Alex Hager

Arkansas wants to make Medicaid, the joint federal and state health insurance program, contingent on work. For the 200,000 healthy adults who depend on this coverage, the prospect of losing it if there is a disruption in their work is scary. 31-year-old Summer Neal works at a pizza place and relies on Medicaid to pay for drugs to control pain caused by the chronic autoimmune disease lupus.

Arkansas tried this in 2018, and more than 18,000 people lost health insurance coverage before a judge stopped it. The state is now awaiting the green light from the Trump administration to try again, as are Ohio and Arizona. For NPR News, I'm Alex Olgin.

Wastewater recycling can safely turn sewage back into drinking water. Arizona recycles more than half of its water, and Nevada recycles 85%. Bronson Mack is a spokesman for that state's largest water agency.

A study released this week by UCLA says that technology could be a big help for other states connected to the Colorado River system. Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah all recycle less than 4% of their water. For NPR News, I'm Alex Hager in Fort Collins, Colorado.

California, Arizona and Nevada have proposed relatively modest cutbacks to their water use. Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming say they don't want to give up any water. Anne Castle, a co-author of the new recommendations, says all of the states need to engage in some shared pain.

The memo, written by academics and retired policymakers, also calls for better protections for tribes and the environment. They've long been left out of talks about sharing the river. For NPR News, I'm Alex Hager in Tucson.

Sanders was projected a top pick in the NFL draft. He was a star quarterback at Colorado and his son to Hall of Famer Deion Sanders. His unexplained fall from projected first round to fifth round

took over the draft and during the slide he got a phone call from allegedly the Saints general manager in a now viral video a young man is shown saying the Saints would draft Sanders next it was a prank the Falcons say defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich's 21 year old son unintentionally found Sanders's phone number on an open iPad while visiting his parents home a friend of his made the call

The Falcons and Ulbricht have apologized to Sanders, who dismissed the call, saying it didn't impact him. For NPR News, I'm Alex Helmick in Atlanta.

Wastewater recycling can safely turn sewage back into drinking water. Arizona recycles more than half of its water, and Nevada recycles 85%. Bronson Mack is a spokesman for that state's largest water agency.

A study released by UCLA says that technology could be a big help for other states connected to the Colorado River system. Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah all recycle less than 4% of their water. For NPR News, I'm Alex Hager in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Well, climate change is shrinking the river to record lows. So at the nation's biggest reservoirs, that's Lake Mead and Lake Powell, water levels could drop low enough that they wouldn't be able to generate hydropower or even send water downstream.

So the Biden administration has been telling farmers if they hit pause on growing some crops, the government will give them money to help replace any income they lost by leaving some water in the reservoirs.

Water users have been told that their grants are under review, but they're not hearing much from their contacts with the federal government. And I'll note that NPR's questions about all this to federal agencies went unanswered.

Some are confused as to why their funding is caught up in this freeze because it doesn't seem to be related to the Trump administration's stated priorities, like eliminating diversity programs and developing American energy production. I talked about that with Anne Castle, who helped manage water under Presidents Biden and Obama.

And without money to incentivize water savings, we're likely to keep seeing steady demand on reservoirs that are already dangerously low.

No one can say for sure, but I talked to a number of representatives for big water users, and they told me there's just a lot of question marks about what's going on or what might be next. But if they go back to using water like they did before the Inflation Reduction Act, that steady demand is going to make it more difficult to keep Lake Mead and Lake Powell from shrinking.

Worth noting that the IRA also funded longer-term work to keep the whole Colorado River Basin ecologically healthy. So that's hundreds of millions of dollars for things like preventing wildfires and restoring habitats. I talked to folks who do that work on the ground, and they say if the federal funding goes away, it'll leave a gap that's too big to be filled by donors or local governments.

Yeah, well, this is likely to make those talks harder. There's less water in the river than there used to be, and states know they need to cut back on their demand accordingly. So far, some of the biggest cutbacks on demand have only been possible because of federal incentive programs.

So now the states might need to figure out new ways to make those difficult cutbacks to farms and cities whose economies and people depend on the Colorado River.

Thank you.