The Great Salt Lake, once roughly 2,300 square miles—larger than the state of Delaware—has shrunk dramatically in recent decades. Heavy water use, repeated dry winters and declining mountain snowpack have left broad stretches of exposed lakebed, imperiling a fragile regional ecosystem and prompting comparisons to an “environmental nuclear bomb.” The crisis has also drawn attention at the highest levels of government.
The lake’s collapse carries three linked risks: public health, economy and biodiversity. The exposed playa contains dust that can carry heavy metals and toxins such as arsenic; when winds lift that dust, it poses respiratory hazards to roughly 2.5 million people across Utah and neighboring states. The lake is also an economic and ecological hub: it sustains global supplies of brine shrimp used in aquaculture feed, serves as a critical stopover for millions of migratory birds, and is the source of industrial minerals including lithium and magnesium, as well as salt used in fertilizer production.
Most of the lake’s inflow comes from mountain snowpack. Dry years—2026 was Utah’s worst snowfall on record—mean the rivers that feed the lake are often tapped for agriculture, municipal and industrial uses before they ever reach the basin. Restoring the lake therefore requires sending substantially more water to it than currently arrives. Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and director of advocacy group Grow the Flow, estimates the lake needs roughly 500,000 to 800,000 acre-feet a year to halt its decline; returning it to its former size could require about one million acre-feet annually. Meeting those needs will demand large-scale, adaptive strategies and significant funding.
That reality helped bring the issue to the White House. In February, Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox met with President Trump during a governors’ conference and put the Great Salt Lake near the top of his agenda. Joel Ferry, executive director of Utah’s Division of Natural Resources, helped prepare Cox for the meeting, which lasted about an hour and a half—far longer than the 15 minutes scheduled—and focused on the health, environmental and economic stakes as much of the lakebed has turned to dry salt flats.
The meeting’s visibility was boosted in part by Mark Burnett, the former television producer who is a Trump associate, serves as a U.K. special envoy and sits on Grow the Flow’s board. Burnett and other advocates had been pressing for federal coordination and helped raise the lake’s profile inside Trump’s circle. After the meeting, Trump gave a verbal commitment to back a major effort to save the lake and has referenced the project on social media, framing it as a signature achievement he could deliver.
Utah officials have asked for $1 billion in federal funding to secure and redirect water, carry out restoration projects and support the broad effort to stabilize and rebuild the lake. Cox said the president did not flinch at the sum. The administration included the full $1 billion request in the president’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget even as it seeks cuts elsewhere, but Congress will make the final funding decision.
State leaders say federal partnership is essential. Utah has been developing lake-rescue plans for years but acknowledges the scale of the problem exceeds state resources. If successful, rescuing a terminal saline lake on this scale would be unprecedented, Abbott says—a potential global first for restoring a large, landlocked, highly saline lake. Achieving that outcome will require bold policy choices, cross-jurisdictional cooperation and major investment.