2025 In Review: Water

In 2025, our Water team focused on turning ambitious ideas into real-world results. Through research, insights, convenings, and hands-on engagement with state and federal agencies, utilities, municipal associations, advocates, and other technical assistance providers, we worked to move water infrastructure investments from intention to implementation.

This work comes at a moment of significant decline in the public’s trust in government institutions. Utilities and government agencies are being asked to deliver faster, explain more, and operate under heightened scrutiny– often with fewer resources and less margin for error. In this environment, progress depends not just on sound policy, but on trusted relationships. Our work is grounded in partnerships built on credibility, follow-through, and a clear understanding of the operational realities our partners face. 

So what made this work so effective in 2025? Our secret sauce: a unique blend of policy expertise, data-driven insight, on-the-ground experience, and trusted relationships with the people responsible for delivering results. Across our Funding Navigator, Lead Service Line Replacement, State Revolving Fund, and Green Infrastructure initiatives, we paired smart policy with practical, implementable solutions designed for the constraints communities and agencies face. This year was about pairing smart policy with practical solutions to drive lasting impact. 

Helping Communities Navigate Funding

Accessing water infrastructure funding remains one of the biggest barriers for small, rural, and under-resourced communities. In 2025, we continued to grow the Funding Navigator, providing free, tailored technical assistance to help communities identify, stack, and sequence funding and financing options that fit their needs. To date, we have supported nearly 80 communities, building trusted relationships that help turn challenges into funded projects.

Much of this work involved hands-on, day-to-day support. We worked directly with utilities and local governments to assess project readiness, clarify funding options, troubleshoot eligibility questions, and help staff navigate unfamiliar application and compliance requirements. In many cases, we stayed engaged for months, helping communities adjust plans, respond to state feedback, and make decisions as conditions changed.

When communities needed additional capacity, we helped line up specialized engineering, financial planning, or compliance expertise and managed scoping and coordination so work could move forward without adding administrative burden for local staff. This approach allowed communities to keep projects moving even when internal capacity was limited.

Throughout the year, we documented what we were seeing on the ground through new case studies, highlighting common obstacles, practical workarounds, and strategies that other communities can use. By pairing direct support with shared lessons, we helped make complex funding systems more navigable and more responsive to real community needs.

Advancing Infrastructure Investment with State Revolving Funds

State Revolving Funds (SRFs) are among the most powerful- but complex- tools for financing water infrastructure. In 2025, we continued supporting states in strengthening SRF policies to better serve communities and protect long-term impact.

A major focus this year was translating state-level experimentation into shared learning. Our work included analyzing loan policies and interest rate structures and examining how states define and support disadvantaged communities. Through our SRF webinar series, we examined how states are structuring loan terms, determining interest rates, prioritizing projects, and putting some flexibilities in place. Over the course of the series, we reached 164 attendees, with representatives from 21 state agencies, bringing together state administrators, utilities, advocates, and technical assistance providers to compare approaches and surface what’s working and what’s still a challenge.

In parallel, we released a first-of-its-kind analysis of congressionally directed spending, showing how earmarks are undermining the revolving nature of SRFs, reducing future financing, limiting technical assistance and principal forgiveness, and shifting resources away from smaller and rural communities. We had several meetings with interested congress members, and we’ll be updating the analysis and re-engaging with more decision makers in the first quarter of 2026. Our Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) Funding Tracker increased data transparency for state agencies, communities, advocates, and decision makers and helped them better understand where funds are flowing and how programs are evolving in practice. 

Together, this work reinforced a central message: protecting the revolving structure of SRFs, while modernizing programs and policies to meet current needs, is essential to delivering fair, sustainable water infrastructure investment and to maintaining trust in these programs into the future.

Accelerating Lead Service Line Replacement

Lead service line (LSL) replacement remained a major focus of EPIC’s water work in 2025. We continued to see state and federal funding expand opportunities. Much of our work this year focused on helping states, utilities, and partners shift attention from whether replacement is possible to how it can be delivered faster, more efficiently, and at scale.

We worked on lead pipe replacement from both a policy and technical assistance perspective. Through research, tools, and direct engagement, we supported efforts aimed at achieving full replacement– not partial fixes– within realistic timelines. We helped elevate a shared, concrete goal across partners: eliminating LSLs within a decade. This framing reflects growing evidence that full replacement is achievable when policies, funding structures, and operational approaches are aligned, and decision makers commit to the cause.

Throughout the year, we documented and shared examples of progress to ground that ambition in practice. Cities such as Akron, Ohio, have already completed full replacements, while others are on track to remove all lead service lines in the near term. We also tracked progress in states like Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. In many states, sustained policy attention and implementation capacity are beginning to show results.

 Another key focus this year was unpacking major updates to federal lead pipe funding, exploring what changed, what didn’t, and why it matters. New national estimates now draw on more than 57,000 data points– an order-of-magnitude increase over prior estimates– that provide a clearer picture of the scope of the challenge and help states and utilities plan with greater confidence. Through our research, tools, and launch of the Lead Innovation Hub, we supported states, utilities, and partners working to remove lead from drinking water systems permanently. Our work showed how strategies like automatic enrollment can streamline replacements, how minimum allotment requirements can create funding bottlenecks, and what considerations utilities should take into account when replacing lead pipes. We also examined funding and financing strategies, outlining how combining traditional and non-traditional mechanisms could help overcome legal, financial, and logistical barriers to covering LSL replacement costs. 

Taken together, our 2025 work reinforced a clear takeaway: full lead service line replacement is closer than many originally thought, and success depends on aligning funding structures, policies, and operational strategies to remove barriers and keep projects moving.

Driving Investment in Green Infrastructure

Green infrastructure remains an effective, and underutilized, solution for managing stormwater, improving water quality, and delivering broader community benefits. In 2025, we deepened our focus on the policies and financing mechanisms needed to move green infrastructure beyond pilots and into sustained, long-term investments.

Our team explored stormwater incentive programs, Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) sponsorship programs, and innovative approaches such as Pay for Success. Throughout, we emphasized implementation realities: aligning incentives, building local capacity, and designing programs that work for both utilities and communities. By staying closely engaged with practitioners, we translated promising concepts into practical guidance that states and local governments can actually deploy.

Driving Impact in 2026

In the year ahead, we will continue working alongside states, utilities, and communities to strengthen program and project delivery, remove friction in funding and implementation, and carry forward the lessons emerging from real projects. We are doubling down on practical support, shared learning, and policy feedback loops that help successful approaches spread and stalled efforts move forward.

Early in the year, our team will gather in person to reflect on what worked, pressure-test assumptions, and sharpen priorities for the year ahead. With clearer data, strong partnerships, and a growing body of implementation-focused insight, we remain committed to helping communities translate available resources into durable improvements that lead to safe, reliable, and affordable water systems that people can trust.

This past year reinforced a core lesson across our work: progress accelerates when policy, funding, and on-the-ground capacity are aligned and when trusted relationships make it possible to adapt as conditions change.