Congress Has a Responsibility to Reverse the Water Crisis It Caused in Puerto Rico
Federal neglect—and restrictive aid conditions—have broken the infrastructure meant to sustain human life in the Caribbean U.S. colony.
Coenia Sanchez
The air in Puerto Rico is thick with the vibrant, unmistakable rhythm of life. Parrots cut bright streaks across the sky from roof to roof, and iguanas bask lazily on the grass. But the more telling sounds of daily life are the water trucks lumbering through neighborhoods — or the hollow, dry hiss of household pipes when the taps give out yet again.
Nearly nine years after Hurricane Maria tore through the island, a dangerous myth persists: that Puerto Rico’s ongoing humanitarian crisis is a failure of local resilience or an unavoidable consequence of climate change. This is a lie.
What the island is suffering from is not a lack of fortitude, but a manufactured financial chokehold. While Congress has technically allocated over $42.5 billion in disaster relief to the island, the federal government’s bureaucratic neglect — and restrictive conditions — have actively broken the infrastructure meant to sustain human life.
A calculated bureaucratic trap
There is a vast gulf between money being promised on a spreadsheet and cash actually hitting the ground in Puerto Rico. According to data from Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Reconstruction, Recovery, and Resiliency, of the $42.6 billion allocated across all recovery programs, only roughly $13.1 billion has actually been disbursed.
This stalling isn’t accidental — it’s driven by unprecedented federal oversight mechanisms that treat Puerto Rico with a level of suspicion not applied to the U.S. states. Chief among these is the strict requirement that local agencies secure pre-approval for minor project adjustments, creating a multi-layered review process where simple administrative decisions can stall for years.
The bottleneck is even tighter where it matters most: the utilities sustaining society.
Of the $11.1 billion FEMA obligated to completely overhaul the island’s brittle electrical grid, less than 25% has been distributed. The rest remains trapped thanks to a calculated bureaucratic trap: FEMA requires Puerto Rico to pay for massive infrastructure project costs up front and seek reimbursement later.
For a government already forced into a historic bankruptcy and stripped of its borrowing power, this pay-first-reimburse-later model is a mathematical impossibility. Furthermore, under restrictive agreements unique to the island, FEMA maintains the power to revoke previously approved reimbursement claims, forcing local municipalities to take on massive financial risks just to clear debris or repair a substation.
Yet because the island is locked in a fiscal vise by a federally imposed oversight board created by Congress in 2016 under PROMESA (the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act)—an extensive law that stripped the territory of its financial autonomy to restructure its historic debt — it lacks the liquidity to start. This unelected board strictly controls the island’s treasury, meaning local agencies are legally barred from shifting public funds to pay for these multi-million-dollar projects upfront.
In the years these billions have sat trapped in federal vaults, compounding inflation has quietly hollowed out their purchasing power. Federal auditors at the Government Accountability Office have warned that because FEMA locked Puerto Rico into rigid, fixed-price estimates under its unique “Section 428” rules, skyrocketing post-pandemic construction and material costs are triggering multi-million-dollar deficits, leaving local agencies with a massive, unfunded gap to rebuild the exact same broken infrastructure.
Poisoned by scarcity
While the world frequently reads about Puerto Rico’s blackouts, the quiet collapse of the water system has pushed the island to its absolute limit. According to the federal oversight board’s official fiscal plan, the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) currently loses up to 65% of its clean, treated drinking water to leaks and pipe ruptures while the funds to modernize the grid remain locked behind red tape.
As a result, some communities have gone months without running water, affecting their daily life and routines and forcing the governor to activate the National Guard to distribute potable water.
This systemic neglect has sparked massive, coordinated resistance: thousands of Puerto Ricans recently flooded the streets of Old San Juan, marching to the steps of the Capitol and the governor’s mansion demanding administrative accountability. Even local leaders have run out of patience, with the mayor of San Juan taking the extraordinary step of filing a lawsuit against the island’s own Water and Sewer Authority over its persistent failure to maintain the grid.
Even the areas considered “lucky” are being poisoned by the scarcity. In my own family’s community of Aguadilla, the water system operates using stored reserves and electricity, meaning we usually maintain a steady water supply. But when neighboring towns go weeks without a single drop, they are forced to rely on Aguadilla as an emergency “oasis.”
This survival mechanism has turned neighbor against neighbor. As adjacent municipalities drain Aguadilla’s reserve tanks and trigger local shortages, our community members go to City Hall to file complaints and stage protests. Scarcity breeds division, and President Trump’s red tape is actively pitting Puerto Rican communities against one another.
How to fix a bipartisan moral failure
The human toll of this engineered collapse is devastating, and the social fabric is fraying. Fed up with lack of water service, countless Puerto Ricans are giving up, fueling a bitter wave of emigration to mainland states like Florida, Virginia and Texas.
The millions of Puerto Ricans living in the stateside diaspora, concentrated in critical electoral swing states, must recognize this as a defining issue in political advocacy. Our families on the island are being systematically treated as second-class citizens, denied the basic human right to clean, consistent water and power.
To congressional policymakers, this must be treated as a bipartisan moral failure. Viewing Puerto Rico as a debtor to be disciplined rather than an American territory requiring urgent humanitarian support is a betrayal of the nation’s core duties.
Change requires immediate, targeted policy shifts.
First, FEMA must streamline its disbursal process, eliminating redundant administrative hurdles that force projects backward into endless design phases rather than moving them into construction. Second, the PROMESA oversight board must be legally mandated to prioritize basic human rights (like running water and electricity) over squeezing the island’s budget to pay off legacy creditors. Finally, the U.S. government must grant Puerto Rico the same matching fund waivers and immediate grid-rebuilding urgency it grants mainland states like Florida or Texas after a disaster.
If the federal government continues to constrain the island’s finances artificially, it is inherently constraining its future. Puerto Rico does not need any more sympathetic press releases or thoughts and prayers. It needs proper care and for its funding to be unlocked.
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Coenia Sanchez is a Henry A. Wallace Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
