- President-elect Donald Trump accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of causing a water shortage during the January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles County by refusing to sign a "water restoration declaration" in order to protect "an essentially worthless fish called a smelt."
- Newsom's office said such a document never existed.
- It's true that Newsom and the California attorney general sued the Trump administration in 2020 over a water management plan that, according to the state, failed to protect certain endangered species, including the delta smelt. That program was never put into place and the Biden administration subsequently approved its own plans for the waterways, with support from Newsom.
- Experts said discussions of water management programs in Northern California have "nothing to do with the fires in Southern California." Official data shows that most of the state's reservoirs were at or above historical average levels before the January 2025 fires.
- Officials said water shortages reported by firefighters in the Pacific Palisades area were due to high demand on a system built for urban fires, not wildfires.
In January 2025, Snopes readers messaged us to ask about claims they'd seen that California Gov. Gavin Newsom refused to sign a water restoration declaration presented by the first Trump administration, resulting in a lack of water for firefighters to battle wildfires around Los Angeles.
The claim stemmed from a Jan. 8 post by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Truth Social, seen below on Trump's Truth, a website that archives Trump's postings on his social network.
(Trump's Truth)
The post read:
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn't work!), but didn't care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
Examples of the claim circulated on X (archived) and Facebook (archived), including a highly viewed post (archived) by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. In the post, Johnson claimed that "Gov. Newsom BLOCKED water policy that reserves water from the north to be available in times like this."
However, Newsom's office said (archived) on X that there had never been a "water restoration declaration" for the governor to decline signing.
Newsom and the Trump administration have a history of legal conflict over plans for water delivery in California. In 2020, the state's attorney general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for failing to protect endangered fish species, including the much-debated delta smelt, in new plans for Northern California. The Biden administration subsequently approved its own plans for the area that differed from Trump's. There's no indication, as of this writing, that this years-long legal battle had any effect on water availability during the January 2025 wildfires. According to officials, California's reservoirs were at above-historic levels before the fires. Water supply issues, widely reported in the Pacific Palisades area, were due to demand and elevation, officials said.
Newsom's office denied the existence of the "water restoration declaration" from Trump's Truth Social post, calling it "pure fiction." However, Trump's transition team told CNN after the post was published that Trump was actually referring to a legal challenge by Newsom and the California attorney general from 2020 against the the administration's plan for operations of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project — more on those below.
Trump, Newsom and the Battle for Californian Water and Endangered Fish
The Central Valley Project, overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, is a network of dams, reservoirs, canals, hydroelectric power plants and other facilities that provides water to half of California's 52 counties. The CVP carries out functions including supplying domestic and industrial water to cities, businesses and farms and providing water to restore and protect fish and wildlife.
The restoration of fish and wildlife mandate — specifically as it applied to a small fish called the delta smelt — became problematic for Trump in 2019, when the federal bureau, together with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote a commentary piece in CalMatters, a nonprofit news publication, presenting a revised plan for operations for the Central Valley Project and State Water Project — a system that collects water from Northern California to redistribute it to water-scarce areas, mainly in the southern part of the state. The SWP is managed by the California Department of Water Resources and mainly serves urban users, like in Los Angeles, while the CVP is managed by the USBR and mainly serves agricultural use.
Because the plan involved pumping water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — the home of the endangered delta smelt — two federal agencies had to give biological opinions on whether the proposed plans would disturb wildlife according to the Endangered Species Act. The opinions were published in October 2019. According to an Oct. 21, 2019, commentary by USBR, NOAA and USFWS officials:
Thanks to the diligent work of our dedicated staff, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that the proposed operations will not jeopardize threatened or endangered species or adversely modify their critical habitat.
Trump's new plan was signed on Feb. 19, 2020. The following day, the California attorney general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration "for failing to protect endangered fish species from federal water export operations." The lawsuit requested that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California declare the Trump administration's adoption of the biological opinions submitted by the NOAA and USFWS "unlawful." The opinions "puts at risk Delta smelt, Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, and other fish species," the lawsuit argued.
In March 2022, then under the Biden administration, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, where the case had transferred, ordered that the "2019 Biological Opinions" be remanded to their respective federal agencies "without vacatur," meaning the court found fault with the opinions but that they should stay in place while they were corrected. A new environmental impact statement was published in November 2024 and a new plan announced that December with the support of Biden and Newsom.
Given the timeline of the case, Trump never got to finish what he started with regard to plans for the CVP and SWP — but this was not because Newsom, who has been governor of California since 2019, refused to sign any document or declaration presented to him, as Trump claimed.
No Connection Between CVP, SWP, Delta Smelt and Wildfire Water Supply
In general, Trump's claim that regulations on the CVP and SWP systems due to endangered fish caused a water shortage in Southern California lacks context.
Brent Haddad, a professor in the environmental studies department of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Snopes via email that while there was a connection between water flow in the north of California and water availability in the south, it was not the one Trump or those spreading his claim about Newsom were seeking:
The connection is that climate change is impacting both systems. Water flow in the north is being upset by longer droughts, fiercer storms, and earlier snowmelt, for which the state's flood control and water storage and delivery infrastructure and accompanying regulations are not prepared. In the south (and elsewhere in the state), the infrastructure is not sized for the increasing frequency and intensity of fires in California. Major investments are needed to upgrade infrastructure and services across water, energy, public health, and urban design to deal with the warming that will take place for decades even if we quickly curb our appetite for fossil fuels.
Jeffrey Mount, a topic expert from the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center, told CNN that discussions of water management programs in Northern California have "nothing to do with the fires in Southern California. There's nothing." We have reached out to Mount and will update this report if we hear back.
On Californiafirefacts, a fact-checking page about the January 2025 wildfires run by the California governor's office, the claim that Newsom's delta smelt policies had anything to do with the wildfires was labeled "outlandish."
According to the California Department of Water Resources, most of the state's water reservoirs were at or above historical average levels on Jan. 6, the day before the fires broke out. Data from the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water in 2023 showed that 46% of the city's water came through the SWP and from the Colorado River, managed by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (labeled MWD on the first graph in the APM Resarch Lab article that presented the data). Hence, even if water delivery from the SWP had been low, there would have been a number of other sources for firefighters to draw on.
A Snopes fact check previously found that reported water shortages in the Pacific Palisades area were largely due to extreme demand on a hydrant system that was not built to battle wildfires.
Snopes has previously fact checked whether the January 2025 fires reached the Hollywood sign and whether Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had cut the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department.