One in three tribal homes in northeastern Arizona has no running water — the federal line that lays the pipe faces an 87 percent cut

What is happening?

Across tribal communities in northeastern Arizona, one in three homes does not have running water. More than 10,000 homes on Southwestern Indian reservations lack it entirely, in a region where the tribes hold substantial water rights on paper. The channel that actually lays household pipe there is not a utility but a construction program inside a health agency — the Sanitation Facilities Construction Program of the Indian Health Service.

That program received USD 3.5 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, released as USD 700 million a year from fiscal 2022 through fiscal 2026. The fiscal 2026 tranche was announced on 2026-04-24, and under the schedule reported in 2024 it is the last one. Over its life the appropriation is expected to benefit more than 109,000 American Indian and Alaska Native households, and it funded more than 700 construction projects across all areas of the agency.

The FY 2027 budget request would raise the total Indian Health Service budget by USD 1.1 billion to USD 9.094 billion while cutting Sanitation Facilities Construction by 87 percent, to USD 14 million.

Whose problem is this?

The body that counts and ranks the need is not the body that funds it, and neither of them is the household hauling the water.

Where does this problem end?

The boundary matters because the deficiency is counted and ranked before it is ever funded. This is not a problem of nobody knowing where the unserved homes are.

What is the state now, and what should it be?

Now

The rows above are drawn from four different years, one row carries no date at all, and the newest national count of unserved homes is already two years old.

Needs a new measurementThe target state: none of the sources opened here states an official target for the share of American Indian and Alaska Native homes that should have piped water and wastewater service, nor a year by which the Sanitation Deficiency System inventory should reach zero. What the record holds instead is an annual appropriation and a ranked list.

How big is it?

The number of people living in these homes cannot be derived from the sources opened here, and the population file records that rather than a forced estimate.

Three counts exist and they do not share a base. Approximately 41,000 homes are reported to lack adequate sanitation facilities, of which more than 5,000 lack access to a safe water supply or waste disposal outright. Separately, the health agency projects that its infrastructure appropriation will ultimately benefit more than 109,000 households — a forecast about a funding program, not a census of unserved homes. Multiplying any of these by an average household size would need a figure that none of these sources supplies.

There is a second reason to refuse the multiplication. The database of eligible homes is documented as an undercount: roughly 100,000 homes in Oklahoma may be missing from it, because tribal homes in dispersed communities away from reservations are hard to identify, and the tracking data is described as not always accurate or validated. An estimate built on that base would carry an error whose size nobody has published.

Under what conditions does it arise?

1. Household water service arrives through a health agency, not a utility. For homes in these communities the pipe is laid by the Sanitation Facilities Construction Program, funded by annual appropriation and sequenced by a project database. Ordinary utility extension does not reach them, so a household with no project on the list has no second channel. 2. Counting is separated from funding. The Indian Health Service ranks projects in the Sanitation Deficiency System, and EPA draws from those same ranked lists to fund the wastewater share. The list documents need. It does not obligate money. 3. The one-time money has an end date. The infrastructure appropriation ran from fiscal 2022 through fiscal 2026 and the final tranche has already been announced. 4. Delivery capacity is itself short. A December 2024 inspection found that staffing shortages and heavy workloads limited the capacity to administer these projects, and that some area offices considered contracting out the engineering work less desirable because of higher costs and other limits. Money appropriated is not the same thing as pipe laid.

What has been tried?

Two directions were tried at once — lay more pipe with one-time money, and settle the water rights that would fill it. Neither has closed, and the first one runs out this year.

What was found?

The grades fall as the claim moves away from federal audit documents and toward material that carries no date.

Why is it still unsolved?

Supply disparity — most households in the country receive water through a utility that builds and maintains service as a matter of course, while these households receive it only if a federal construction program reaches their project on a ranked list in a year when that list is funded.

The two channels do not behave alike. When a utility serves a household, it extends the main and recovers the cost over decades through rates, and no annual vote stands between that household and the tap. A neighboring household of the same income in the same county, if it falls under this program instead, has no rate base behind it at all. It has an appropriation, and that appropriation has run below the ranked need for as long as the ranked need has been published. At the end of 2021 the list held 1,513 projects worth USD 3.4 billion in eligible costs. The largest injection in the history of the program, USD 3.5 billion spread over five years, is roughly the size of that single snapshot, and it expires in fiscal 2026.

What follows the expiry is the sharpest thing in the record. The FY 2027 request would raise the overall agency budget by USD 1.1 billion and reduce this specific line by 87 percent, to USD 14 million. The line that lays household pipe is not merely losing a contest for growth against other line items. It is being cut while the total rises.

There is a quieter reason as well. Because the deficit appears as a household hauling water rather than as a service interruption, nothing visibly fails when the list goes unfunded. A hospital that closes makes news. A home that never had a tap makes none. Both federal reviews of this program in 2024 and 2025 examined how projects are administered rather than how many homes are still waiting.

What observation would mean it is solved?

Candidates — (a) the count of American Indian and Alaska Native homes without piped water or wastewater service falling toward zero (b) the Sanitation Deficiency System inventory shrinking in both project count and dollars (c) the share of tribal households lacking indoor plumbing converging on the national share.

Each carries a trap. (a) can improve on paper if homes drop out of the eligibility database rather than gain service, and that database is already documented as an undercount. (b) falls whenever projects are struck for being infeasible, not only when they are built, and an 87 percent cut would also slow new projects entering the list. (c) rests on a comparison whose source page carries no date, so the baseline it converges toward is not fixed.

Read together, the three are informative. Read alone, each of them can improve while nothing at all changes inside the homes.

What is it connected to?

The relation type and the evidence grade for each of those links were not confirmed in this round.

Fills with researchlikely connections include Colorado River allocation, tribal housing supply, the overall budget of the health agency, and health outcomes tied to hauling water.

What these sources do not say

• The current dollar value of the ranked backlog. The only figure we could open is USD 3.4 billion across 1,513 projects as of 2021-12-31, in an audit work plan entry. No 2025 or 2026 restatement of the Sanitation Deficiency System total was reachable.
• How many homes the money actually connected. The fiscal 2025 announcement says the allocation serves more than 14,000 households and the program projects more than 109,000 over its life, but no source opened here reports completed connections measured against the count of unserved homes.
• What the national comparison rate is, and when it was measured. The figure of 19 times for indoor plumbing sits on a page with no date and no stated year for the underlying data.
• What replaces the infrastructure money after fiscal 2026. The FY 2027 request cuts the line by 87 percent. None of these sources describes a successor appropriation, a phase-down plan, or an estimate of how many homes would go unserved.
• Which homes are missing from the count. The tracking database is described as likely underestimating eligible homes, with roughly 100,000 in Oklahoma possibly absent, but no source quantifies the total undercount.
• The state of service in Alaska Native villages. Every figure for homes here is either national or Southwestern. Nothing opened separates Alaska, where the sanitation engineering problem is materially different.

See the evidence

We did not read any Indian Health Service document directly. The domain ihs.gov refused every connection attempted on 2026-08-07, so each agency figure here arrives through EPA, through the HHS Office of Inspector General, or through press citing the agency, and the row for the agency announcement is left with an empty URL.

One internal cross-check did hold, on labeled values in both documents. The EPA memorandum of 2025-05-30 splits the fiscal 2025 Clean Water Indian Set-Aside into USD 52,060,000 of infrastructure money for wastewater, USD 4,500,000 for emerging contaminants and USD 32,777,000 of base appropriation, and its own attachment carries a fiscal 2025 total row reading USD 56,560,000 of infrastructure money against USD 32,777,000 of base, summing to USD 89,337,000. The separate fiscal 2025 fact sheet repeats that total and carries a labeled data table beneath its chart in which the fiscal 2025 column reads USD 56,560,000 of infrastructure funding, USD 32,777,000 of appropriation and 67 projects funded. The two documents agree on every figure they share.

A second resemblance is weaker than it looks. DigDeep states that one in three Navajo households still needs a working tap and toilet, which is the same ratio the KJZZ interview reports for tribal communities in northeastern Arizona. The two are not counting the same population and the DigDeep page carries no date, so this is a resemblance rather than a confirmation.

Two of the items above are not independent of each other — the WLRN piece carries the byline of the same KJZZ reporter, so the figure of more than 10,000 homes rests on a single newsroom. The counts of 41,000 and 5,000 homes date from 2024-08 and no newer national count was found in this round.

People affected

Estimated range Not derivable

The reason and what is missing are listed under “What is missing” below