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drinking water
The Poison We Pay For: As Federal Budget Cuts Slash Public Water, Big Plastic Wins
Federal cuts to drinking water programs and regulations will further erode trust in tap water, worsening water inequity and the plastic pollution crisis.
Jun 27, 2025
As the Trump administration works to finalize next year’s budget, we must pay attention to funds for drinking water. The currently proposed federal funding cuts will weaken the ability of public water systems to ensure safe water, diminish trust in tap water, and increase business for plastic bottled water—the de facto response when water systems falter.
But what could be more important than access to clean water? To some industries, it seems the answer is profit—especially for Big Plastic.
Water is essential for all life, and access to safe drinking water is an internationally recognized human right. To deny water is to deny health.
It is critical that funding be redirected into public drinking water systems, away from corporate handouts and privatization of our precious freshwater resources.
President Donald Trump says his administration wants “really clean water.” However, it’s difficult to see how dismantling Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation and capacity, rolling back federal clean water protections, and drastically cutting drinking water infrastructure will lead to anything but the pollution of billions of single-use plastic bottles, increased threats to public health, and worsening water injustice.
The White House’s fiscal year 2026 budget plans to slash funding for the Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds by nearly 90%. This funding is the primary source of federal support for water infrastructure across the nation, and has been underfunded for decades. In fact, these new proposed cuts layer onto a near 80% decline in investment in public water systems between 1977 and 2017, which has left many Americans exposed to aging and insufficient infrastructure, and at times, unsafe water. It also doesn’t make good economic sense: Estimates show the proposed cuts will result in the loss of 38,622 American jobs and $6.47 billion in economic output.
Enter: Big Plastic
In the United States, federal cuts will leave state and local governments trying to pick up the tab. Water systems have already raised water rates to cover existing funding gaps, causing a deepening water affordability crisis, only made worse by increasing water privatization. High water rates result in mounting household water debts and shut offs—a practice United Nations experts consider a violation of human rights.
Water insecurity only deepens our reliance on the manufactured “savior” to these crises: plastic packaged water. When the ability of water systems to do proper maintenance and infrastructure improvement is undermined, and communities can’t reliably access or trust safe water coming from the tap, they often turn to or are pushed onto bottled water.
Nearly 90% of Americans consume some bottled water, and 20% consume only bottled water. Bottled water is big business; in fact, it’s the most consumed beverage in the U.S. and worldwide. Globally, more than 1 million plastic bottles are sold every minute, and around 600 billion plastic bottles are produced every year. The global revenue of bottled water is projected to surge to $509.18 billion by 2030, up from $372.70 billion in 2025. The U.S. contributes the largest share of this market.
Central to the bottled water industry’s profiteering is fear mongering about tap water.
Despite having some of the overall highest quality tap water in the world, disinvestment in public drinking water infrastructure and deregulation has led some U.S. communities to have valid concerns about the safety of their public water. Over 9.2 million households still have toxic lead pipes bringing water to their taps, and nearly half of the U.S. has PFAS contaminating their water. These crises, as well as other safe drinking water violations, disproportionately occur in low-income, rural, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.
But the plastic bottled water industry explicitly targets these communities with advertisement campaigns and exploits drinking water crises for profit by mythologizing their product as a “safe solution” as opposed to the regrettable replacement it is in many circumstances.
First myth: bottled water is the safer, purer option.
Bottled water does not face the same health standards as tap water. Companies are required to test their water quality far less frequently than public water systems. And while public water systems always have to notify the public when there is a drinking water violation, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates bottled water as a food product, does not have this same requirement to inform consumers about contamination and recalls. Staff cuts at the FDA threaten to further weaken the enforcement of bottled water regulations.
Moreover, nearly two-thirds of plastic bottled water is repackaged tap water. The plastic bottles then add to that water toxic chemicals that can leach from the bottle itself, including PFAS and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals. It should come as no surprise that the amount of microplastics in bottled water is far higher than in tap water.
Second myth: Bottled water is inexpensive.
Bottled water is not affordable, costing households hundreds to thousands of times more per year than tap water, and further entrenching wealth disparities. In emergencies, municipalities and residents seeking an alternative water supply are often subject to price gouging for plastic bottles. Low-income communities with poor infrastructure are the least trusting of tap water and most reliant on bottled, paying more for an inferior commodity than wealthier households pay for a safe tap. Budget cuts will deepen water insecurity and lead more people to bottled water use.
Third myth: bottled water is sustainable and recyclable.
Ninety-nine percent of plastics are made from fossil fuels, plunging the planet deeper into the climate crisis. Communities on the frontlines and fencelines of fossil fuel extraction, plastic production, and landfill and incineration sites are recurrently exposed to highly toxic chemicals and polluted air, soil, and water. Plastic production itself requires a massive amount of water, both for the extraction of oil and for the cooling of plastic pellets. And bottlers are drying up local groundwater resources. Overall, an estimated 2,000 times more energy is needed to produce bottled water than to supply tap water.
And those bottles never go away. Municipalities have to pay massive sums to deal with plastic bottle pollution and the few bottles that are reclaimed. Plastic bottles most often end up in landfills or incinerators, are shipped overseas under the guise of “recycling” only to be dumped and open-burned, leading to further serious pollution, injustice, and greenhouse gas emissions. In all cases, plastic bottles—like all plastics—break up into micro- and nanoplastics, polluting our bodies and environment.
The bottled water industry is undermining safe public drinking water infrastructure and investment everywhere. According to 2016 estimates, it would take less than half of global annual bottled water sales to ensure safe drinking water supply across the world.
Federal cuts to drinking water programs and regulations will further erode trust in tap water, worsening water inequity and the plastic pollution crisis. It is critical that funding be redirected into public drinking water systems, away from corporate handouts and privatization of our precious freshwater resources.
Call your senators and representatives to oppose these proposed cuts to drinking water infrastructure and ensure the human right to public, safe water is protected.
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As Federal Leaders Are Failing on PFAS, States Must Step up—Here’s How
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action.
May 31, 2025
The Environmental Protection Agency is rolling back critical protections that ensure safe drinking water. These regulations help ensure that our water is free of PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” an especially hazardous form of industrial chemicals that linger in the environment indefinitely.
PFAS are damaging to human health at even the lowest doses. Exposure to PFAS can contribute to serious illnesses including kidney cancer, liver disease, thyroid disorders, or autoimmune disorders. There are no current treatments to remove PFAS from the body.
Despite the evidence of these dire health risks, the administration is shirking their responsibility to protect people across the country from PFAS exposure.
At the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Now, it is more urgent than ever for state and local leaders to step up, fill this gap, and protect their communities from PFAS exposure. It’s a massive undertaking, but fortunately, there is a clear path forward.
Advocates and experts across the country have already begun to chart the way—because they’ve had to. Even though prior PFAS regulations were important, they’ve never been enough to fully protect our water, our land, or our bodies from pollution.
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action. We're the first state to require manufacturers to report intentionally added forever chemicals in products. Perhaps most significantly, the state is working toward the elimination of PFAS from consumer products, addressing the problem at its source rather than merely managing its consequences. Maine's regulatory approach has implemented some of the nation's most protective drinking water standards for PFAS compounds, recognizing that even minute concentrations pose serious health risks.
My own work in Maine has focused on advancing programs to monitor, test, and limit PFAS in our water and food supply. Over the years, we’ve realized that establishing strong drinking water standards is just the beginning of ridding our communities of PFAS. Now, we’re tackling contamination in the food supply by working with farmers to test their land and crops and make the technical changes necessary to produce safe crops and livestock.
Our state's PFAS Advisory Fund provides critical support to farmers whose agricultural operations have been devastated by PFAS contamination, primarily through the historical application of contaminated biosolids to farmland. Complementing this effort, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) established their PFAS Emergency Relief Fund to offer direct assistance to organic producers facing immediate financial hardship from crop losses and farm closures due to contamination.
Maine has also taken the bold step of banning the land application of sludge, eliminating a primary pathway for PFAS contamination of agricultural soils.
These comprehensive regulations serve multiple critical purposes: protecting the health of farmers who work the land and face direct exposure to contaminated soils, safeguarding consumers with safe food, and preserving our most treasured and irreplaceable resources—soil and water.
I urge more local leaders to champion these initiatives with your own representatives. Every town and state has a unique political landscape, and some of these programs might not advance easily. We need new innovation and lots of legwork to develop and advance the right solutions for everyone. But at the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Where the federal government won’t protect us, we will take action ourselves—by raising awareness, pushing for strong state-level responses, and stopping PFAS contamination before it causes further harm.
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Global Water Woes the 'Canary in the Coal Mine' for Climate Calamity: WMO
"As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water," the WMO lead said.
Oct 07, 2024
The climate crisis is destabilizing the world's water cycle, depriving millions of people of the freshwater resources they need while inundating others with deadly and catastrophic floods.
That's the picture painted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)'s third-ever State of Global Water Resources report, released on Monday, which found that 2023 was the driest year for the world's rivers in more than three decades.
"Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. "We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods, and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems, and economies."
A total of 3.6 billion people struggle to access sufficient water for at least one month per year, according to U.N. Water, and this number is projected to swell to over 5 billion by 2050. In 2023, which was also the hottest year on record, river catchment areas around the world were at their driest in 33 years. As in the two years before, more than half of all catchment areas saw abnormal conditions, with most of them seeing below-average water flow.
Especially hard-hit river systems included the Mississippi and Amazon basins, which shrank to record-low water levels, as well as riparian systems in much of Northern, Central, and South America. Argentina's GDP shrank by 3% due to drought, the WMO found. Meanwhile, the report showed how major river systems in Asia—the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Mekong river basins—were drier than usual across almost all of their reach.
Another threat to freshwater access is the melting of glaciers. In 2023, the world's glaciers lost their greatest amount of mass in 50 years at over 600 metric gigatons of water. This ice loss was primarily driven by melting in western North America and Europe's Alps. Switzerland's glaciers shrank by 10% in two years.
"It was either too dry or too wet—and neither is encouraging."
"The worldwide loss of glacier volume, equivalent to 600 gigatons of water according to the latest WMO report, is alarming," said report contributor Robert Reinecke of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "It is the greatest loss we have witnessed in the past five decades."
Saulo added: "Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action."
While 2023 saw drought and ice melt, its high temperatures combined with the shift from La Niña to El Niño halfway through and the positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole also fueled extreme precipitation events.
"It was either too dry or too wet—and neither is encouraging," Reinecke said. "We have to expect both extremes more frequently as global temperatures continue to rise."
Africa saw the deadliest flooding, with Storm Daniel causing a dam collapse in Libya that killed more than 11,000 people in September 2023. Also hard hit were the Greater Horn of Africa, Congo, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Malawi.
"As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated," Saulo said. "It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions."
To respond to these shifting conditions, WMO urged more monitoring and data sharing and said that the Early Warnings for All initiative must cover water-related hazards.
"Far too little is known about the true state of the world's freshwater resources," Saulo said. "We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration, and assessments."
In response to the report, water advocate Mina Guli also called for increased conservation efforts.
"To tackle this crisis, we must invest more resources into protecting and restoring our freshwater ecosystems. Healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands do so much more than provide water—they are our best defense against the worsening impacts of climate change and play a crucial role in ensuring food and water security while also reversing nature loss," Guli wrote on social media.
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