Clean Water

Turn on the tap. Fill a glass. Drink it without thinking. That’s the promise — the most basic promise a modern society makes to its citizens. You built the roads, you paid the taxes, you held up your end. In return, the water is clean.

In Flint, Michigan, the water wasn’t clean for years. Children were poisoned with lead. It took a decade to replace the pipes — the last one came out in July 2025. Nine thousand kids were diagnosed with learning and behavioral problems from the exposure. The city lost 20 percent of its population. The settlement checks — from a $600 million fund — finally started arriving in December 2025. Eleven years after the crisis began.

In Jackson, Mississippi, the water system collapsed in 2022. A federal court appointed a private manager. As of 2026, the system survives on $150 million in federal subsidies, 6,000 locations still receive water without an account, and a judge just approved a 12 percent rate increase on a city where one in four residents lives in poverty.

Those are the ones that made the news. Right now, 30 million Americans live in areas where drinking water systems violate federal safety rules. Two million Americans don’t have running water or indoor plumbing in their homes. Nine million homes still get their water through lead pipes. And 176 million Americans — more than half the country — have drinking water that has tested positive for PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that don’t break down in your body or in the ground.

You can’t bootstrap your way out of poisoned water. You can’t work harder. You can’t save more. Either the infrastructure works or people are harmed. Foundation is built on the premise that there is a minimum set of conditions people need to thrive. Clean water is one of sixteen components — and it might be the simplest test of whether a society is serious about its own people.

The Debt We’re Standing On

America’s drinking water earned a C-minus on the 2025 ASCE infrastructure report card. Wastewater got a D-plus. That grade hasn’t improved since 2021, despite $55 billion allocated through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — the largest federal water investment in U.S. history. The EPA estimates the country needs $625 billion over the next 20 years just to maintain current systems. Not to build anything new. Not to address emerging contaminants. Just to keep what we have from falling apart.

And here’s what’s happening to the money: the proposed federal budget for 2026 would slash Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Fund programs from $2.76 billion to $305 million — an 89 percent cut — with the stated intent to eliminate the programs entirely. The IIJA authorization expires in September 2026. And $2.3 billion has already been rescinded from infrastructure funding.

We’re not maintaining the pipes. We’re not replacing the pipes. We’re defunding the programs that were supposed to do both.

Water contamination doesn’t happen randomly. It follows fault lines of race, class, and political power. Tribal nations, rural communities, and low-income urban neighborhoods bear the weight. That’s not an accident. It’s an outcome of who gets to decide where the money goes and whose complaints get heard.

What This Looks Like in Oklahoma

Daniel is not one person. He is a pattern. He lives outside Kingfisher, in central Oklahoma, where his family has run cattle for three generations. The well water turned bad two years ago — started smelling like sulfur, then worse. A ProPublica investigation found that toxic wastewater from oil and gas operations had been pouring out of the ground near his property for months, killing crops and trees, while Oklahoma regulators failed to stop it.

Daniel’s family connected to a rural water system as a stopgap. The groundwater pollution isn’t fixed. It may never be.

Oklahoma has the nation’s second-highest number of orphan wells — abandoned oil and gas wells that nobody maintains. The state has catalogued about 20,000 of them. Federal researchers estimate the true number may exceed 300,000. Each unplugged well is a pathway for injected wastewater to contaminate the aquifers that rural Oklahomans depend on for drinking water.

The state’s drinking water infrastructure needs $6.9 billion in investment. Four hundred and forty-nine dams are rated high-hazard potential. And for the 38 Tribal Nations in Oklahoma, the situation is worse: in May 2025, the EPA revoked a requirement that states consult with tribes before receiving EPA approval of environmental authority in Indian Country. The safeguard was in place for five months before it was removed.

Meanwhile, the EPA finalized the first-ever federal limits on PFAS in drinking water in April 2024 — a genuine step forward. Then in May 2025, the agency announced it would keep limits for two compounds but rescind regulations for four others and extend compliance deadlines from 2029 to 2031. A partial rollback of rules that weren’t yet enforced. Nearly 10,000 PFAS-contaminated sites have been identified across all 50 states.

What This Does to a Person

Here’s what connects Daniel’s poisoned well, the children in Flint, the families in Jackson paying more for water they still can’t fully trust, and the 176 million Americans drinking PFAS.

When you can’t trust your water, it poisons more than your body. It poisons your relationship with the system that was supposed to protect you. It’s the most fundamental breach of the social contract there is — more basic than healthcare, more basic than housing, more basic than anything else in this framework. Because water is the thing you need before you need anything else.

And when the system breaks this promise, the cascading damage is immediate. Contaminated water drives healthcare costs — lead exposure alone costs the U.S. an estimated $80 billion annually in lifetime earnings lost to cognitive damage. Water contamination makes housing worthless — ask anyone in Flint what happened to their property values. And communities without clean water can’t attract businesses, can’t retain families, can’t sustain the tax base that funds everything else.

The connection to sustainable energy is direct: fossil fuel extraction is one of the primary sources of water contamination in states like Oklahoma, where the choice between energy production and clean water has been decided — repeatedly — in favor of the companies doing the extracting. That’s not a trade-off. That’s a hierarchy, and the people drinking the water are at the bottom of it.

You can’t build the scaffolding for hope when what comes out of your tap might be hurting your kids. That’s not anxiety. That’s a rational response to a real threat that your government has decided isn’t worth the money to fix.

What We’re Building

Foundation frames clean water as non-negotiable public infrastructure — funded like defense, monitored with the best technology available, and governed transparently. Not a service you purchase from a company whose shareholders need the stock price to go up. Not a system that runs on deferred maintenance until a city makes the news.

The technology to do this well already exists. AI-monitored water networks can detect contamination in real time, predict pipe failures before they happen, and alert communities immediately when something goes wrong. Smart sensors can track water quality at every point in the distribution system, not just at the treatment plant. Machine learning can identify contamination patterns that human monitoring misses — catching problems in hours instead of the years it took in Flint.

But the privatization trend is moving in the opposite direction. American Water and Essential Utilities are merging into a company that would serve 20 million people across 17 states. A dozen states have passed “fair market value” laws that make it easier to sell public water systems to private companies. Seventy-three million Americans already rely on private companies for water and wastewater. When Gloucester Township, New Jersey, put a privatization proposal to a vote, 81 percent of residents rejected it. The public understands what the politicians apparently don’t: water is a public trust, not a revenue stream.

The same principle applies here that applies to healthcare and housing: no for-profit motive belongs in civic infrastructure. The people who manage your water shouldn’t have shareholders.

What We Need From You

Those who say we can’t afford water infrastructure are telling you that your children’s health is less important than the budget line. The $625 billion the EPA says we need over 20 years is roughly what the Department of Defense spends in nine months. This is not a resource problem. It is a priorities problem. And priorities can change.

We have a framework. We don’t have all the answers — and that’s deliberate. Here are directions we think matter. Push back on them, extend them, or bring your own:

• AI-monitored water networks as public infrastructure. Real-time contamination detection, predictive pipe failure analysis, and immediate public alerts — deployed in every water system, governed transparently, with data published openly. The technology exists. What’s missing is the mandate to use it and the funding to deploy it. What would real-time water quality data, available to every resident, change in your community?

• Complete the lead pipe map — then replace every one. Nine million homes still get water through lead pipes. Twenty-four million more service lines are “unknown material” — we literally don’t know what’s in the ground. AI can accelerate the mapping. Federal funding can pay for the replacement. The IIJA allocated $30 billion for this. Whether that money survives the current budget cycle is the question. What’s the status of your city’s lead pipe inventory?

• Block water privatization and restore public control. When 81 percent of voters in a New Jersey township reject selling their water system, they’re telling you something. Water is a public trust. The trend toward privatization — enabled by state legislation designed to make sales easier — needs to be reversed, not accelerated. What does water governance look like in your community? Who makes the decisions? Who profits?

What’s in your water right now? Do you know? If you don’t, that’s the first problem. If you do and nobody’s fixing it, that’s the second.

This is citizen-developed work. This is one of sixteen components. Explore the full framework →

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