NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Whalen Wong, and I am joined today by Alex Hager of

member station KUNC in Colorado. Welcome to the show, Alex. Hey, Waylon. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you. So there has been a lot of confusion lately over how one of our most

precious resources, water, can be moved from regions in the U.S. that have lots of it to places

that don't. A recent example of that confusion came up after the deadly fires in Los Angeles.

President Trump claimed that the U.S. military went to California and, quote, turned on the water

flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest and beyond, end quote. White House press secretary

Caroline Levitt repeated that claim to reporters last week. Water has been turned back on in California.

And this comes just days after President Trump visited Pacific Palisades.

And as you all saw, applied tremendous pressure to turn on the water and to direct that water to places in the south and in the middle of the state.

In fact, there was no spigot to turn on that could direct water to the Los Angeles region in this way.

Moving water around is complicated.

Still, that hasn't stopped people, including the president, from wondering, if we have a lot of water elsewhere,

why don't we just move it to somewhere that needs it more?

That question comes up a lot in California and in the arid west as a whole. I know you know all about this,

Alex, since you cover water infrastructure. Yeah, I get this question more than anything else. A lot of

people say, look, we've got a lot of water in the eastern U.S. Why don't we just pipe it to the west?

You know, share the wealth a little bit.

Today on the show, we're talking water infrastructure

and that tantalizingly simple proposal of piping water from one region to another.

In this case, from the east to the west.

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