The program, called the Real Water Technical Assistance (RealWaterTA) initiative, rescinds a Biden-era memorandum that the Trump administration criticized for prioritizing storytelling and climate change mitigation projects rather than practical water infrastructure updates that could be more applicable to rural communities.
Rural water experts say the Trump-era changes are a welcome revision to the previous iteration of the program. “It’s not that those programs were not well thought out or didn’t have good intentions, but they moved away from compliance,” said Charles Stephens, senior executive policy director at the National Rural Water Association, which is a trade group with 50 state associations under its umbrella.
“A lot of [rural] communities don’t need big, expensive projects; they need help making what they already have work better, or help getting into compliance with [federal] regulations,” Stephens told The Daily Yonder.
RealWaterTA will connect rural communities with experts like those at the National Rural Water Association to help them repair water utilities or help them apply for loans and grants through USDA’s Rural Development. While the program itself will not provide money for these efforts, Stephens said it will act as an “extra pair of hands” for rural communities that lack the staffing cities often have.
“If somebody’s having a problem, they call us (we’re already being paid through EPA), so there’s no charge to the community,” Stephens said. “And then we can go in and do the full gamut.”
The full gamut usually relates to three major drinking water problems Stephens sees rural communities face. The first issue is getting rural water utilities into compliance with new EPA regulations, like maximum contaminant levels for dangerous chemicals.
“In a small community, they may have one to five employees running the entire utility, and so every time there’s a new regulation or new rule, that just stretches them further,” Stephens said.
The second issue is aging infrastructure, which can be more challenging for rural communities with smaller budgets and more obstacles to get federal funding. A long history of federal disinvestment ails rural America, leaving critical systems like water utilities without the proper maintenance funds.
As a 2025 report from the Brookings Institute put it, “Competitive infrastructure grant and loan programs also generally require highly complex technical applications with specialized engineering requirements — and such technical expertise and assistance is both costly and difficult to find in rural communities.”
That expertise is the third issue Stephens worries about: Many rural water operators are in their 50s and 60s, which means they will soon be eligible for retirement. But there are not enough trained staff in rural areas to replace these operators, which could lead to big problems in the future for the management of rural water utilities.
“More than 60% are going to be eligible to retire in the next 10 years, so [the National Rural Water Association] is taking a lot of steps to try to recruit and train the next group of water operators,” Stephens said.
The RealWaterTA initiative is meant to address some of these issues. The 2026 memorandum highlighted eight goals: helping rural water utilities maintain compliance, focusing on both traditional and innovative water infrastructure, defining what technical assistance entails, strengthening management, empowering the rural water workforce, expanding access to financial assistance, reducing costs, and defining clear objectives for the program.
Eligible communities can apply for technical assistance.
This story was produced by The Daily Yonder and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.