By John — Desalination News
A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators has introduced legislation to renew the federal government’s authority to fund desalination projects nationwide, aiming to head off a lapse that would otherwise hit before the end of the year.
Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Alex Padilla (D-California) introduced the Desalination Reauthorization Act (S. 5352) on August 6, extending the Bureau of Reclamation’s authority to award grants for ocean and brackish-water desalination projects. The bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources the same day and became public this week.
Why it matters
The Bureau of Reclamation’s current desalination grant authority — established under the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation (WIIN) Act and the Water Desalination Act of 1996 — is set to expire on December 16, 2026. Without reauthorization, new federal support for desalination projects would require a separate act of Congress for each individual project, a process that developers and water agencies say introduces delay and cost uncertainty into projects that already take years to plan, permit and build.
Desalination — treating seawater or brackish groundwater to produce drinking water — has become an increasingly prominent tool for water agencies across the drought-prone American Southwest, where reservoir levels tied to the Colorado River and other strained sources have pushed utilities to diversify supply. Cornyn pointed specifically to Texas’ Gulf Coast region and the Rio Grande Valley, both grappling with what he called “devastating drought conditions,” while Padilla framed the bill in broader terms, calling access to safe drinking water “a human right.”
What the bill would do
Beyond a straightforward reauthorization, the legislation makes several targeted changes to how the federal desalination grant program operates.
It expands eligibility to include public-private partnerships in project development, opening the door to a funding and delivery model increasingly used on major desalination builds. It also removes an administrative cap that had limited how much federal cost-share large individual projects could receive, allowing bigger facilities to draw the full 25 percent federal contribution the underlying law already permits. And it directs additional support toward the program’s research arm, aimed at helping pilot-scale desalination technologies cross what the bill’s backers describe as the “valley of death” — the gap between a promising lab result and a commercially deployable system.
The bill has drawn early backing from the Association of California Water Agencies, water-tech firm OceanWell, and the South Coast Water District, which cited its Doheny Ocean Desalination Project in Dana Point as evidence of the federal program’s value in getting regional water-resilience projects off the ground.
Context
Reauthorization fights for federal infrastructure programs are common as expiration dates approach, and this one arrives amid steady momentum for desalination policy in Washington and in state capitals. The bill does not appropriate new funding on its own — it preserves and modifies the legal authority for the Bureau of Reclamation to make grants, with actual dollar amounts to be determined through the standard appropriations process. No cosponsors beyond Cornyn and Padilla have been listed as of this week, and the bill has not yet been scheduled for a committee markup.
What’s next
The measure now sits with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Given the December 16 deadline for the current authority, water-policy observers expect the committee to act on some version of a reauthorization before year-end, though the scope of any changes — including the public-private partnership provision and the removal of individual project caps — could shift as the bill moves through committee. A companion measure has not yet been introduced in the House.
(Source: Senator John Cornyn) (Source: edhat) (Source: Congress.gov)