Trump and Newsom are both tugging at water supplies. Trump is winning.

SACRAMENTO, California — President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are so in sync on California water that they're in a race to capture as much of it as possible — even at each other’s expense.

Trump and Newsom's relative alignment on water issues has been good news all around for farmers and cities that draw from both sides of the state's main water hub: the federally run Central Valley Project, and the aptly named State Water Project, which is state-run.

Water deliveries have ticked up, mostly as a result of back-to-back wet years but also as a result of loosened environmental rules on both sides, much to the chagrin of environmental groups concerned about the collapse of endangered fish populations in the sensitive Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

But the feds have been steadily squeezing out more water over the course of the past year — to the point where state customers are getting worried that their own supplies could be in jeopardy.

“It’s on my radar,” said Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, which represents the 27 water agencies and 27 million people getting state supplies.

Karla Nemeth, California’s director of water resources, has already played out the scenario in which the state would have to reduce its own pumping to keep enough water flowing through the Delta for endangered fish if the feds took a lot of water: “We talk in real time about whether or not that has the potential to happen and how to avoid that happening,” she said.

“It gets tricky,” she added. “That's where we have an actual harm to the State Water Project.”

In pre-Trump times, the state and federal sides of the projects operated in tandem, obeying the same pumping limits meant to protect endangered fish. But federal and state water managers have been following diverging rules since Trump’s first administration, when the Interior Department loosened its protections and the state sued. (Newsom has since ordered his own regulators to maximize water supplies, too.)

The situation worsened a year ago when federal officials ordered large releases from two Central Valley dams against established operating norms in an attempt to send water south for the Los Angeles fires, raising the prospect of chaos in the usually closely coordinated joint system of pumps, reservoirs and canals across the state.

Last month saw more divergence: Both state and feds gave their water managers more leeway over pumping, but the state still has to follow stricter environmental limits. The federal government’s more lenient rules allowed it to export roughly 24,000 more acre-feet of water than the state government during the first major storm of the water year in December, according to both state and federal water officials.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took a victory lap in a press release last week.

“The gains achieved over the past year demonstrate how a disciplined, mission-focused approach can expand water reliability for communities, agriculture and the economy,” he said.

Nemeth emphasized that state and water managers are still talking through operations daily. For example, during the first week of January, federal water managers determined that they could increase pumping without harm to fish populations, but the state declined to do so — and the federal government ultimately backed off, according to Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson Tara Jane Campbell Miranda.

State and federal water managers are both planning to appear at the State Water Resources Control Board this week to detail their latest pumping plans, and federal water managers and users are also gathering in Reno for an annual conference.

But Nemeth acknowledged angst among Delta users and advocates about a disconnect.

“This is a complex system where people already do not trust each other on their best day,” said Nemeth. “That's the story of this political moment, anyway.”

The late December and early January storms, which cleared California of drought for the first time in a quarter century, are temporarily papering over the tension: With most reservoirs full, it’s less obvious if one party or the other may be losing out on potential supplies.

But that may not last as the weather forecast for the coming weeks remains mostly dry. Pierre criticized the state for missing an opportunity earlier this month to capture more storm flows for summer use.

“It's frustrating that when we have significant water being released for flood control that we're not even having a conversation about whether some of that water could be used to rebuild our storage,” Pierre said.

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