If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie and Ian on Signal at @cwarzel.92 and @ibogost.47.

Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have their own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

[Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government]

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

Our perception of reality is a subjective lived experience, a virtual construct shaped by our senses, biology, and personal history.

Things are not as they are seen, nor are they otherwise.
—”Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra”

It’s always night inside my skull — yours too, unless there are actual gaping holes in it. This proposition would be unremarkable, were it not for my visual experience, which often suggests otherwise. What it suggests right now, with me being awake and aware and my eyes open, is that the place from which I look out at the world is just behind the bridge of my nose. Even more strikingly, I see what I see through what appears to be a large oval hole in the front of my head. But when I feel around with my fingertips in search of it, I find that all is well with my face. This can only mean one thing: that the sensory reality that I inhabit is virtual. To put it less gently, I am living a lie.¹

That the lie is being perpetrated by me on myself is something of a solace, as is the realization that it fits right into the bigger picture of what consciousness is. And I know I can — praise be to evolution — by and large trust my perception not to lead me into grave error, such as stepping off a cliff, or overlooking a pair of watchful eyes in tall grass, or otherwise messing with my chances of having and raising children. The perceived world is an illusion, but it is a useful one.

The predicament of the brain, confined to the perpetual darkness inside the skull, is, after all, not as dire as it sounds. The senses gather and make good use of enough information about what is happening on the outside to keep the virtual reality rig alive and kicking. If there is still any unease left, it comes from too much thinking, and too much worrying, about far-out things like ultimate truth. One such worry that arises out of thinking about perception is this: Given that everything we perceive is a virtual construct, how can we keep believing that our senses reveal to us the world as it really is?

Umwelten

The realization that the perceived world is virtual immediately leads to another one: that what it looks like should depend on the kind of virtual reality engine that one employs. Things are likely to look very different for species whose brain, body, and ecology all differ from the human “standard.” The same goes even for humans who happen to have special abilities. A useful, if fictional, prop for thinking about these matters is Zatōichi, the hero of a long-running action film series in Japan, whose prowess with a sword was not in the least impaired by his blindness. The trope, which the viewers loved, was that the Blind Swordsman leveled the playing field against sighted opponents by making better use of his remaining senses and his other skills. (He did not always play fair: In some fight scenes, he would first cut off the wicks of the candles, plunging everything into darkness.)

A key insight into Zatōichi’s situation is that light is of no use to him, nor is it even present as such in his perceptual world; and yet he acts as if the scene were brightly lit. Imagine this: Zatōichi and a sighted human walk into a barn. Make it a dark barn. Inside, the two of them meet a bat and an owl. There are now four qualitatively different kinds of perceptual worlds in play; five, if we count the mice scurrying on the floor; six, if the cat wanders in. Jakob von Uexküll, the ethologist who was among the first to realize the inevitable idiosyncrasy of each “lived world,” or Umwelt, remarked that “the dog is surrounded by dog things and the dragonfly is surrounded by dragonfly things.” When a human and a dog go for a walk, the leash between them has each end in a different virtual world.

How things really are

If different species, or even different individuals belonging to the same species, inhabit different perceptual worlds, what can we know about what the real world is like? Clearly enough to make action possible; apart from that, not much. Amazingly, the more basic a question about that real world seems, the more difficult it is to get a definitive answer to it. Is it dark at night? The sense in which it is for us is of little concern to a bat, and of no concern to a mole. Is air thick? Not really to us, but sufficiently so for a swallow to push against during its aerial acrobatics. Is water wet? Not to a duck or a water strider. In the face of such differences, it seems silly to insist that our perceptual world is somehow privileged or that what we perceive is how things really are.²

How things look and feel depends not only on who is doing the looking and feeling, but also on what action or other purpose it serves, as well as on the perceiver’s experiential history (and therefore on memory) and bodily and emotional state. I may see a rock outcropping encountered on a hike as a human face or as a battering ram, depending on where my mind was wandering as I was walking up to it (arguably, the best hiking experience requires that the hiker practice just seeing instead of seeing as).³

When I am hungry, a mountain track that I am facing looks steeper than right after a meal. The prospect of jumping at six o’clock in the morning into the indoor pool, in which the water is kept cool to prevent lap swimmers from overheating, feels discomforting to different degrees, depending on whether it is summer or winter outside, as I found out, having been doing this three times a week for many years. Luckily, it helps to think about other matters while swimming. For example, anticipating how the chapter that I am working on is going to end literally warms me up: It distracts me from the initial feeling of cold and I also swim faster, so that it takes me a couple of minutes less to do my usual 3,200 yards.

As we find ourselves compelled to doubt the very notion of objective truth about what the world is like, can science help? Yes, as long as we don’t expect it to do the impossible. Whatever the world is “really” like, evolution has been clearly successful — in an endless variety of strange and beautiful ways — in coming up with effective means of dealing with it. Science, which operates on much the same principles of variation and selection, can be at least equally successful. But evolution has no use for questions of ultimate truth and scientists too are supposed to shun them. In some disciplines, they have learned to do so. Is the electron really a wave or a particle? Quantum mechanics, an epitome of theoretical and practical success in physics, rightly refuses such questions.

The complexity of the human brain greatly exceeds that of any other physical system that we know of, so that in perception science it is even more important not to waste time on arguing about absolutes. What color is this banana? Purple (it’s my favorite variety from Costa Rica), but there is no matter of objective fact about this observation, because color has no physical definition: It is entirely the construct of the observer’s visual system in its interaction with the environment.⁴ At least as far as color is concerned, things are neither as they seem, nor otherwise.

There is a philosophical tradition out there that holds this — the essential emptiness of all things — to be an ultimate truth in its own right; indeed, the only ultimate truth. Some find this notion liberating — the religious tradition that is built around that philosophy holds this to be the only liberating notion. Others, like the reluctant hero of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Lathe of Heaven,” find it hard:

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

But now that we have seen it, bear it we must.

Shimon Edelman is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of several books including “The Consciousness Revolutions: From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation” (Springer) and “Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist’s View of the Human Condition,” from which this article is excerpted.

The seemingly simple act of waiting in line is guided by unwritten rules and visual signals that shape how we navigate social space.

Queuing is often a cultural marker. In some countries, it’s a point of honor; in others, any means would seem legitimate to avoid it.

The stereotypical Italian in London is frustrated because he realizes that he won’t be able to use one of the many stratagems to avoid waiting in line. (Among them: pretending to ask for innocent information directly at the counter; pretending to know someone at the head of the queue; walking straight to the front as if returning for a second time; or simply applying John Le Carré’s golden rule for going unnoticed — imagining that you own the place.) The stereotypical Brit in Rome does not know how to get to the only open counter: Behind which person should he stand in line?

But the queue is a complex institution that transcends cultural differences. How people choose to stand in line appears to be deeply rooted in social cognition, defining something that is almost an ethics of queuing. The deepest explanation of the peculiarities of queuing behavior might be one of a perceptual nature: Simply, the queue makes visible to an individual how he or she should behave compared to all the people who came before them.

When we queue, our brains switch gears from what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2 thinking — a slow, deliberate process that demands focus and draws on memory — to System 1 thinking, where decisions are made quickly and instinctively, though with less precision. This mental shift highlights the unique role of queuing as a social institution: The action presupposes the recognition of shared rules and behaviors.

If an extraterrestrial entered a post office and saw people in line, they would immediately recognize it as some form of social behavior and assume there was some reason for the configuration. It is evident that since everyone is doing a certain thing, we are asked to tune in to the collective behavior, or at least to inquire about it.

The basic rules of queuing are simple:

1. Whoever arrives first is served first.
2. Latecomers join at the end of the line.
3. No one is served until the person before them is.

In a metaphorical sense, the queue turns invisible time into visible space. It translates temporal priority — an abstract and invisible concept — into a concrete and visually apparent spatial priority. Consider how people in a queue naturally face the same direction. Now, try this experiment: Gather a group of friends and line up at the counter of your local post office — but instead of facing forward, turn so that your backs are to the counter. Then observe the reactions of the customers who arrive after you. Where do they think the end of the line is?

This transformation of time into space has clear cognitive advantages when it comes to the ease of drawing conclusions from a visual examination of the line. The presence of the queue says: “No anarchy here, there is a social event to be part of if you want to get to the counter.” Conversely, being a member of a queue also means performing a role for all those who see the queue; by showing that you are in the queue, you indicate the rules of the game to those who want to play along. Finally, there are subjective cognitive advantages to queuing: The fact that you are in line allows you to keep an eye on only one customer at a time, the one who is immediately before you in line.

The Paradox of Queuing

While the queue offers cognitive advantages — such as its immediate readability, the many inferences we can draw from a quick glance, and the relief of not having to continuously assess our place in line — this doesn’t mean our intuitions about queuing are always clear.

In particular, it is unclear to those who queue whether queuing is a useful thing. This lack of clarity becomes evident in situations like boarding at an airport gate, where a traveler can roughly estimate how many people are in line. No additional passengers, aside from the occasional latecomers chased by loudspeaker announcements, are expected to arrive. Yet, people still line up for boarding — often everyone joins the queue, even though those at the very end, precisely because they are last, have no real reason to do so.

The opacity of intuitions crystallizes in a real paradox:

(a) If you are the last person of the queue, every second spent in the queue is wasted. If one knew that one would definitely be the last person queuing, as in the boarding queue, one could do something else.

(b) If you are in any position other than last, you are not wasting your time. In fact, you are gaining time compared to whoever comes next in line. If you arrived after them, you would spend more time queuing.

From these two facts, it follows that in order to avoid wasting time in line, you must hope that someone will line up behind you during the same amount of time you spend waiting. But this is problematic. The time spent in line, with or without someone behind you, is the same. Think about the following, slightly surreal, conversation where Person A says, “I wish I wasn’t the last one in this line.” Person B responds, “In the sense that you would like to exchange places with someone in front?” And Person A insists, “No, in the sense that I would like someone to enter the queue after me.”

RelatedProxemics 101: Understanding Personal Space Across Cultures

The solution to the paradox is simple; it is our intuitions that are confused. If you are certain you are the last in line, the best thing for you is really to go away and do something else. The explanation of the difficulty we have with our intuitions must take into account the delicate balance between the many factors that determine the behavior in line.

The cognitive advantage of the queue, based on its evident structure with simple visual inspection, comes at a cost. For a queue to be perceptually salient, it is necessary for each participant to do her part — remaining in line — even if she knows or fears she is wasting her time. But in this case, being last in line can incur significant costs, as it wastes all the time spent in line, and on top of that, it frustrates the performative work of queuing. Without anyone behind the last person, the perception of order is lost. The marginal benefit for the last person in line is largely symbolic: They uphold the cognitive script of the queue, serving as an implicit guide for any newcomers, even if this role has no practical effect.

This dynamic highlights how queuing is not merely functional but also a social institution shaped by powerful taboos that are difficult to negotiate. I observed this firsthand at Newark International Airport during a night of canceled flights and missed connections, waiting in a long queue for a cab. At a certain point, an elderly person arrives slowly pushing a trolley loaded with luggage, approaches the head of the queue as if there was no one waiting, and talks to the first person in the queue, who is about to take the first unoccupied cab. Then, she approaches the second person. Finally, the elderly person joins the third person and after a brief conversation, she gets into the car with him. Those of us who are far back at the end of the queue mumble. We soon learn that the lady was looking for someone who had a destination close to hers and that in exchange for the possibility of getting into the cab with him or her, she paid for the ride.

Now there is something in the lady’s behavior that seems not quite right, but what is it? She hasn’t stolen anything. She’s paid her fare. Of course, the person has also made a profit. A profit is made, in the sense that even though the elderly person paid for the ride (which she would have done anyway), she gets to arrive at her destination long before she would have had she queued, and gets to avoid the inconvenience of the queue itself. And yet, no one seems to lose: not the first two customers in line, who still took the cab when they were supposed to take it, and not the third person in line, who hit the jackpot.

The lady is violating the paradigm, the script of queuing, introducing a deviant behavior. But which aspect of the script forbids her to do what she did? The rules do not prohibit the purchase of a place in line. Should we then imagine that there are some additional rules that we have not considered? A rule like the following one?

You cannot sell your place in line.

Let’s ask ourselves what may be the reasons that make us resentful or perplexed. Maybe the elderly person does not pay the cost that we “pay” in terms of time by standing in line. But then, why did we not go there ourselves and ask the first in line? Or, the elderly person arrived last and left first, and therefore her behavior is unfair to the person she bought her position from, who leaves when she leaves but had to wait before leaving with her. However, the elderly person paid, and the person “sold” his place in line, and besides, why should we, from the back of the line, sympathize with the first person in line?

At the end of the day, the rules of the queue exist not just to maintain order but to preserve the queue itself as a recognizable institution — one that regulates access to resources through its simple yet effective visibility. This primacy of perceptual functionality explains why we often favor standing in line over informal alternatives, such as asking who is last.

Queues are dynamic maps of time and space. They move, albeit slowly at times, and their movement is essential: A stagnant queue threatens its purpose and frustrates its participants, eroding the trust that keeps the institution functioning. Ultimately, the queue is more than a mechanism for resource allocation; it is a testament to the fundamental principles of human cognition and cooperation.

Roberto Casati is the Director of the Jean Nicod Institute and Professor at EHESS in Paris. He is the author of several books, including “The Cognitive Life of Maps,” from which this article is adapted. A freely downloadable open access edition of the book is also available here.

Immigration and border security will be the likely focus of U.S.-Mexico relations under the new Trump administration. But there also is a growing water crisis along the U.S.–Mexico border that affects tens of millions of people on both sides, and it can only be managed if the two governments work together.

Climate change is shrinking surface and groundwater supplies in the southwestern U.S. Higher air temperatures are increasing evaporation rates from rivers and streams and intensifying drought. Mexico is also experiencing multiyear droughts and heat waves.

Growing water use is already overtaxing limited supplies from nearly all of the region’s cross-border rivers, streams and aquifers. Many of these sources are contaminated with agricultural pollutants, untreated waste and other substances, further reducing the usability of available water.

As Texas-based scholars who study the legal and scientific aspects of water policy, we know that communities, farms and businesses in both countries rely on these scarce water supplies. In our view, water conditions on the border have changed so much that the current legal framework for managing them is inadequate.

Unless both nations recognize this fact, we believe that water problems in the region are likely to worsen, and supplies may never recover to levels seen as recently as the 1950s. Although the U.S. and Mexico have moved to address these concerns by updating the 1944 water treaty, these steps are not long-term solutions.

Growing demand, shrinking supply

The U.S.-Mexico border region is mostly arid, with water coming from a few rivers and an unknown amount of groundwater. The main rivers that cross the border are the Colorado and the Rio Grande – two of the most water-stressed systems in the world.

The Colorado River provides water to more than 44 million people, including seven U.S. and two Mexican states, 29 Indian tribes and 5.5 million acres of farmland. Only about 10% of its total flow reaches Mexico. The river once emptied into the Gulf of California, but now so much water is withdrawn along its course that since the 1960s it typically peters out in the desert.

The Rio Grande supplies water to roughly 15 million people, including 22 Indian tribes, three U.S. and four Mexican states and 2.8 million irrigated acres. It forms the 1,250-mile (2,000-kilometer) Texas-Mexico border, winding from El Paso in the west to the Gulf of Mexico in the east.

Other rivers that cross the border include the Tijuana, San Pedro, Santa Cruz, New and Gila. These are all significantly smaller and have less economic impact than the Colorado and the Rio Grande.

At least 28 aquifers – underground rock formations that contain water – also traverse the border. With a few exceptions, very little information on these shared resources exists. One thing that is known is that many of them are severely overtapped and contaminated.

Nonetheless, reliance on aquifers is growing as surface water supplies dwindle. Some 80% of groundwater used in the border region goes to agriculture. The rest is used by farmers and industries, such as automotive and appliance manufacturers.

Over 10 million people in 30 cities and communities throughout the border region rely on groundwater for domestic use. Many communities, including Ciudad Juarez; the sister cities of Nogales in both Arizona and Sonora; and the sister cities of Columbus in New Mexico and Puerto Palomas in Chihuahua, get all or most of their fresh water from these aquifers.

A booming region

About 30 million people live within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the border on both sides. Over the next 30 years, that figure is expected to double.

Municipal and industrial water use throughout the region is also expected to increase. In Texas’ lower Rio Grande Valley, municipal use alone could more than double by 2040.

At the same time, as climate change continues to worsen, scientists project that snowmelt will decrease and evaporation rates will increase. The Colorado River’s baseflow – the portion of its volume that comes from groundwater, rather than from rain and snow – may decline by nearly 30% in the next 30 years.

Precipitation patterns across the region are projected to be uncertain and erratic for the foreseeable future. This trend will fuel more extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, which could cause widespread harm to crops, industrial activity, human health and the environment.

Further stress comes from growth and development. Both the Colorado River and Rio Grande are tainted by pollutants from agricultural, municipal and industrial sources. Cities on both sides of the border, especially on the Mexican side, have a long history of dumping untreated sewage into the Rio Grande. Of the 55 water treatment plants located along the border, 80% reported ongoing maintenance, capacity and operating problems as of 2019.

Drought across the border region is already stoking domestic and bilateral tensions. Competing water users are struggling to meet their needs, and the U.S. and Mexico are straining to comply with treaty obligations for sharing water.

Cross-border water politics

Mexico and the United States manage water allocations in the border region mainly under two treaties: a 1906 agreement focused on the Upper Rio Grande Basin and a 1944 treaty covering the Colorado River and Lower Rio Grande.

Under the 1906 treaty, the U.S. is obligated to deliver 60,000 acre-feet of water to Mexico where the Rio Grande reaches the border. This target may be reduced during droughts, which have occurred frequently in recent decades. An acre-foot is enough water to flood an acre of land 1 foot deep – about 325,000 gallons (1.2 million liters).

Allocations under the 1944 treaty are more complicated. The U.S. is required to deliver 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to Mexico at the border – but as with the 1906 treaty, reductions are allowed in cases of extraordinary drought.

Until the mid-2010s, the U.S. met its full obligation each year. Since then, however, regional drought and climate change have severely reduced the Colorado River’s flow, requiring substantial allocation reductions for both the U.S. and Mexico.

In 2025, states in the U.S. section of the lower Colorado River basin will see a reduction of over 1 million acre-feet from prior years. Mexico’s allocation will decline by approximately 280,500 acre-feet under the 1944 treaty.

This agreement provides each nation with designated fractions of flows from the Lower Rio Grande and specific tributaries. Regardless of water availability or climatic conditions, Mexico also is required to deliver to the U.S. a minimum of 1,750,000 acre-feet of water from six named tributaries, averaged over five-year cycles. If Mexico falls short in one cycle, it can make up the deficit in the next five-year cycle, but cannot delay repayment further.

Since the 1990s, extraordinary droughts have caused Mexico to miss its delivery obligations three times. Although Mexico repaid its water debts in subsequent cycles, these shortfalls raised diplomatic tensions that led to last-minute negotiations and large-scale water transfers from Mexico to the U.S.

Mexican farmers in Lower Rio Grande irrigation districts who had to shoulder these cuts felt betrayed. In 2020, they protested, confronting federal soldiers and temporarily seizing control of a dam.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum clearly appreciate the political and economic importance of the border region. But if water scarcity worsens, it could supplant other border priorities.

In our view, the best way to prevent this would be for the two countries to recognize that conditions are deteriorating and update the existing cross-border governance regime so that it reflects today’s new water realities.

Gabriel Eckstein is affiliated with the Permanent Forum on Binational Waters, International Association for Water Law, and International Water Resources Association.

Rosario Sanchez receives funding from the USGS under the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program Act. She is affiliated with Texas A&M University and the non-profit as a volunteer to the Permanent Forum of Binational Waters, the International Association of Hydrogeologists, and the International Water Resources Association.

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