Safe Drinking Water ACT: The Next Fifty Years

In this open access book, contributors explore current challenges and opportunities to improve drinking water regulation, governance, management, environmental justice, and more. In 2024, the United States marked the 50th anniversary of the Safe Water Drinking Act, its principal law regulating drinking water. Rather than looking back, this book looks forward to the decades ahead: each chapter is rooted in rigorous research and ends with concrete recommendations for the future of American drinking water. The book’s authors include leading policy scholars and water sector professionals. The book culminates in the Madison Declaration, a vision statement and bold call to action for the next fifty years.

Manny Teodoro is Robert & Sylvia Wagner Professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government (2022, with Samantha Zuhlke and David Switer) and Bureaucratic Ambition: Careers, Motives, and the Innovative Administrator (2011).