What government function do we rely upon multiple times every day from the moment we wake up until you hit the sack? What monopoly do we depend upon daily to provide an absolute necessity of life? For more than 300 million people in the United States, the answer is our drinking water utility. Every time we brush our teeth, grab a glass of water, use the toilet, take a shower, make coffee, cook, and wash, we rely upon our water system. Few ever give it a second thought.
But is that water always safe, and is it being checked and effectively protected by regulators?
The short answer is, not really. Fifty years ago today—December 16, 1974—Republican President Gerald Ford signed the bipartisan Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) with fanfare, promising an end to a national tap water contamination epidemic.
Certainly, as recently summarized in a piece in the Environmental Law Forum, progress has been made since. The frequency of waterborne disease outbreaks and some severe chemical contamination incidents having been reduced. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued standards for about 100 contaminants, including recently strengthening the requirements to control lead and new rules for six toxic “forever chemicals.” The EPA also substantially reduced the allowable level of arsenic in tap water in 2001, preventing thousands of cancers (though the National Academy of Sciences later found that arsenic at the current standard still presents a cancer risk far exceeding EPA’s acceptable level). And billions of dollars have been provided to water utilities under the SDWA’s State Revolving Fund, which have helped many communities.
Yet the water crises in Flint, Michigan, Newark, New Jersey, Jackson, Mississippi, and many other communities across the nation in recent years have highlighted that drinking water crises continue to erupt, decades after the law passed. Lead, arsenic and toxic PFAS “forever chemical” contamination remain rampant; hundreds of serious drinking water contamination incidents plague communities in every state and on Tribal lands.
Why isn’t our tap water safer than it is, 50 years later?
It’s not that we lack the technology to clean up our drinking water. That’s already available off the shelf. It’s not because the public doesn’t care. Gallup’s tracking polls consistently find that drinking water contamination is the no. 1 environmental worry for Americans; Gallup found in 2024 that a majority “worry a great deal about the pollution of drinking water in the U.S., which remains their top environmental concern.”
And it’s not that the costs of better tap water protections are excessive or overshadow the benefits to our health. Analyses by the EPA and independent experts show that the benefits of reducing tap water contamination—including lives saved, improved health, and sheer economic payback—outweigh the costs, often by many fold. For example, a recent Harvard study found the health and economic benefits of reducing lead contamination of drinking water exceed the costs by 35 to 51 times.
Oddly enough, the group most opposed to stronger water protections are water utilities and their trade associations. And in the rare cases lobbying Congress to weaken the Safe Drinking Water Act to make standards harder to issue hasn’t worked, the utility trade groups have repeatedly sued to block rules meant to make water safer. Over the past three decades, the American Water Works Association (AWWA) has sued to block drinking water standards for lead, PFAS, perchlorate, all of which are toxic chemicals that contaminate the water for millions of people. Just last Friday, December 13—50 years almost to the day after the Safe Drinking Water Act was enacted—AWWA sued to block the EPA’s new lead in drinking water rule improvements. Filing a lawsuit to keep lead in drinking water is deplorable. Who supports lead-contaminated drinking water? No one.
Even more troubling is the lack of transparency provided by water utilities about whether your water is safe. Thousands of water utilities often violate drinking water standards for tens of millions of Americans, disproportionately low-income communities and communities of color.
And unfortunately, when all else fails and water systems violate EPA standards, they generally avoid meaningful enforcement. Indeed, our analysis found that about 9 out of 10 drinking water violations, ranging from failures to test the water for contamination to exceeding contamination standards, face no formal state or federal enforcement, and 97 percent of violations face no monetary or other penalties.
What is the answer to achieving safe drinking water in the next half century?
- Hold water utilities accountable for their behavior. We should prohibit them from using their customers’ funds to lobby and litigate against more health-protective standards, and ban them from making false or misleading claims to customers about their water.
- Strengthen the Safe Drinking Water Act. The law should require the EPA to regulate contaminants that are showing up in our tap water; streamline the standard setting process so it doesn’t take decades to protect the public; improve right to know requirements; and toughen the citizen and EPA enforcement tools. We also need to strengthen the law to be sure kids’ water in schools and childcares is safe.
- Provide greater funding and authority to the EPA to control source water contamination. Congress and the states need to provide more funding to help communities upgrade their water infrastructure—especially disadvantaged communities that for too long have been left behind.
- Enforce the law protecting safe drinking water. Nearly 80 percent of violations of basic health standards faced no formal enforcement. That must change.
- Make drinking water affordable. Utilities and states should adopt water affordability measures, as outlined in our water affordability toolkit, while Congress should enact a permanent low-income household water assistance program, akin to the long-standing LIHEAP program that helps low-income people pay their heating bills.
With these and other important reforms, we should all be able to turn on our kitchen taps and finally feel confident that our water is safe.
