Sewage progress welcome — but will it survive Trump-Newsom feud?

For more than six years, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has made the point over and over that the slow-motion federal response to the massive amounts of untreated sewage from Tijuana constantly fouling local beaches was absolutely unacceptable. We repeatedly noted that replacing and improving broken, decrepit sewage infrastructure on both sides of the border was not a daunting engineering challenge but a leadership challenge — one that Donald Trump didn’t meet in his first term as president and Joe Biden didn’t meet in his four years in the White House.

Now the second Trump administration has shown decisive action can pay off. The agreement announced Monday by U.S. and Mexican officials builds on rapid progress already made on the U.S. side of the border: the 40% increase in sewage treatment capacity at the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, going from 25 million to 35 million gallons a day.

The most promising initiative was the creation of a binational working group that’s been given three months to come up with recommendations on how to upgrade the San Antonio de los Buenos Wastewater Treatment Plant, potentially expanding the plant’s capacity from 18.26 million gallons to 43.37 million gallons per day.

More concretely, Mexico also agreed to construct a sediment basin at Smuggler’s Gulch near the international boundary before the 2026-27 rainy season, reducing the sediment reaching South Bay shores, and to build the Tecolote-La Gloria Wastewater Treatment Plant by December 2028, which will have a capacity of 3 million gallons per day.

All improvements south of the border will be paid for solely by Mexico, EPA officials said.

While it’s heartening to see progress after an era in which then-California Sen. Dianne Feinstein lectured critics of the awful federal response for not appreciating that this was just how things worked in Washington, there is a very big reason to worry about follow-through by the Trump administration: our mercurial president. A report in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times outlined how $8 billion in White House cuts in previously approved federal clean energy grants were all in 16 states that voted against Trump in 2024, with California taking the biggest hit of all at $2.1 billion. The administration also has abandoned a Biden White House commitment to provide $1.2 billion in funding for the state’s hydrogen energy hub.

What’s next? If his feud with California Gov. Gavin Newsom keeps escalating, will Trump lash out by directing the EPA to back off its attempts to help with San Diego’s sewage crisis?

In July, when a U-T editorial raised the possibility that the White House would try to “claw back” some of the unspent federal funds committed to sewage repairs, Coronado Mayor John Duncan, a Republican, called this “bizarre.” If he still thinks so now after the White House “clawed back” $2.1 billion in grants to California, it’s hard to understand his confidence that Trump will treat our state with good faith.