Drought, Denial, and Deregulation
How Republican Orthodoxy Is Failing the American West
Iowans are not unfamiliar with concerns over their water. Water quality issues have plagued the state for decades, largely because of ongoing repercussions from fertilizer runoff and extreme weather. Lakes and rivers are sometimes not fit for recreational purposes, often being littered with harmful bacteria such as E. coli. The state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, has also explicitly throughout her tenure, done everything in her power to halt further regulation of the state’s water resources. Her platform, mirroring what is happening in DC, is predicated on deregulation, centralization of power, and reducing the state’s role in the economy. But despite continued reassurances on the success of Republican governance, Iowa’s problems with water are indeed growing worse, and for a variety of preventable reasons.
One of these reasons is pollution. In June of this year, over 600,000 Iowans within the state’s central region, where the capital Des Moines is located, received an alert for a lawn water ban because of growing levels of nitrate within the local Des Moines and Raccoon rivers. Levels reached over 17 mg/L, easily breezing past the federal limit of 10 mg/L, which exists because of the possible health ramifications that could emerge from prolonged exposure. For pregnant women, these concentrations are especially worrying because exposure can lead to serious pregnancy complications and possibly blue-baby syndrome. Other health effects can also occur, with cancer being one of the most severe effects of long-term exposure.
For the state’s southwestern residents, similar lawn watering bans have also been issued, but for completely different reasons. Drought has consistently plagued the region for the past decade, and despite ongoing efforts to source more water from regional rivers, little progress has been made to sustainably deliver adequate sources of water. Wells within the area are simply running dry, sometimes to the point of empty pipes or slews of boiling orders and emergency alerts. These experiences, however, are not just native to Iowa. Environmental degradation is occurring throughout the country in a variety of locations, and within each of these disparate localities, Republican state and municipal governments are finding it increasingly difficult to overcome challenges that are far beyond their worldview’s reach.
Republican officials and politicians are beginning to run headfirst into the consequences of an ideology that simply cannot fathom government involvement in environmental concerns. Funding, policymaking, bureaucratic implementation, and a plethora of other desperately needed public goods, which could mitigate environmental problems, are simply not taking place; not because of governmental capacity, but because Republican orthodoxy forbids it. And as climate change and water shortages grow, many people on the ground in these affected communities are indeed growing to understand that climate change is not merely just a culture war buzzword. In many cases, it’s simply biological. We need water to live. As do farms, towns, and entire regions. If water cannot be conserved or if it is repeatedly poisoned by private interests, bad things will eventually begin to happen. First to the economy, and then to the health of entire regions. Simply put, a crisis with environmental governance is emerging within a plethora of Republican localities, and within the coming decades, this problem is only going to grow more severe as demands for food, water, and survival increasingly fall onto a political party that is ideologically committed to not solving or even viewing the crisis as an issue.
Environmentalism as Pessimism:
There used to be a time in American politics when environmental laws and regulations were largely bipartisan. Both parties had to deal with different constituencies who were being near-constantly affected, both positively and negatively, by the growing effects of industrialization and environmental regulation. A lack of regulation could cause a river to catch fire or a superfund site to be born; conversely, a new regulation could potentially cut industrial jobs in Ohio or make business interests complain of being less competitive. But in total, both parties had to come to terms with these new conditions and accept them as necessary. The question now was not whether environmental regulations should exist, but rather how they could be balanced to help save lives and clean our environment while also keeping our economy competitive.
By no means was this structure perfect, but for a couple of decades, progress was indeed made. The Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act, and the Wilderness Act would all pass with bipartisan majorities. And even under Republican presidents, new agencies and departments were gradually created with the goal of expanding environmental regulation and mitigating harmful externalities. President Nixon famously helped to implement the Environmental Protection Agency, and during his 1970 State of the Union address, he even managed to argue that “Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country.”
But by the mid-1970s, America’s expanding environmental movement ran into an American society that was reeling from stagflation and ever-rising energy costs. Shortages of gasoline and other fuels caused mile-long queues and precipitously drove up the price of shipping and purchasing goods, and as these conditions worsened, it only made more and more Americans afraid of what future shortages and economic decline could look like. For many, the crises of the 1970s conveyed a government that was no longer able to solve problems. Prices had increased, shortages grew tighter, and all the government could seemingly do was sit back and watch as conditions further deteriorated. To America’s middle class, they emerged feeling helpless; they now wanted growth to return to bring stability to their lives and security to their communities. And business groups and right-wing conservatives would indeed capitalize on this sentiment.
By the 1990s, Republican views toward environmentalism had grown increasingly dominated by business groups, conservative think tanks, and a growing coalition of evangelicals and right libertarians who viewed any expansion of government as a threat to liberty. Mirroring Barry Goldwater’s famous screed that “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”, these groups took America’s shifting anti-government stance and weaponized it to try and defeat any kind of law or regulation that would increase environmental protection or reduce profits.
And by the 2000s, while still highlighting economic concerns, Republicans largely began to define their opposition to environmentalism around the core values of protecting liberty, private property, and tradition. American liberty now needed to be defined by deregulation, expanded drilling, new pipelines, and maximized profits; private property rights needed to triumph above clean air, soil, and water; and most importantly, America’s small towns and values needed to be kept insulated and energy independent from an outside world which was littered with terrorists and big government socialists. The Republican Party of the early 2000s was no longer the same one that had supported the environmental measures of the mid-20th century. Instead, the party was now the inevitable conclusion of a right-wing consortium which was vehemently opposed to both government regulation and any kind of movement which would impede their right to drill baby drill and fully unleash American energy.
And it was at this moment that Donald Trump found his vehicle for power. Trump’s anti-regulation and anti-establishment rhetoric managed to mesh quite nicely with a Republican electorate that increasingly viewed environmentalism and regulation as existential adversaries. No longer was environmentalism meant to protect America’s waterways and forests; rather, it now carried with it a direct threat that would kill America’s economic and moral system. It needed to be defeated and expelled from America at all costs. Trump would meet these various sentiments incredibly effectively, and by 2018, America found itself out of the Paris Climate Accords and actively questioning the science behind climate change. A forty-year transition toward complete conservative anti-environmentalism was now complete, and with this apotheosis came hundreds of acts of deregulation and environmental rollbacks, which helped to firmly reveal the Republican environmental agenda. But within several years, this newly confident Republican Party found itself struggling with a global environment that was still changing despite all their screeds, cuts, and memes.
An Existential Crisis of Governance:
Utah’s Great Salt Lake (GSL) is drying up. Climate change’s rising temperatures have, over time, turned the region’s ecosystem into a sweltering, drought-littered mess defined by declining precipitation and mountain runoff. Rapid urban development, population growth, and increased agricultural activity have also continued to divert more and more water from the rivers, lakes, and wells, which are already struggling from chronic drought. Even more damning, as the GSL has continued to shrink, its dry lakebeds have gradually led to more toxic and unhealthy dust particles flowing into the region’s atmosphere, causing many public health officials to worry about the region’s health and longevity.
This growth in atmospheric dust, if left unabated, will eventually cause permanent damage to the region’s survivability. Mineral extraction, fishing, and soil quality will all degrade rapidly, as will the value of various private companies and housing developments. Economic activity will be permanently impaired. The subsequent environmental disaster will also likely jeopardize countless native species in the region, upending an already struggling food chain. The region’s ecosystem and environmental health will be fundamentally reshaped, and millions of Americans will likely find themselves with very few options to preserve their land, livelihoods, and health. At a bare minimum, to prevent these conditions from coming to fruition, water usage must drop by an estimated 30% to 50%; federal and state funding is also needed to sustain water levels, save local species, clean up toxic materials, and provide financial assistance to those who need it most.
But despite these measures and demands being known, neither the federal government nor the Utah state government has reacted with much seriousness. Laws and regulations have been passed, but not even close to the degree they need to be. Many statutes, similar to Iowa, have relied on volunteerism and abstract reforms that have no material backing behind them. Some have gone actively out of their way to impede or dissuade environmental investments, such as the state’s recent anti-ESG bill. Further, the state has continued to largely utilize its power and funding capabilities to invest in water educational programs, financial incentives, and costly augmentation projects. The legislature has also continued to be extremely lenient toward the real estate and agricultural lobbies, two of the largest and most powerful water users in the state. Conservation has been woefully inadequate and is seemingly making no headway with Republican Party officials, who have continued to label environmental concerns as “wars on grass” and private property. And thus, conflicts over water rights in the state are growing, just as federal funding is being halted and delayed, or perhaps even permanently disrupted. Progress is small, and the underlying crisis is only growing larger.
Other Western states are suffering from similar crises. Lake Mead in Nevada, which receives its water from the Colorado River, is drying up, harming the ability of Las Vegas and its surrounding areas to absorb new people and private developments. At the state level, state democrats and republicans both recently passed two bills involving effective water management and groundwater conservation. At least regarding water scarcity, this is seemingly the last area where bipartisan consensus can be reached, at least within Democratic-majority state legislatures. But this principle, too, is coming under strain as disputes over water resources heat up amidst worsening conditions.
In Arizona, which is also significantly dependent on the Colorado River, the state is continuing to suffer from long-term drought conditions, which are only being further exacerbated by climate change. Development, while having continued at pace for several decades, is finally running into a problem, not of financial liquidity, but of the hydrological variety. Water will either have to be increasingly imported, or development within the state’s growing suburban and urban communities will have to stop.
State Republicans have responded to these concerns by largely focusing on weakening urban water requirements and trying to build thousands of homes without a guarantee of groundwater being present. The party has also continued to oppose regulations on water and well usage within the state’s expansive rural areas. Without much restraint, industrial-level agricultural operations are operating en masse, with many private producers focusing on water-intensive crops and livestock. Wells are drying up rapidly, and little is being done to help the communities and towns on the ground who will eventually run out of water.
For the American West, climatic conditions are indeed worsening, but this deterioration has yet to shift the Republican Party’s liberty-inspired vision of the environment. In many cases, Republican officials are now even voting against creating green jobs and industries just to deny the legitimacy of climate change and to protect fossil fuel extraction. Republican governance, in its essence, is no longer a mechanism for change or adaptation. It simply can no longer govern over or mitigate environmental crises, nor can it use the power of the state to help people overcome worsening conditions. All it can do is either make the crisis worse or throw public funds at private volunteers, all while protecting an antiquated version of liberty that has no basis in reality.
This is occurring at the federal level as well. Currently, the Trump administration’s own Environmental Protection Agency is attempting to roll back dozens of regulations that cover everything from climate change to clean water to mercury pollution. Administrative rollbacks have also deeply impacted the flow of federal funds into water preservation programs and US geological operations, which provide western states with information on water quality. The Supreme Court over the past three years has only further augmented this phenomenon by steamrolling over a plethora of fundamental laws and legal doctrines. Environmental and administrative law have been decimated, as have the abilities of federal agencies to write, implement, and defend their policies and rules. And since January 2025, these already hobbled institutions have only been further decimated by DOGE raids, illegal closures, mass layoffs and resignations, and funding freezes.
Simply put, at a time of intense climatic change, many of our nation’s states and municipalities are suffering from a self-inflicted crisis defined by an inability to legislate or govern. A city cannot deregulate or dig itself out of a region-wide drought, nor can a state rely solely on volunteer programs to overcome rising temperatures and declining water resources. Tax incentives toward business, permit reforms, and water markets will create momentary growth, and they might even help to shift the needle toward a little bit of progress, but in the long run, these pro-business actions will not be able to surmount the inevitable shocks of systemic drought.
Decisions on water allocation, development, authority, and even growth will have to be made through state policies and under conditions of growing scarcity, something Republican ideology cannot fathom. Growth at all costs will not solve this problem, and for the first time in the modern era, Republicans will have to factor in how different kinds of growth can negatively impact their economies and communities in the long run.
Moreover, as conditions worsen, Republican governance, regardless of what level of government, will no longer be able to outright deny the climate question because of its enormous implications. Insurance markets, real-estate developers, mineral companies, AI firms, and a plethora of other private actors will, in time, shift their priorities toward sustainable growth and conservation to preserve stable markets and growth. Quite ironically, as wells and rivers dry up, economic activity will only be able to be sustained through a government strong enough to ensure the basics of human survival. The GOP platform, which currently is just an objective recipe for crisis acceleration, will have to change as their allies in business recognize the true severity of the crisis.
A New Definition of Liberty:
Overall, governance predicated on anti-environmental and anti-government ideals is going to inevitably deliver a public policy portfolio littered with failures, scandals, and cronyism. More importantly, it will beget a systemic inability to solve any of the actual environmental problems that are plaguing our country. And this will remain true whether you’re in Iowa, Arizona, Washington, DC, Florida, or any other Republican-controlled entity. Future environmental governance, in order to be successful and deliver livable conditions for all Americans, will have to achieve sound policymaking and implementation. Government agencies will have to study, investigate, and produce rules focused on conservation, preservation, and apolitical scientific methods.
State governments will have to produce laws and guidelines that acknowledge environmental reality and then attempt to actually fix conditions on the ground, not just for business, but for everyone. And most significantly, the federal government will have to step in and help hundreds of local towns and communities surmount the ever-rising costs of climate change and ecological collapse. Government is going to become more important, not less, in the coming decades.
We must fight to ensure, however, that this future government operates as a democratic institution rather than as a Mad Max race for dwindling resources and water rights. We must not allow our nation’s most vital and life-sustaining resources to become privatized or locked behind violent institutions clinging on for dear life; instead, our country must strive to achieve a form of environmental governance that recognizes the right of normal people to live a life with basic security.
American liberty should not be defined by the ability to burn through our nation’s air, water, and soil, nor should it only be available to those who have the financial and physical resources necessary to exert political power. Rather, it should be shaped by the ability to democratically and effectively conserve our environment’s existence for future generations. If conservatism means anything, it must grow to accept environmental and resource conservation as a fundamental necessity, not just for economics, but for the continued existence of America as a free and fair country. The fate of our country’s environmental and national security truly rests on the next several decades of governance. Hopefully, Republicans can get their act together on this front before it is too late.