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Reading passage Grade 10 Social Studies & Civics

How the Safe Drinking Water Act Shares Power Among Governments

A grade 10 informational passage explaining how the Safe Drinking Water Act divides authority among federal, state, and local governments, with comprehension questions.

Objectives

  1. Students will describe how federal, state, and local governments each hold a distinct role under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
  2. Students will explain how a gap in how the levels work together can leave water unsafe even when rules exist at every level.

Vocabulary

Contaminant
A contaminant is anything in water that should not be there, whether it is a germ, a chemical, or too much of a natural mineral, that could make the water unsafe or unpleasant to use. Treatment plants are built specifically to find and remove contaminants before water reaches the tap.

Also: Safe Drinking Water Act, primacy, oversight, infrastructure

Teacher overview

This passage explains the structure behind safe tap water in the United States. It traces how the Safe Drinking Water Act splits the work among the federal government, the states, and local utilities, and why that shared design has both a strength and a weakness. A teacher can assign it to introduce federalism through a system students use every day.

How the Safe Drinking Water Act Shares Power Among Governments — Grade 10 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

In the United States, several levels of government share the job of keeping tap water clean. The main law that organizes this work is the Safe Drinking Water Act, first passed in 1974. The law does not put one agency in charge of every faucet. Instead, it divides the work among federal, state, and local governments, and each layer does something the others cannot.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, sits at the top of the system. Its main job is to set the national rules. The EPA sets the national standards for lead, for bacteria, and for dozens of other contaminants. These standards apply to every public water system in the country. A small town and a large city must meet the same federal standards. That keeps a basic floor of safety steady from one state to the next.

The EPA does not usually run water systems itself. Most of the daily work is handed to the states through an arrangement called primacy. A state applies to the EPA for permission to run the drinking water program inside its borders. To win primacy, the state must show that its own rules are at least as strong as the federal ones. Once a state has primacy, it inspects treatment plants, issues permits, tests for violations, and acts when a system breaks the rules. Almost every state has chosen to take on this role.

Closest to the tap is the local utility. The utility actually treats the water and pumps it through the pipes. It hires and trains the operators. It repairs broken mains, reads meters, and sets the rates that pay for all of it. When a problem reaches a home, it is usually the local utility that sends the notice and makes the first repair.

This layered design has a clear strength. No single failure has to reach every home in the country, because responsibility is spread out. But the same design has a weakness. A gap in how the layers work together can still leave people with unsafe water. The crisis in Flint, Michigan showed how. In 2014, Flint, then run by a state-appointed emergency manager, switched its water source to the Flint River without adding the corrosion control treatment that keeps lead out of old pipes, and state regulators did not require it. Federal limits and state oversight both existed on paper, yet lead leached into homes before officials acted.

Money is a constant strain on the system. Much of the country's water infrastructure is old. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's drinking water a grade of C-minus in its 2025 report card. The EPA estimates that about $625 billion in drinking water investment is needed over the next twenty years, and that most of that need is in the buried pipes that carry water to homes. Deciding who pays for that work, and when, is one of the hardest questions the three layers face together.

Knowing this structure helps a resident act. A complaint about a monthly rate belongs at the local level. A question about whether a plant was inspected belongs at the state level. A concern about whether a national limit is strong enough belongs at the federal level.

Questions

  1. According to the passage, what does the EPA decide that applies to every public water system in the country?
  2. What is primacy, and what must a state show to receive it?
  3. What grade did the American Society of Civil Engineers give the nation's drinking water in its 2025 report card?
  4. The passage calls the layered design both a strength and a weakness. Explain each in your own words.
  5. Using the Flint example, explain how water can become unsafe even when federal limits and state oversight both exist.
  6. A resident is upset that her monthly water bill went up. Based on the passage, which level of government should she contact first, and why?
  7. Why does the passage say that deciding who pays for aging pipes is one of the hardest questions the three layers face together?

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: The EPA sets the national standards for contaminants such as lead and bacteria, and those standards apply to every public water system, large or small. The passage states this in the section on the federal role.
  2. Answer: Primacy is the arrangement in which a state runs the drinking water program inside its own borders. To receive it, the state must show the EPA that its rules are at least as strong as the federal ones.
  3. Answer: A grade of C-minus. The passage cites the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2025 report card.
  4. Answer: The strength is that responsibility is spread across three layers, so no single failure has to reach every home. The weakness is that a gap in how the layers work together can still leave people with unsafe water.
  5. Answer: Federal limits and state oversight existed, but the city switched sources without corrosion control and state regulators did not require it, so lead entered homes before officials responded. Rules on paper did not protect residents when the layers failed to act.
  6. Answer: The local level, meaning the utility or city that sets the rates. The passage says a complaint about a monthly rate belongs at the local level, because that is where rates are set.
  7. Answer: Because the pipes are old and the estimated need is very large, about $625 billion over twenty years, and no single layer clearly holds the duty to pay, so the federal, state, and local governments must decide together who covers the cost and when.

Differentiation

Support

Provide a three-box diagram (Federal, State, Local) that students fill in with one duty per box as they read, so the structure is visible while they answer. Allow questions 1, 2, and 3 to be answered by pointing to the matching paragraph.

Extension

Ask students to write a short paragraph explaining what might happen to the "basic floor of safety" the passage describes if the federal government stopped setting national limits and left every standard to the states.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "Safe Drinking Water Act," "primacy," "contaminant," "oversight," and "infrastructure" with simple definitions and the three-box diagram. Allow the literal questions to be answered in short phrases, and pair students to discuss questions 4 and 5 before writing.