Amid 18 months of federal retreat and punctuated hostility to local priorities, one San Diego problem has managed to draw Washington in.
Since his first visit in April 2025, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has returned to the region repeatedly to press what he calls a “100% solution” to the Tijuana River sewage crisis. In July 2025, Zeldin signed a memorandum of understanding with Mexico’s environment secretary. Last December the two governments enacted a binational agreement known as Minute 333, and work is now underway to expand the South Bay treatment plant and install river gates meant to keep millions of gallons of sewage out of the valley.
Set against everything else the region has absorbed from Washington over the past 18 months—including slowed funding to local research institutions, cuts in Medi-Cal and nutrition support for county residents, threats to homelessness dollars, and a mass deportation campaign targeting the region’s so-called “sanctuary cities”—constructive federal engagement in the Tijuana River Valley stands out.
How has cooperation in this area progressed where so much else has been a fight?
Machinery that Worked
To be sure, the cleanup effort has offered Trump administration officials appealing opportunities to hold their Mexican counterparts’ feet to the fire, and pressure our southern neighbors to deliver long-delayed investments.
But behind the bluster lies the slow and steady machinery of public policy. Local officials in the South Bay, including former Imperial Beach mayors Serge Dedina and Paloma Aguirre, and countless other advocates and community representatives, spent years documenting the problem and demanding action. Along the way, local leaders gained support from San Diego’s local Congressional delegation, which garnered a $650 million federal commitment to the region for wastewater treatment. The state of California followed with a $46 million commitment for border water quality projects as part of 2024’s $10 billion Proposition 4 climate bond. The work is managed through the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which possesses critical authorities and binational channels for addressing the crisis.
The road to a 100 percent solution remains a long one, and will require continued federal and international pressure to be successful. Nevertheless, the example shows how a well-defined local priority can travel up the federalism food chain and produce meaningful results, even from an administration that has spent most of its energy taking things away.
The challenge is that San Diego too rarely presents itself in this way.
A Region in Reactive Mode
The pattern since the start of the second Trump administration and 119th Congress in January 2025 has been consistent: Washington acts, and San Diego responds. NIH slows its grantmaking, research institutions brace, and philanthropy moves to compensate. A budget bill reshapes Medi-Cal and CalFresh, and the county begins counting who will lose benefits and devising revenue responses. The feds withhold money for after-school programs and English-learner instruction, and local districts scramble to keep summer and fall programming alive. Each response has been serious and often skilled, yet almost all of them have been defensive.
The Tijuana River Valley cleanup represents a relatively straightforward opportunity for coordination. Everyone agrees sewage in the river is bad. Each level of government sees its interests at play. The goal is to restore a healthy status quo, not to choose among competing visions of the region’s future. In the face of such a clear and shared problem, San Diego has methodically organized itself and managed to move Washington accordingly.
The harder question is whether the region can coordinate in the absence of a clear emergency, and when the goal is not immediate cleanup but long-term prosperity.
Toward Setting the Agenda
For most of the modern era, San Diego’s relationship with Washington has been characterized by mutual benefit. From the stationing of the Pacific Fleet, to increasing support for biomedical research, to liberalizing trade with Mexico, to expanding the safety net, federal policies have buoyed San Diego, and San Diego has delivered for the nation and the world.
The past 18 months, however, have transformed federal policy from a source of growth and stability, into a source of volatility for the region. With partisan warfare in Washington showing few signs of abating, this may be the new normal. And a region that only reacts to that volatility will always remain a step behind.
The alternative is for San Diego to agree on its own priorities and press them up the chain, in Sacramento as much as in Washington. San Diego has not only the raw materials for this approach—a large, professional public sector; strong college and university leaders; world-leading businesses; and innovative philanthropies and nonprofits—but also a track record of delivering on big ideas. That’s how UC San Diego landed here in the 1960s, how the region’s defense sector emerged from post-Cold War retrenchment stronger and more innovative, and how a revitalized downtown and Petco Park took shape in the 1990s and 2000s.
Consider a few opportunities now at hand.
The housing challenge: As I wrote in March, the region’s affordability crunch is a problem nearly everyone here agrees on, with 56 percent of renters cost-burdened and most local jurisdictions falling short of their state housing targets. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which became law in July, hands regions new tools to expand supply: competitive grants to modernize zoning and planning, streamlined federal environmental review, and new room for single-stair and factory-built homes. Walking through the door Washington has opened will reward regions that show up with a plan their local governments have agreed upon. San Diego is already demonstrating leadership in this realm, but could now seize the opportunity to speak with a more unified regional voice and strategy.
Health sciences leadership: As Washington pulls back, Sacramento is considering stepping in. State lawmakers have advanced a $12 billion research bond meant to backstop the biomedical research that federal NIH cuts now threaten. A region clear about its priorities can help shape where and how dollars like these land, while a fragmented one waits to learn the terms and lives with the outcomes.
Energy abundance. San Diego has quietly become one of the country’s leading centers of energy innovation. General Atomics operates the largest magnetic-fusion research facility in the nation for the Department of Energy, and is now designing a first-of-its-kind testbed in San Diego with federal seed money. The San Diego Regional EDC reported last fall that California’s emerging fusion industry alone could support some 43,000 jobs over the next decade. And affordable, reliable, clean power is a gateway to high-performance computing, biomanufacturing, advanced medical devices, and other industries that both the region and the nation hope to grow.
Playing Offense and Defense
There will inevitably be limits to how much San Diego can bend Washington toward its desires over the next few months, years, or perhaps decades. Smart, adaptive defense is table stakes. But the Tijuana River crisis shows that this region can also define a goal, align actors, and begin to move even a reluctant federal partner. It’s doing so under the pressure of a crisis no one can ignore. The open question is whether San Diego can summon the same coordination for the future it wants to build. Until it does, San Diego will keep meeting Washington on Washington’s terms, one shock at a time.
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