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WASHINGTON D.C. — With a major Great Lakes restoration program set to expire this year and infrastructure funding nearing its end, freshwater advocates traveled to the nation’s capital last week to press Congress to maintain support for clean water programs across the region.
Great Lakes Day is an annual convening of environmentalists, policy experts, scientists, and small business owners on Capitol Hill. This year marked its 20th anniversary.
Top priority this year is the reauthorization of the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), a bipartisan program that since its genesis in 2010 has invested more than $5 billion into the region and supported just shy of 9,000 restoration projects. Widely considered one of the most successful freshwater conservation efforts in the world, the GLRI is a financial lifeline for hundreds of organizations, including local fishers, farmers, nonprofits, and scientists. For every dollar invested on the GLRI, more than $3 in economic benefit is produced.
Authorization of the five-year program is set to expire on September 30. Advocates are asking for appropriations of $500 million annually through 2031, the amount proposed by the reauthorization bill’s bipartisan sponsors in 2025. If granted, it would be the largest annual allotment since the program’s inception.
Federal Changes Threaten Unifying Cause
Protecting the Great Lakes — which hold 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water — has long drawn strong support from both sides of the aisle. But the Trump administration’s return to power last year has produced disarray and concern for efforts to sustain healthy waters.
Layoffs, funding freezes, and grant cancellations have affected farmers, fishers, nonprofits, and research organizations across the basin, leaving unfilled gaps in crucial water quality, invasive species, and fisheries monitoring programs.
“We don’t just provide solutions that are useful down the road,” Greg Dick, director of the Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research, told Circle of Blue. “We conduct research that provides actionable information to people on a day to day basis, information that’s really critical for people’s safety and prosperity and well-being.”
These changes have placed community health at risk. On Lake Erie last summer, analyses that track and forecast harmful algal blooms were disrupted amid a loss of personnel at the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab, where staffing was down 40 percent in November, compared to early 2025 figures, Dick says.
Paul McGinnis, the superintendent at the Monroe Water Treatment Plant in Monroe, Michigan, said that he and other water plant operators along the lake’s shoreline were “left in the dark a little bit” without access to federal water quality data, which informs how communities’ drinking water is treated to ensure safe consumption.
“The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” one U.S. Geological Service employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity and referring to the disconnect between the federal government and states, told Circle of Blue.
Water Infrastructure In Need
Meanwhile, regional investment in public water infrastructure remains a growing priority across the basin. Over the next 20 years, Great Lakes wastewater and drinking water systems will require improvements totalling upwards of $290 billion, according to EPA data.
Illinois, Ohio, New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin are among the nation’s leaders in the number of legacy pipes that contain toxic lead. Chicago has more of these lines — 412,000 — than any other city in the country. Despite a federal mandate to replace these pipes by 2047, the job is unlikely to be finished until the 2070s. Cleveland, New York City, Detroit, and Milwaukee are other hotspots where replacement efforts have lagged.
Despite these needs, future funding is not guaranteed.
The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) appropriated $15 billion between 2022 and 2026 — $3 billion annually — for states to proceed with infrastructure improvement projects. Not only does that pot run out at the end of this fiscal year, but it has taken hits along the way. In February, the U.S. House voted 217 to 214 approving an appropriations bill that slashed $125 million in federal funding for the replacement of lead drinking water pipes.
With BIL funding expiring in September, advocates are urging legislators to continue to fund two EPA programs that for decades have offered communities low-interest loans for water quality projects: the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which are respectively authorized for $4.89 billion and $4.38 billion in annual spending.
Since their respective launches in 1988 and 1997, the two programs have supported nearly 70,000 financial assistance agreements nationwide and disbursed nearly $200 billion. The programs themselves are permanent, but the five-year funding boost provided by the BIL expires on September 30, leaving future funding uncertain.