Reference articles on history, science, culture and more
Surprise meSurprise meSubscribe
Encyclopedia

CALFED Bay-Delta Program

California state government department

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
2 min read
Source updated August 8, 2026
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

The CALFED Bay-Delta Program, also known as CALFED, is a department within the government of California, administered under the California Resources Agency. The department acts as consortium, coordinating the activities and interests of the state government of California and the U.S. federal government to focus on interrelated water problems in the state’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The coordination program was created in 1994 by Governor Pete Wilson and federal Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt following a decade of chaotic disputes between the state of California, the federal government, environmental groups, agricultural interests, and municipal water services.

The current Director of CALFED is Joe Grindstaff. The department is located along Capitol Mall in Sacramento.

01Responsibilities

CALFED's responsibilities for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta include:

  • To ensure the reliability of water supplies within the Delta.
  • To improve and safeguard the Delta's water quality. The Delta currently serves as the tap to 25 million Californians who receive at least some of their drinking water.
  • To restore the Delta's ecosystem by protecting native species and eradicating invasive species.
  • To improve levee protection along the Delta's rivers.

02Coordinating agencies

Various federal and state agencies fall into CALFED's coordination authority. These agencies include:

State

Federal

In addition to the state and federal agencies, nearly 60 Native American tribes also participate in the program's activity coordination.

03Criticisms

In February 2006, the California Legislative Analyst's Office, or LAO, published criticisms of the CALFED Program during its annual budget review, citing sources from the California State Legislature and various independent review panels. The LAO report indicated that CALFED had "[failed] to develop a viable long-term finance plan (as directed by the Legislature)," as well as its "lack of focus and priorities," and "lack of a performance orientation." Due to its various coordination agencies and priorities, the LAO declared that "the program had strayed from its original focus of resolving conflicts among water-related interests in the Delta, by expanding into what looked like a statewide water management program, resulting in substantial overlap with the mission and responsibilities of [the] California Department of Water Resources."

The LAO recommended to the Legislature and for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to reform CALFED by establishing realistic budget reviews and create more confined responsibilities that would not overlap into other departments.

Watch videos about CALFED Bay-Delta ProgramExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “CALFED Bay-Delta Program”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Images, from Wikimedia Commons:

Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.

Continue exploring

Related topics

Sacramento River

The Sacramento River is the principal river of Northern California in the United States and is the largest river in California. Rising in the Klamath Mountains, the river flows south for 400 miles (640 km) before reaching the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay.

San Joaquin River

The San Joaquin River is the longest river of Central California. The 366-mile (589 km) long river starts in the high Sierra Nevada and flows through the rich agricultural region of the northern San Joaquin Valley before reaching Suisun Bay, San Francisco Bay, and the Pacific Ocean.

Central Valley Project

The Central Valley Project is a federal power and water management project in the U.S. state of California under the supervision of the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). It was devised in 1933 in order to provide irrigation and municipal water to much of California's Central Valley, by regulating and storing water in reservoirs in the northern half of the state (once considered water-rich but suffering water-scarce conditions more than half the year in most years), and transporting it to the water-poor San Joaquin Valley and its surroundings by means of a series of canals, aqueducts and pump plants, some of which are shared with the California State Water Project (SWP).