill?
The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), the huge spending bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, “was a mini farm bill in some ways,” says Vincent Smith, director of agricultural policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. The OBBB includes a $56 billion expansion in safety-net programs, not only increasing the number of acres eligible, but also raising the price tag. Among other measures, the legislation adds $6 billion to the crop insurance program and raises guaranteed prices for major commodities by 10% to 20%, so the baseline floor price of soybeans, for example, went from $8.40 a bushel to $10.
Dr. Smith sees the investment in certain commodity crops as a way for Republicans to hold on to their rural seats in Congress. Proponents of subsidy programs, however, say that these investments encourage farmers to invest in a business that is subject to volatile market and environmental shifts. U.S. wheat stocks, for example, are set to be at their lowest levels since the 1960s, thanks to fertilizer shortages due to the Iran war and widespread drought.
The OBBB balanced boosted spending on the farming pillar of the farm bill with cuts to SNAP in the nutrition sector. Although SNAP is currently funded 100% by the federal government, the OBBB is set to have states be partially responsible for the program beginning in 2028 if they have high rates of improper payments. (In both 2023 and 2024, about 10% of SNAP payments were for incorrect amounts or should not have been distributed.) The act is also set to shrink the size of the program by increasing work requirements for eligibility, and making some noncitizens, such as refugees and asylees, ineligible.
These OBBB-led changes to agricultural policy have made it an “unusual year” for farm bill negotiations, says Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, given “that so much major policy has happened outside the farm bill.”
What’s next for the 2026 farm bill?
Despite the farm bill’s big-tent ethos that has made this sweeping legislation possible, delays have become more regular. The 2008 farm bill took more than a year to enact, the 2012 farm bill was eventually passed in 2014, and what was supposed to be the 2023 farm bill is now the 2026 farm bill.
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Although the 2026 farm bill passed the narrowly divided House 224 to 200, with 14 Democrats voting in support, there are several potential sticking points in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to pass. Some Senate Democrats have voiced opposition to the legislation largely because of the OBBB-induced SNAP cuts and new cost-sharing regulations, threatening the bipartisan compromises that have long underpinned farm bills.
“I used to tell my students that one of the joys of following farm bill politics is that it’s less partisan than other areas of American policymaking,” says Dr. Wilde. “But that also isn’t true this year.”
In Utah, growing pushback over a city-sized data center
As data center disputes rage across the country, with communities pushing back against mammoth facilities that require chunks of energy, water, and land to fuel the international artificial intelligence race, few places can compare to the debate happening in the northwestern corner of Utah.
Locals and scientists say the Stratos Project, backed by celebrity Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame, stands out not just for the way in which it was approved, but also for its size. Initially planned to sprawl across 40,000 acres (the size of Washington D.C.) in Box Elder County, the project would consume up to 9 gigawatts of electricity, which is more than double what the state of Utah uses per year. Mr. O’Leary has boasted that it would be one of the biggest data centers in the world.
Opposition has grown over the past few weeks, after the approval process was fast-tracked by a special state commission called MIDA (Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority) and unanimously approved by the three-person county commission in early May. Many locals say they have had no opportunity for input. In response, Republican officials in the state have softened their previous full-blown support for the project. Gov. Spencer Cox issued an executive order last week requiring “careful consideration” of data centers’ environmental impacts. Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, who chairs MIDA, called for a 75% reduction in Stratos’ acreage footprint in a letter to Mr. O’Leary on Monday.
Why We Wrote This
The Stratos Project near Utah's Great Salt Lake has scaled back its planned footprint. But scientists still see big risks for the local environment.
Despite initially calling Mr. Adams’ request for such a “haircut” of the project “outrageous,” Mr. O’Leary announced on Thursday that he would cut the footprint of the project in half, removing about 20,000 acres from his plans.
But thus far this has done little to quell pushback. Scientists say a compromise over acreage does little to alleviate concerns over the ecological impacts that such a project would bring to the Great Salt Lake Basin, a nationally renowned site facing a megadrought.
“It’s performative,” says Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, of the promised acreage reduction. He has concluded from his own calculations that the 9 gigawatt project would only require 5,000-7,000 acres. Even still, he says, the energy usage would be 20 times more than what is used by “hyperscale” data centers.
Dr. Davies has also found that such a project could raise the nighttime temperature in the area by up to 12 degrees, which he says would be “transformative.” Among other impacts, that sort of temperature rise would suppress nighttime condensation levels that the already water-stricken ecosystem relies on. “This would be one of the largest single site heat sources on the entire planet,” he adds, “[and] that includes volcanos.”
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Although he has only committed to a reduction in square footage, and not energy consumption, Mr. O’Leary told the Salt Lake Tribune that the project will no longer be the largest in the world. “That’s off the table,” he said. In his letter to Mr. Adams, Mr. O’Leary cited “incorrect assumptions” for all the alarm around the project, and he has previously claimed that opposition groups were backed by the Chinese Communist Party. But at the same time, Mr. O’Leary has acknowledged the real political pressures on the ground in Utah, where the Box Elder County project has become an issue even within Mr. Adams’ own GOP primary contest.
“[Adams] did this for political reasons,” Mr. O’Leary told the Salt Lake Tribune. “He had to. What other choice did he have? He had to answer to all these people.”