Amid Tina Peters fight, Trump is withholding funding from parts of Colorado that overwhelmingly voted for him

President Donald Trump is taking aim at new areas of Colorado: those that overwhelmingly voted in 2024 to send him back to the White House.

This week, Trump vetoed a bill that would have provided funding to complete a pipeline to carry clean water to communities in southeastern Colorado. Last week, he denied disaster funding to help northwestern Colorado recover from wildfires and southwestern Colorado recover from flooding.

The decisions come as Trump intensifies his war against Colorado over the state’s refusal to release Tina Peters from prison. 

Peters, the former clerk in Mesa County, is serving a nine-year state prison sentence for orchestrating a breach of her county’s election system as part of a failed attempt to uncover voter fraud. The president vowed to punish Colorado as long as Peters remains in prison — and he appears to be making good on that promise. 

On social media Wednesday, Trump called Gov. Jared Polis a “scumbag” and called the Republican prosecutor who brought the case against Peters “disgusting.”

“May they rot in hell,” Trump said on his Truth Social site. 

Trump pardoned Peters, but since she was convicted on state charges, that had no effect. Polis has also so far refused to honor the Trump administration’s request that Peters be transferred to federal custody.

Many Colorado Republicans were silent as the Trump administration rolled back funding for clean energy projects and initiatives in the state, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. But things are starting to change amid the White House’s latest decisions. 

Prominent members of the GOP, including Republican U.S. Reps. and Jeff Hurd and Trump loyalist Lauren Boebert, are speaking out against the president after his latest moves.

“I must have missed the rally where he stood in Colorado and promised to personally derail critical water infrastructure projects,” Boebert, traditionally a Trump ally, said in a written statement this week. “My bad, I thought the campaign was about lowering costs and cutting red tape.”

Boebert, who recently split with the president in calling for files related to Jeffrey Epstein to be released, also said in her remarkable rebuke of Trump that “Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics.”

Boebert was the main sponsor of the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act, which passed Congress unanimously last year. It would have shifted more of the cost of completing the Arkansas Valley Conduit onto the federal government and away from the communities in southeastern Colorado, many of them poor, it aims to serve. 

The conduit, first approved in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, is a 130-mile pipeline that is supposed to span Lake Pueblo to the Lamar area and carry clean water for municipal and industrial uses. The communities the pipeline aims to serve struggle to provide water to residents and businesses because of naturally occurring salinity or radionuclide contamination in their groundwater.

But the project has never been completed because the communities it aims to serve haven’t been able to cover their share of the cost. The Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act was meant to be the last step in getting the money figured out.

The counties served by the conduit — Pueblo, Otero, Crowley, Kiowa, Bent and Prowers — all voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. 

In vetoing the bill, Trump complained about shifting the cost burden onto the federal taxpayer. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the nation,” he said in a letter explaining his decision. 

Boebert did not share his take.

“Nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections,” Boebert said of Trump.

Boebert is now urging Congress to override the veto.

Earlier in December, Trump denied disaster funding requested in response to the Elk and Lee fires, which in August damaged crucial electric lines, in Rio Blanco County and in response to  record-breaking flooding in La Plata, Archuleta and Mineral counties, which in October damaged or destroyed drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. 

All of the counties affected by the disasters, with the exception of La Plata, backed Trump in 2024.

The White House cited fiscal responsibility in denying Colorado’s disaster claims. It claimed politics didn’t play a role in the decision. But Hurd rejects that argument.

“Western Colorado has long supported the president, and that support comes from communities now facing the real human and economic consequences of recent disasters,” he said in a written statement. 

Hurd’s district also includes areas that would have benefited from the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act.

“The vetoed legislation did not authorize new construction spending or expand the federal government’s original commitment,” Hurd said in a statement. “It adjusted repayment terms to reflect decades of federal delay, rising construction costs, and changing regulatory requirements — factors largely outside local control — so existing federal investments could actually result in completed infrastructure and clean drinking water.”

Trump’s veto of the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act and decision to deny disaster funding requested by northwestern and southwestern Colorado are not the first time his actions have hurt Republican areas during his second term. In September, he relocated U.S. Space Command headquarters to Alabama from Colorado Springs, a GOP stronghold, citing Colorado’s use of mail-in ballots.

But that decision was long expected, and many Republican leaders effectively brushed it off. 

However, the latest, unexpected actions by the Trump administration have Republican leaders like Boebert and Hurd fuming. 

Boebert told 9News that she thinks it is sometimes right for the Trump administration to retaliate against Colorado for the Peters situation and for its policies shielding immigrants living in the U.S. illegally from deportation. 

“If he wants to go after Boulder and some climate activists, sure. … But we’re talking about southeast Colorado, who has overwhelmingly voted for President Trump,” she said. “These are not the people that should be attacked.”