Troubled Waters Ahead For The Great Lakes?

A local nonprofit is raising alarm bells about the Trump Administration’s blueprint for the 2027 federal budget, which proposes funding cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The cuts “would jeopardize the water and water systems that Michiganders and people throughout the Great Lakes region rely on,” according to Flow Water Advocates Executive Director Liz Kirkwood.

Flow works “to ensure the waters of the Great Lakes Basin are healthy, public, and protected for all.” Last week, after Trump’s Office of Management and Budget shared its first draft of the federal budget for the 2027 fiscal year, Flow issued a press release warning of the cuts. The budget requests a $73 billion reduction in non-defense government spending (a 10 percent cut compared to 2026). Defense spending would get a $445 billion (44 percent) increase.

On the environmental side, the Trump Administration is requesting a $4.2 billion budget for the EPA in 2027, “a $4.6 billion or 52-percent decrease from the 2026 enacted level.” That part of the budget promises “a return to common sense environmental policy that works for Americans by providing clean water, clean air, and clean lands,” and says it will work to eliminate “wasteful, radical Green New Scam spending and regulatory overreach.”

The EPA budget does sketch out $122 million “for the critical drinking water mission at EPA,” including a $7 million year-over-year increase to “enable EPA to respond to drinking water disasters quickly and efficiently,” as well as a $27 million increase for the Indian Reservation Drinking Water Program.

But it also proposes to cut $1 billion in categorical grant programs that help states implement environmental statues like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, and $1.7 billion from the Hazardous Substance Superfund, which is “responsible for cleaning up some of the nation’s most contaminated land and responding to environmental emergencies, oil spills, and natural disasters.”

Perhaps “the most consequential reduction for Michigan,” according to Flow, is a $2.5 billion cut to the EPA’s Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds (SRFs).

“Communities across Michigan rely on [the SRFs] to repair aging systems, upgrade septics and wastewater infrastructure, and keep the drinking water safe,” explains Carolan Sonderegger, Flow’s policy director. 

Trump’s budget says states “should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects.” Sonderegger tells The Ticker Michigan isn’t remotely ready to do that.

“We are the only state in the nation not to have a septic code,” Sonderegger says. According to the Michigan Environmental Council, the lack of statewide rules to regulate septic installations and inspections has resulted in over 100,000 failing septic systems statewide, which combined release “close to 10 billion gallons of raw sewage into our soil and waterways each year.”

“Right now, we are working to establish [a septic code], and that legislation has been introduced, but one of the issues we're seeing is there's no funding to support it,” Sonderegger continues. “State lawmakers want to do a statewide database. They want to take old records that are on paper and in filing cabinets and put them into something that would be [searchable], but they don't have the funding to set that system up. So, people are concerned that this will be an unfunded mandate. Well, the SRF could potentially help with that, but not if it's going to be gutted.”

The proposed budget also calls for $1.6 billion in cuts from NOAA's $6 billion budget, with a focus on climate, research, and grant programs. Sonderegger fears those cuts could jeopardize NOAA’s status as “a major source of science on climate, water, and systems,” with implications for everything from weather forecasting to the tracking of harmful algal blooms in Michigan lakes.

It’s not the first time Flow fought proposed federal environmental budget cuts. President Trump's initial budgetary blueprint for the 2026 fiscal year included many of the same reductions, but Congress largely rejected those proposals. Sonderegger hopes something similar will happen again. She says Flow is currently talking with “some other sister environmental groups” in hopes of figuring out a “consolidated, coordinated push” for lobbying lawmakers and building a coalition to oppose the cuts. In the meantime, Sonderegger says Flow's focus is on education and awareness.

“We’re just trying to communicate to the public that what we’re looking at [with this budget proposal] is delayed or cancelled infrastructure projects, higher costs for local communities, more failing septic systems, and increased risk to the groundwater,” she says. “Cutting the budget doesn’t eliminate the need, and I think it is important to understand that water does not follow political boundaries. It needs all of us to take care of it.”