Colorado River operations for the next decade now have a proposed roadmap. The Bureau of Reclamation has published its Final Environmental Impact Statement, naming a preferred approach for how Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be run once the current rules expire.

Rather than locking in fixed numbers for ten years, the document lays out something more elastic: an adaptive decision framework that sets boundaries and then allows operating guidelines to be written, revisited and revised inside them through 2036.

Why the Approach Looks Different This Time

Previous efforts leaned toward prescriptive rules. This one deliberately does not, and the reason is straightforward. Hydrology in the basin has become too unpredictable to plan around a single projection.

The framework establishes three things. It sets operational principles. It defines sideboards, meaning the outer limits within which any guideline must fall. And it creates a process governing how guidelines get drafted, reviewed and updated.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum framed the department’s obligation as keeping the system reliable and resilient for the millions who depend on it, describing the framework as a way to respond to shifting conditions while leaving room for the Basin States to keep negotiating toward durable agreements of their own.

What the Sideboards Actually Allow

The numerical ranges analysed in the Final EIS are wide by design, giving managers room to react to whatever the snowpack delivers. Within them:

Annual releases from Lake Powell may fall anywhere between 5.0 and 12.0 million acre-feet
Lower Basin shortages may be imposed up to 3.0 million acre-feet
Conserved water may be banked for later use, up to 8.0 maf in Lake Powell and 3.0 maf in Lake Mead
Voluntary Upper Basin conservation of up to 200 thousand acre-feet is available, dependent on hydrology

That last provision reflects a long-standing asymmetry. Upper Basin states cannot easily promise fixed reductions because their supply arrives as runoff rather than from storage, so their contribution is framed as voluntary and conditional.

Guidelines on a Two-Year Cycle

Under the preferred alternative, Interior would issue operating guidelines in roughly two-year increments. The exception is if the seven Basin States reach a consensus agreement that covers a longer stretch, in which case the department can adopt that timeline instead.

That structure is doing two jobs simultaneously. It gives water users predictability about how decisions will be made over the coming decade, and it preserves an incentive for the states to negotiate, since a successful deal can be folded directly into federal operations.

Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Andrea Travnicek described the plan as balancing flexibility against predictability for a system serving forty million people, noting the unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the scale of potential impacts on water users.

The Scale of What Depends on the River

It is easy to lose sight of how much rests on these decisions. The Colorado River supports:

More than 40 million residents across seven states
Hydropower generation throughout the region
Thirty tribal nations and two Mexican states
Roughly 5.5 million acres of irrigated farmland
Critical ecosystems and habitat for endangered species

Every adjustment to a release figure or a shortage tier ripples outward through all of it.

Numbers That Explain the Urgency

The arithmetic underlying this planning process is unforgiving.

Twenty-five years of drought have pushed combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead to levels not seen since before Glen Canyon Dam began filling in 1963. Since 2000, consumption has outpaced total inflow into the system in most years.

The original allocation compounds the problem. The Colorado River Compact divided 7.5 million acre-feet each to the Upper and Lower Basins, working from an estimated pre-compact average inflow of about 18 million acre-feet drawn from the years 1906 to 1921. Actual inflows from 2000 through 2024 have averaged 12.9 million acre-feet.

This year’s figures are starker still. Unregulated inflow into Lake Powell as of July is projected at just 3.5 million acre-feet.

Where the Water Goes

Between 2020 and 2024, average consumptive use across the basin totalled 13.1 million acre-feet, distributed as follows:

Lower Basin: 6.5 maf, or 49 percent
Upper Basin: 3.8 maf, or 29 percent
Mexico: 1.4 maf, or 11 percent
Evaporation: 1.4 maf, or 11 percent

The evaporation line deserves attention. Losing as much water to the atmosphere as Mexico receives under treaty is a structural feature of storing water in large reservoirs across a desert, and it is not something operating guidelines can eliminate.

Three Years of Process

The Final EIS closes out a NEPA review that began in June 2023. Across that period, Reclamation held extensive engagement with stakeholders throughout the basin, and the agency says that input shaped both the alternatives evaluated and the preferred approach selected.

Following release of the draft EIS in January 2026, the agency received in excess of 18,000 comments. Among those were 785 unique submissions from members of the public, tribal governments, states, federal agencies and other interested parties. Substantive feedback was evaluated and incorporated into revisions to the final document.

The Mexico Question Sits Elsewhere

One important limitation is worth flagging. This document deals strictly with domestic operations. Deliveries to Mexico are handled through a separate binational track, which the department says is approaching completion.

Discussions concerning post-2026 operations and implementation of the 1944 Water Treaty will proceed through the International Boundary and Water Commission, with the State Department consulted throughout. Interior has stated its commitment to continued cooperation with Mexico on these matters.

What Comes Next

The publication of a Final EIS is a milestone rather than a conclusion. A record of decision typically follows, formalising the selected alternative, after which the first set of operating guidelines would be developed within the sideboards now defined.

The open question is whether the Basin States can produce the consensus agreement this framework so clearly invites. The federal structure functions without one, but it was plainly built with the hope that it will not have to.