With the Feb. 14 deadline looming, the seven states in the Colorado River Basin failed to reach an agreement on how to manage the river after the 2026 operating guidelines expire later this year.

John Entsminger, Nevada’s chief negotiator, said there is no deal in place.

“The seven Colorado River Basin states have failed to reach an agreement to collectively protect our respective communities and economies in the face of almost certain reductions to our use of the river,” Entsminger said. “As I talk with people throughout Southern Nevada, I hear their frustrations that years of negotiations have yielded almost no headway in finding a path through these turbulent waters.”

Entsminger added, “As someone who has spent countless nights and weekends away from my family trying to craft a reasonable, mutually acceptable solution only to be confronted by the same tired rhetoric and entrenched positions, I share that frustration.”

The statement was initially reported by the Water Desk at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Entsminger’s statement referred to the failure of the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada to come up with a framework to manage the dwindling water supplies of the Colorado River and whether the states can agree on cuts to their allocations.

Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, also lamented the failure of the negotiations.

“Arizona and its Lower Basin partners have offered numerous good-faith compromises to the representatives of the Upper Basin states. In that time, virtually all of them have been rejected,” he said in a statement on Friday.

He noted the options the Lower Basin states have offered, such as substantial cuts to their Colorado River allocations: 27% for Arizona, 17% for Nevada and 10% for California.

“Not enough” for the Upper Basin states, he said.

Last summer, the Lower Basin states “proposed a revolutionary and innovative method of dividing the river’s bounty holistically based on a three-year rolling average of the ‘natural flows’ in the river.” The Upper Basin states rejected that, too, he said.

The message from the Upper Basin states has been consistent, he said — no firm commitment to reduce their allocations, “no matter how dire the conditions of the river may be.”

“We have offered to do more,” Buschatzke said, “But we simply cannot take on the task of saving this precious river system on our own.”

On Friday afternoon, the Upper Colorado River Commissions responded, saying it didn’t create the problem.

“We’re being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create with water we don’t have,” said Colorado’s commissioner, Becky Mitchell. “The Upper Division’s approach is aligned with hydrologic reality and we’re ready to move forward.”  

“The Upper Division has stepped up and offered a compromise framework that could serve as a basis for a long-term agreement,” added Brandon Gebhart, who represents Wyoming on the commission. “We are choosing workable solutions over litigation and political messaging. Conflict won’t change the hydrology.”

In a last-ditch effort to get through to the states, the White House had invited the governors of the seven states to discuss the path forward.

As it turned out, there isn’t one.

The ball is now back in the court of the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation, which has been without a permanent commissioner since President Donald Trump took office.

The first nomination was withdrawn last August due to objections from Upper-Basin state senators, notably from Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which has the authority to recommend the reclamation nominee.

Trump has yet to name another nominee.

In the meantime, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum named Scott Cameron as acting commissioner, formerly the Interior Department’s principal deputy assistant secretary for policy, management and budget, and also previously the acting assistant secretary for water and science.

The Trump administration has twice set deadlines for the seven states to reach agreements, yet they have remained deeply divided over one major issue — how much water the Upper and Lower basins should receive and by how much that allocation should be reduced.

The Colorado River is no longer capable of providing the amount of water outlined in several long-standing agreements, starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

Under those agreements, the Lower Basin was allocated 75 million acre-feet of water over 10 years, with the Upper Basin receiving the same amount. The Upper Basin states have maintained they’ve never taken the full amount.

The Lower Basin states actually took about a million acre-feet more annually, in part because they did not account for factors that would reduce that allocation, such as evaporation and transit losses. The Lower Basin states have since agreed to account for those losses.

Amid the flailing negotiations, the winter of 2025-26 has been among the worst in history for poor precipitation, largely the snowpack that feeds the Colorado River, beginning at its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Downstream, the low water levels at Lake Powell — the water bank for the Upper Basin states — and Lake Mead, which servers the same purpose for the Lower Basin states, could mean both reservoirs, the largest in the nation, will struggle to deliver water to 40 million residents of the seven states, supply water to millions of acres of agriculture and provide hydropower through the reservoirs’ two dams, Glen Canyon and Hoover, respectively.

The federal government last month released a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) that could form the basis for the agreement, but it’s one the seven states aren’t happy with.

When the draft EIS was released, Andrea Travnicek, the assistant secretary at Interior for water and science, said the department “is moving forward to ensure environmental compliance is in place so operations can continue without interruption when the current guidelines expire.”

She added that the river and the 40 million people who rely on it cannot wait.

“In the face of an ongoing severe drought, inaction is not an option,” she said.

A coalition of environment and river groups also issued a warning on Friday.

“The Draft Environmental Impact Statement for post-2026 operations makes clear that the system is operating with little margin for delay,” said the coalition, which includes American Rivers, the Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Trout Unlimited and Western Resource Advocates.

“Failure to reach consensus could lead to litigation that would likely take decades to resolve and delay progress towards the solutions needed at this crucial moment for the Basin and its communities. There remains a narrow opportunity for the Basin to shape its own future through negotiated, forward-looking solutions, including many of the meaningful tools identified in the Draft EIS,” the coalition said.

The Department of the Interior has said it wants to see an agreement in place by Oct. 1, the start of the next water year.