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11/13/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 11/13/2025 14:10
Watered Down: A Weakened Global Water Strategy
Watered Down: A Weakened Global Water Strategy
Photo: MARK TIA/AFP/Getty Images
Commentary by David Michel
Published November 13, 2025
This analysis is a component of Part II of a three-part series, A New Landscape for Development, that examines the context, current state, and early impacts of the dramatic changes to U.S. foreign assistance in 2025.
A New Landscape for Development
Part I - The Ground Has Shifted
Part II - Examining Impacts, Capabilities, and Opportunities
Part III - Recommendations
Water is a critical resource. Modern societies require sustainable supplies of safe, sufficient water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, as well as to grow food, generate energy, promote industry, and ensure public health. Yet many countries and communities worldwide struggle to provide reliable water services for their people.
Water resources are renewable, but they are unevenly distributed. Rainfall and river flows vary season to season and place to place. Extreme events such as floods and droughts can imperil water systems and water users. Contaminants can render water sources unsafe. Accessing, treating, storing, and delivering clean fresh water where and when it is needed; protecting water systems from extremes and disasters; and sustaining water resources to meet evolving demands requires substantial financial investment, infrastructure development, and managerial capability. These demands strain the capacities of many societies. Today, one-quarter of the global population lacks access to safely managed drinking water and two in every five people around the world do not have safely managed sanitation.
In 2017, the United States launched its first Global Water Strategy. The first Trump administration affirmed that "Water may be the most important issue we face for the next generation." Adopting a "whole-of-government" approach, the strategy marshaled U.S. knowledge, resources, technology, and diplomacy to support a more water-secure world. By bringing the full spectrum of its expertise and capacities to bear, the United States has sought to increase global access to safe water services, promote sustainable management and protection of water resources, reduce conflict and foster cooperation around shared waters, and fortify water sector finance and governance.
The second Trump administration has abruptly abandoned this approach. Since issuing the presidential executive order "Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid" on January 20, 2025, the administration has slashed funding and programming across the water sector and shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the key agencies implementing the Global Water Strategy. In Washington, the administration asserts that its dramatic assault on development assistance represents a salutary sweeping of Augean stables, eliminating initiatives and organizations riddled with waste and abuse that serve no U.S. interest. On the ground in partner countries, however, the United States' drastic policy retrenchment has left a trail of broken engagements, unfinished infrastructure, weakened institutions, and diminished water security.
Water for the World
Supporting water services has long figured as an object of U.S. foreign aid. In the wake of World War II, shattered communities from West Berlin to rural Greece drew on the Marshall Plan to rebuild ruined water systems. Following the creation of USAID in 1961, U.S. water-related development assistance during the Cold War decades focused predominantly on supply-side infrastructure, providing drinking water, sanitation, and pollution control as important components of economic modernization.
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With passage of the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act in 2005, Congress made increasing developing country access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) an explicit goal of U.S. foreign assistance. Importantly, the act not only framed strengthening water services as public health and development imperatives but cast water scarcity as a prospective conflict risk. Competition over vital shared water resources, it argued, could potentially threaten national security and international stability. This landmark legislation required the president, acting through the Department of State and USAID, to formulate a strategy for advancing safe water and sanitation provision in developing countries and to designate specific "High-Priority" countries for assistance.
With that mandate, USAID crafted its first five-year Water and Development Strategy, targeting improved public health outcomes and sustainable agricultural water management to enhance food security. In 2014, Congress then passed the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act. The new legislation declared that "the United States should be a global leader in helping provide sustainable access to clean water and sanitation for the world's most vulnerable populations." Building on the 2005 act, it directed USAID and the Department of State to co-lead creation of a single government-wide Global Water Strategy containing agency-specific plans detailing how the United States would increase water services access, improve water management, and reduce water conflicts in targeted countries. With dozens of cosponsors from both sides of the aisle, the Water for the World Act and its objectives enjoyed substantial bipartisan backing, passing through both houses of Congress unanimously.
The U.S. Government Global Water Strategy
The first Trump administration inaugurated the first Global Water Strategy in 2017. Fulfilling the instructions of the Water for the World Act, the strategy established four interconnected strategic objectives: increasing sustainable access to water services; encouraging sound management and protection of water resources; promoting cooperation on shared waters; and strengthening water sector finance and governance institutions. It also included dedicated plans from 16 different agencies describing their contributions toward those ends. NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Geological Survey, for example, would apply their Earth observation and modeling capabilities to monitor and assess water availability and water use patterns and develop weather forecasts and early warning systems for water hazards and extremes. The International Trade Administration and the Millennium Challenge Corporation would catalyze infrastructure financing and investment opportunities. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture would offer training and capacity building in areas such as infrastructure operation and agricultural water management, and so on.
To best leverage U.S. resources, the strategy identified 13 "High-Priority" countries as primary recipients of U.S. foreign assistance, based on criteria set forth in the Water for the World Act combining measures of national needs and capacities, together with opportunities for U.S. impact. For each country, USAID led development of detailed multiyear plans to guide U.S. programming and investments to achieve the Global Water Strategy goals in alignment with partner country needs and priorities.
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The Water for the World Act stipulates renewal of the Global Water Strategy on a five-year basis. In its second iteration, the U.S. Government Global Water Strategy 2022-2027 retains the four strategic objectives announced by the first, refining them to heighten the focus on climate resilience and conflict prevention. The current strategy defines these objectives as follows: strengthening sector governance, financing, institutions, and markets; increasing equitable access to safe, sustainable, and climate-resilient water and sanitation services and the adoption of key hygiene behaviors; improving climate-resilient conservation and management of freshwater resources and associated ecosystems; and anticipating and reducing conflict and fragility related to water. It also updates the set of "High-Priority" countries and adapts the selection criteria to include political and economic considerations of U.S. interests and program impact and sustainability. Expanding on the initial version, the strategy now targets 22 countries across Africa, Asia, and Central America, together with a further 15 "Strategic Priority" and "Expanded Global Portfolio" states.
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David Michel
Senior Fellow, Global Food and Water Security Program
Programs & Projects
- Global Development
- Global Food and Water Security Program
- Project on Water Security
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The scale of the global water challenge is enormous. International cooperation and assistance can only ever be one piece of larger response strategies. Yet the U.S. Global Water Strategy has realized significant results. In the 20 years since the Water for the Poor Act was passed, U.S. foreign assistance has helped tens of millions of people in dozens of countries gain access for the first time to safe and sustainable water services. In the period of FY 2008 through FY 2016 under USAID's first Water and Development Strategy, U.S. programs brought improved drinking waters services to 37.3 million people, improved sanitation services to 24.1 million people, and improved agricultural water management to 6.8 million people worldwide. The first U.S. Global Water Strategy set targets to provide 15 million people with sustainable access to safe drinking water and 8 million people with sustainable access to safe sanitation services by 2022. U.S. water sector programming surpassed both benchmarks in 2021. By FY 2023, U.S.-supported initiatives had brought safe drinking water services to an additional 35.9 million people and safe sanitation services to a further 32.1 million people (see Figure 4). As importantly, U.S. efforts have supported training and capacity building initiatives that have engaged and strengthened hundreds of water management institutions at all levels of government, bolstering the "soft infrastructure" of knowledge, practices, and organizations that furnish the enabling environment for effective and sustainable water governance. These achievements risk being lost.
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Whither the U.S. Global Water Strategy?
The second Trump administration's dramatic realignment of U.S. foreign assistance policies and priorities holds potentially significant ramifications for the U.S. Global Water Strategy. Based on calculations from the best available data as of summer 2025, foreign assistance funding and programming for the water sector have been drastically diminished. By August 2025, the number of USAID programs had been slashed from 254 to 99, a 69 percent decrease compared to the previous March. Obligated funding destined for water sector projects had been similarly curtailed, falling 64 percent, from $3.45 billion to $1.23 billion.
The sudden wave of closed programs and terminated contracts has left many crucial infrastructure projects half finished, vulnerable communities without promised water and sanitation services, and long-standing local partners set adrift mid-stream. Irrigation canals lie uncompleted in Kenya, risking flooding to farmers' fields. Water towers serving schools and health clinics go empty in Mali, and water systems under construction in Nepal sit abandoned, their building materials scattered unused. Death rates from cholera-a waterborne disease-have spiked in several African nations where WASH contracts have been canceled.
Beyond the dismantling of USAID, large budget cuts to many other agencies could also hobble key components of the Global Water Strategy. At NASA and NOAA, for instance, the announced elimination of several Earth science missions and weather data programs could leave farmers, businesses, and communities around the world-and in the United States as well-increasingly blind to evolving water extremes and disaster risks. Such examples reflect the risks of cascading impacts to the Global Water Strategy goals as the success of many programs depends upon the performance of other interconnected initiatives.
Remote Visualization
The Trump administration's America First overhaul of U.S. foreign assistance is ongoing, and its ultimate consequences for global water security remain unclear. The Water for the World Act requires the renewal of the U.S. Global Water Strategy by October 2027. The Global Water Strategy faces many acknowledged challenges and shortcomings. Many in the water policy community have acknowledged the need and potential for reform. Perhaps the administration's sweeping realignments to U.S. foreign aid will serve to lay the foundations of more efficient and effective strategies on ground now cleared of old obstructions. But the abrupt and chaotic nature of its approach so far suggest a different future fraught with "derailment risk." Rather than effectively steering policy in desired new directions, the brutal speed and force of the administration's sudden policy turnabout could wreak extensive damage, derailing much of the success achieved and making it much more difficult to bring progress toward U.S. goals and interests back on track. Upon taking the oath of office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged that U.S. policy will be guided by the goals of making the nation stronger, safer, and more prosperous. These aims will not be served by policies that risk making vulnerable populations in partner countries weaker, poorer, and less water secure.
David Michel is the senior fellow for water security with the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).
© 2025 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.
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