Two Detroit-area members of Congress reintroduced a bill this week that would create the first permanent federal water assistance program in U.S. history, modeled directly on a home energy benefit that’s been on the books since 1981.
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Detroit and U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell of Ann Arbor dropped the Water Access and Affordability Act again, pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to build and run a low-income water aid program from scratch. Under the bill’s terms, the EPA administrator would have one year after enactment to get it operational.
They tried this before. Tlaib and Dingell introduced the same bill in 2024. It didn’t pass. They’re back.
“Our families can’t live without access to water,” Tlaib said. “We have a federal program for electricity and gas, but no permanent program for water. Millions of our neighbors across our country are having their water shut off simply because they cannot afford the rising bills.”
That federal program she’s referencing is LIHEAP, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. It’s been helping low-income households with heating and cooling bills since 1981. Water has never had anything like it. That gap is what Tlaib and Dingell are trying to close, and they’re not wrong that it exists.
The Safe Drinking Water Act dates to 1974 and set federal standards for what comes out of your tap. It didn’t say anything about whether you could afford to pay for it. Fifty-two years later, that’s still the situation.
Here’s what the bill would actually deliver if it passes. Enrolled low-income households would get direct financial assistance toward their water bills. People already drowning in arrears would have access to debt relief. Crisis assistance and disconnection help would be available too. And the bill would fund water efficiency upgrades, meaning actual plumbing repairs, not just pamphlets about running the dishwasher less.
The scope doesn’t stop there. Water service disconnections would be banned for enrolled households, along with the fees that pile up when you fall behind. The program would require automatic enrollment and would specifically cut down on paperwork, which matters because burdensome application processes are how people who need help most end up without it.
Renters get the same treatment as owner-occupants. That’s not a throwaway detail. Detroit’s a renter-heavy city, and any program that only protected homeowners would leave a big share of residents out.
Community water systems themselves would get technical assistance under the bill, not just the households they serve. That piece of it acknowledges something people don’t talk about enough: utilities across the country are running on pipes that are decades past their expected lifespan, and they don’t have the money to fix them. Detroit’s system built for a much larger population is a textbook case. The city’s water infrastructure was designed to serve a city of well over a million people. Detroit’s population is nowhere near that now, and 230,000 households are stuck paying to maintain a system that’s too big for the current city.
When maintenance costs spike, utilities raise rates. When rates go up, more households can’t pay. When people can’t pay, they get shut off. That spiral has played out in Detroit over and over, loudly and publicly, for more than a decade. A federal assistance program with automatic enrollment and disconnection protections would at least put a floor under people at the bottom of that spiral.
Tlaib’s bill has 16 co-sponsors in the House. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has endorsed it. So have Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Mothering Justice, Clean Water Action, and the National Wildlife Federation. That’s a coalition running from environmental law to reproductive justice to wildlife conservation, which tells you something about how broadly the water affordability problem cuts across different communities.
According to Michigan Advance, the bill’s reintroduction comes as water costs nationally have climbed faster than inflation for years straight. Detroit residents don’t need a chart to know that. They’ve been living it.
Whether this Congress moves the bill any further than the last one did is a different question. It didn’t go anywhere in 2024. But the infrastructure that makes the problem real, aging pipes, a shrinking rate base, federal programs that cover gas and heat but not water, hasn’t changed. Neither has Tlaib’s argument.
