How administration's rash funding cuts imperil the Mississippi River
Listing as nation's most endangered river cites defunding of federal programs as threat to environment, infrastructure
After centuries of manmade manipulation, the Mississippi River remains a powerful, even daunting natural phenomenon. However, conserving its fragile ecosystems while maintaining flood control and navigation works requires constant vigilance.
Navigating the constant push and pull of natural and manmade forces is also expensive, which is why the group American Rivers last week cited the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to federal agencies and programs in designating the Mississippi the nation’s most endangered river.
“The Mississippi River is vital to our nation’s health, wealth, and security,” said Mike Sertle, central region director for Washington, D.C.-based American Rivers, when announcing the designation. “We drink from it, we grow our food with it, we travel on it, we live alongside it, and simply, we admire its beauty.”
According to American Rivers, the nation cannot afford to turn its back on the health of the river or the communities alongside it. Millions of Americans “need unified direction instead of uncertainty at the national level,” Sertle argued.
Those who know the river well say the cuts will be profoundly felt throughout its continental watershed.
“I don’t feel great about it -- in Mississippi or anywhere,” observed New Orleans-based writer Boyce Upholt, author of 2024’s The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. Upholt said that during his research for the seminal nonfiction work, when he lived in the Mississippi Delta, he was surprised by how little people knew about the river and how few understood its value for recreation or its importance as an environmental resource and an avenue of commerce.
Now, Upholt said, “The EPA and other federal agencies that do important environmental work are being dismantled. The Army Corps is getting its funding cut back. How can they possibly do this work without that money?”
Upholt believes the Mississippi would be better protected if more Americans experienced and learned to appreciate its wildness and beauty. “I fell in love with it,” he said of his early travels along the river. “But from the beginning, I was intrigued by the fact that, even living in Mississippi, people weren’t shouting at me to go out on the river. People didn’t know. People never saw it. So that’s always been part of the work for me -- how do we change that?”
Outfitters such as Clarksdale, Miss.-based Quapaw Canoe Company promote recreational use of the river, yet many residents, even in riverside towns, are not well-versed in its ecosystem or its role as a global avenue of commerce.
Critics say a lack of understanding and foresight has contributed to the administration’s evisceration of programs under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies responsible for maintaining the river.
In addition to environmental and flood control setbacks, the cuts could adversely affect farmers who already face challenges from administration tariffs by reducing funding for maintenance and improvements to shipping channels.
At 2,350 miles long, draining all or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, the Mississippi has been a major continental artery for centuries, channeling culture, commerce and national conflict. It remains a globally important economic driver, supporting more than 1.5 million jobs and $500 billion in annual revenue.
The Trump funding cuts coincide with a rollback of federal environmental protections: The EPA has slashed dozens of environmental regulations and billions in grants, including programs for wetland restoration, water quality and habitat for fish and wildlife. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has likewise ended its building resiliency program, cutting billions from projects designed to prepare vulnerable communities for natural disasters, including the kind of flooding that is currently occurring along the river, which has prompted local governments to call for more investment in flood control.
The president also issued an executive order that directed the Corps of Engineers to fast-track emergency permits for primarily fossil fuel projects that will enable the filling of wetlands and construction in sensitive zones. And his administration has repealed sections of the Clean Water Act, which, among other things, will endanger essential buffers in the river’s floodplain.
“The Clean Water Act and the actions of state and federal agencies since the 1970s mean the Mississippi River is the cleanest it’s been in 100 years,” said Paul Hartfield, a retired endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service whose work focused on the lower river. “But the health of the river can’t be measured only by water quality. Any decrease in funding for the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies pretty much means we’re going to see a decrease in environmental protection and flood controls, which are important for the river’s economy and human life.”
The basin lost 221,000 acres of wetlands between 2009 and 2019, according to data compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency that has itself been subject to mass firings that jeopardize scientific research and operation of national wildlife refuges.
Even before the Trump cuts, conditions were not ideal at the state government level. Mississippi and Louisiana are both governed by GOP supermajorities that tend to be skeptical of environmental regulation and the dangers of climate change. Massive interstate river projects tend to fall under federal purview, but, “Water quality tends to be more of a state-driven issue,” Sertle told The Mississippi Independent.
Hartfield pointed out that the Mississippi legislature “could lobby their federal representatives and senators for more funding for the Corps to maintain the river for habitat and people, or address climate change, but we’ve got a Republican administration here that really doesn’t even believe in climate change and mostly sees the river as an economic resource.”
Yet even programs aimed at maintaining and promoting that economic resource are on the chopping block.
Among the threatened environmental programs are those aimed at conserving wetlands that serve as natural water filters and help capture some of polluted runoff. The loss or degradation of such wetlands could exacerbate floods, pollution and the destruction of viable habitat for fish, wildlife and plants, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Some states have attempted to address the environmental damage that will result from the defunding. New Mexico passed landmark water protections in the wake of weakened Clean Water Act enforcement and Iowa doubled down on its commitment to reduce nutrient runoff spilling into the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
Sertle noted that Iowa is building and restoring natural wetlands and shallow lakes on farms to capture and treat water before it enters the Mississippi River system and flows down to the Gulf of Mexico, where nutrient-laden runoff causes annual oxygen-starved dead zones. In 2024, the dead zone grew to nearly 6,000 square miles, posing a significant threat to aquatic ecosystems that sustain the seafood industry in coastal states, including Mississippi.
Mississippi state legislators have so far not proposed any legislative or agency-driven remedies to protect the river that forms its western border.
The river’s economic vitality could meanwhile be threatened by cuts to programs that ensure maintenance of shipping channels, ports and flood control works. In early April, FEMA announced the end of its building resilient infrastructure and communities program, which included reducing flood damages by elevating or removing floodprone structures. In addition to the withdrawal of $3.6 billion for the 2024 fiscal year, any undistributed funds from 2020 to 2023 will be returned to the federal government, according to a Mississippi Emergency Management Agency memo.
Sertle said such defunding will mean that some work already done will go to waste. “Everybody comes together to realize these projects, including community members, nonprofits and the state,” he said. “It takes a lot of these projects over the years to get to the point where people don’t have 17 inches of raw sewage backing up into their living room.”
It is not yet clear how cuts to the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers could affect the 2024 Water Resources Development Act, which authorizes more than $10 billion for improving water infrastructure, including Mississippi’s waterways, ports and flood zones, according to a December 2024 press release from U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss).
“Those types of projects are the other extreme,” Sertle pointed out. “The Army Corps programs are large physical construction projects that could be years in the works. Millions of dollars have already been spent recreating back ponds and side channels and building islands upstream in the Mississippi. If they can’t finish that, and they can’t bring in some trees, some grass, and some rock to stabilize all that, it’s all going to wash away in the next flood.”
For a casual observer, the Mississippi River’s vast forests and wetlands appear natural, which belies its intensive engineering for commerce, including through the stabilization of banks with rock riprap and other materials, extensive levee construction, frequent dredging to facilitate barge and ship traffic, and the maintenance of necessary infrastructure for industrial facilities and power plants.
The challenge now, according to Upholt, is not just to repair the damage human engineering has caused to the river’s natural ecosystems, but to recognize the value of what is left to protect.
“All that could be reversed,” Upholt said of the river’s past degradation. “But it’s socially and politically impossible right now. So maybe it’s less about undoing and [more about] waking people up to what can still be done -- showing people that there’s still a lot of great things left in the Mississippi River.”
Image: Chris Battaglia, Boyce Upholt and Andy McLean, L-R, at a camp near Greenville, Miss., during a paddle down the lower Mississippi River (courtesy John Ruskey/Quapaw Canoe Co.)
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