First veto of Trump’s second term kills long-awaited water project in Colorado

President Donald Trump has used the first veto of his second term to strike down a unanimously bipartisan funding plan for a major safe drinking water project in rural Colorado.

The abrupt move drew swift condemnation from the state’s congressional delegation, including from far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert, who sponsored the legislation and whose district is affected.

Trump’s veto followed his pledge of retribution against Colorado state leaders after a jury last year convicted former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a Trump ally, of breaching her county’s secure voting systems in an attempt to find nonexistent evidence to substantiate Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Peters remains in prison in Colorado despite the president’s calls for her release.

“My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies,” Trump said in a statement explaining his decision. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the Nation.”

The president did not mention Peters in explaining Tuesday’s veto, which comes on the heels of his denying requests for disaster relief in Colorado and authorizing the dismantling of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the largest federal climate research center, which is in Boulder.

But he took to social media again Wednesday to rail about her imprisonment. He called Democratic Gov. Jared Polis a “scumbag” and said Polis and Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, a Republican, should “rot in Hell” for prosecuting Peters.

The “Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act” aimed to revise the payment terms that have long stood in the way of the completion of a vital pipeline that delivers clean water from the Pueblo Reservoir to rural communities in Colorado’s Eastern Plains, where the groundwater is largely unusable due to a range of toxicities that threaten public health. 

The bill would have given communities in the Arkansas River Valley 100 years to pay back interest-free federal loans for their share of the project, reducing the initial payment burden enough to incentivize the completion of the 130-mile pipeline. 

“President Trump decided to veto a completely noncontroversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously,” Boebert, a longtime Trump ally who has clashed with him recently over the release of the Epstein files, told MS NOW. “Why? Because nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado.”

Boebert was one of four House Republicans who signed a discharge petition in September that forced a vote on the release of the Epstein files, which Trump was staunchly against. The Trump administration attempted to convince Boebert to remove her name from the petition before the files came to a vote, but she refused. 

“I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability,” Boebert said. “Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics.”

MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia also signed the petition before announcing plans to resign from Congress in January after a public fallout with Trump over the files, which she said led to death threats against her and her family.

Colorado’s two Democratic senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, denounced the veto, with Hickenlooper accusing Trump of “playing partisan games and punishing Colorado by making rural communities suffer without clean drinking water.”

The Arkansas Valley Conduit pipeline was first authorized in 1962 during the Kennedy administration as part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, a massive piece of federal infrastructure responsible for delivering vital water across Colorado’s continental divide for agriculture and urban use. Construction of the pipeline did not officially begin until 2020, during the first Trump administration, because the rural communities tasked with funding it couldn’t afford the payments. 

Former President Joe Biden’s signature legislation incentivized the pipeline project in 2023, but that federal funding wasn’t enough to get construction across the finish line.

“This isn’t over,” Boebert said Wednesday in a post on X.