Older article (from 2021) but it’s even more relevant today. The eastern seaboard is getting pummeled with heavy rainfall. Especially the northeast.
A NYT investigation found that many communities are using up their groundwater at dangerous rates. Why not use the excess water the East gets to replenish what is in short supply on the other side of the Mississippi?
Now what would be really sick is finding a way to pipe in water from the sea and have a way of desalinating it along the pipeline as it gets closer and closer to its various destinations. That would be a boon for the southwest US, south Saharan Africa, and Australia, but that’s a bigger project than simply finding ways to pipe large amounts of fresh water westward in a country that already has a track record of large-scale infrastructure projects.
It takes a lot of infrastructure and power to pump water over small ranges, much less the continental divide. You’d be far better off using a small fraction of the money for more desalination plants on the coast. The largest share of the Colorado river’s water is consumed near the coast California, with a lot being expended to maintain the brackish marshes. While desalination is energy intensive, it’s nowhere near what pumping a river that high would be.
You could also cut down on agricultural subsidies and use. A lot of the water is used for growing crops in the desert, and while there are reasons for this based on which types of crops are grown, they are largely luxury crops like almonds, and spending so much money and water to keep the price of such foods low seems rather odd.