With a Feb. 14 deadline looming, the seven states in the Colorado River Basin have not reached an agreement on how to manage the river after the 2026 operating guidelines expire later this year, and 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 refers to the inability of the upper basin states, which include Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, and the lower basin states, including California, Arizona and Nevada, to come up with 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 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.”

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

As it turns out, there wasn’t one.

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

While Trump has acted quickly to fill many major cabinet and department positions, he has acted slowly on the Bureau. The first nomination was withdrawn last August due to objections from upper-basin state senators, notably 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 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, however, note 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.

What’s at stake: 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, low water levels at Lake Powell, the water bank for the upper states, and Lake Mead, the bank for the lower states, could mean both reservoirs, the largest in the nation, could struggle to provide 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 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 the Department of the 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. 

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

Colorado’s negotiator, Commissioner Becky Mitchell, did not respond to a request for comment. The Upper Colorado River Commission, which represents the upper basin states and of which Mitchell is a member, also did not comment on the collapse of the negotiations.