Support Incresed Funding for the National Water Quality Assessment Program
The NAWQA program was created by Congress in 1991 to give credible, scientific information to policy makers about the condition of streams and ground water nationwide, to assess trends over time, and to determine the causes of water contamination and the impacts of reduced water quality on human and ecological health. It is the only program that provides this critical decision-making information. Federal, state, and local governments and our own organizations and members use NAWQA’s data and assessments to inform scientifically sound water protection and management decisions. NAWQA also provides the water quality information necessary for assessing water availability now and in the future and for understanding the impacts of climate change.
Some of NAWQA’s accomplishments include:
- Identifying nitrogen and phosphorous loadings in the Mississippi River Basin, which provide policy-makers information to better control nutrients that contribute to hypoxia.
- Identifying MTBE in groundwater and determining its sources, which led to a Congressional ban on the compound as a gasoline additive.
- Detecting certain “emerging contaminants” present in bodies of water, some of which serve as the source of drinking water supplies. Some contaminants identified through NAWQA include pharmaceuticals, hormone disrupters, and potentially toxic chemicals used in many household products.
For over a decade Presidential budget proposals and Congressional appropriations for NAWQA have not kept pace with inflation. Without inflationary adjustments over time,
NAWQA’s scope of work has been significantly curtailed. The number of stream sites monitored has been reduced from 500, during its first ten years, to only 113 over the entire country since 2001. At even these 113 sites, only 12 are monitored every year, 15 are monitored every other year, and the remaining 86 are monitored only every 4 years. Sediments in fish tissue are no longer sampled at all, so that data on levels of trace elements, pesticides, and other organic chemicals, like PAHs, in aquatic life are missing. All work in Alaska and Hawaii has stopped.
The Clean Water Network supports increasing funding for a critically important part of the Nation’s effort to protect our water resources —the National Water Quality Assessment program (NAWQA) of the U.S. Geological Survey.
To begin to bring the NAWQA program back to its capacity, we request that at least $70 million in the FY 2010 budget. This increase would allow all 113 sites to be monitored every year to better assess water-quality trends during this period of rapidly changing climate and chemical use. It would start the process of restoring the program and realizing the potential Congress envisioned for it. NAWQA’s accomplishments and the reputation it enjoys among the many agencies, businesses, and organizations that use its information demonstrate the worthiness of its funding.