Once far larger than Delaware at about 2,300 square miles, the Great Salt Lake near Salt Lake City has shrunk dramatically. Years of heavy water use, worsening winters and declining snowpack have left vast areas of exposed lakebed and a fragile ecosystem in peril. The lake’s collapse has been called Utah’s “environmental nuclear bomb,” and it has attracted presidential attention.
The lake’s decline threatens public health, the region’s economy and biodiversity. Exposed playa contains dust with heavy metals and toxins like arsenic that can become airborne during winds, posing respiratory risks to roughly 2.5 million people in Utah and neighboring states. The lake supports global brine-shrimp supplies used for aquaculture feed, is a stopover for millions of migratory birds and is the source of minerals such as lithium and magnesium. Its waters also supply salt used in fertilizer production.
Great Salt Lake’s inflows come mostly from mountain snowpack. In dry years—2026 was Utah’s worst snowfall on record—the tributary rivers that feed the lake are often diverted for other uses before reaching it. Restoring the lake will require sending substantially more water to it than currently arrives. Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and director of the advocacy group Grow the Flow, estimates the lake needs roughly 500,000 to 800,000 acre-feet per year to stop decline; restoring it to former size could require about one million acre-feet annually. Achieving that would demand bold, adaptive approaches and major investment.
The push for federal help culminated in a February White House meeting between Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox and President Trump. Cox was invited to meet by the White House on the margins of a governors’ conference; he brought the lake as one of Utah’s top issues. Joel Ferry, executive director of Utah’s Division of Natural Resources, said he helped Cox prepare but that the governor was already well versed in the stakes. What had once been water is now more than a thousand square miles of dry lakebed, and Cox presented the health, environmental and economic risks to the president.
The meeting came about in part because of Mark Burnett, the former TV producer and a Trump associate who serves as a U.K. special envoy and sits on Grow the Flow’s board. Burnett and others had been discussing the need for federal coordination and helped elevate the issue within Trump’s circle. Cox’s hour-and-a-half meeting—far longer than the scheduled 15 minutes—ended with a verbal commitment from Trump to back a major effort to save the lake. Trump has mentioned the lake several times on social media, framing the restoration as a signature achievement only he can deliver.
To make the rescue possible, Utah officials asked for $1 billion in federal funds to help secure and redirect water to the lake and support restoration projects. Cox said Trump “didn’t flinch” at the amount. In the president’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget, the administration included the full $1 billion request for the Great Salt Lake, even as the budget seeks cuts in many other areas. Ultimately, Congress will decide whether to approve the funding.
State leaders say federal partnership is essential. Utah has been working on lake-rescue strategies for years but acknowledged it cannot tackle the scale of the problem alone. If successful, rescuing a terminal saline lake like the Great Salt Lake could be a global first, Abbott said—an unprecedented restoration of a large, landlocked, highly saline lake.