The World Health Organization and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme reported in 2025 that the United States carries an internal water divide. It is the kind of divide usually associated with the countries whose deprivations dominate the international development agenda. The report found that 0.3 percent of white households in the United States lacked complete plumbing, compared with 0.5 percent of Black and Hispanic or Latino households and 5.8 percent of Native American households. Taken together with housing and homelessness data, the WHO and UNICEF programme concluded that more than 2.2 million people in the United States lacked basic water and sanitation services, a figure that sits awkwardly beside the country’s reputation for having solved household water access decades ago.
The scale behind that finding can be checked against the United States’ own statistics. The US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, in its 2024 one-year estimates, table B25047, counts 2,303,757 housing units nationwide lacking complete plumbing facilities out of 146,740,960 in total (a margin of error of plus or minus 38,026 applies to the smaller figure). Those figures were read through the Census Reporter mirror of the Bureau’s data. That is a national rate under two percent, the kind of figure that lets a country report near-universal service coverage while millions of households remain outside it. The WHO and UNICEF programme addressed that arithmetic problem in its own methodology. It classifies any country above 99 percent service coverage as having achieved universal access, while acknowledging that official statistics carry inherent uncertainties and that the absolute number of people who remain unserved may still be significant. The United States clears the headline threshold and still leaves millions of households out of a service most of its own residents assume is universal.
Some of that unevenness can now be traced down to the ZIP code, using a recalculation of an existing federal index rather than any new survey. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry maintain the Social Vulnerability Index, a place-based measure combining Census socioeconomic, household, minority-status and housing data. Its first edition broken down to ZIP Code Tabulation Areas appeared only in the 2022 dataset, released in May 2024. A public reprocessing of that CDC and ATSDR dataset into ZIP-code-level social vulnerability data, published under a CC BY 4.0 open licence with an assigned DOI, lets researchers and reporters outside government match the same federal vulnerability scores against local water and environmental records without waiting for the next official release cycle.
Three strands of evidence point toward a structural pattern rather than a series of isolated local failures. First, a 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that drinking water violations are far from rare, estimating that between 9 million and 45 million people were possibly affected by health-based violations in each of the 34 years it examined. The same study reported that its indicator of minority, low-income populations was associated with a higher likelihood of total coliform violations. Those findings, its authors concluded, might indicate environmental justice concerns for rural areas and minority communities. Second, the federal government has itself acknowledged the pattern in regulatory language. Its Lead and Copper Rule Improvements materials state that lead in drinking water “irreparably harms the health of children and adults and disproportionately impacts lower-income communities and communities of color.” Third, the CDC and ATSDR vulnerability index gives that disproportion a location. Access to it, and not only awareness of it, is what lets anyone hold a particular system accountable.
The tools built to make that kind of disproportion visible are not secure. On February 5, 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency removed from its website the environmental justice mapping and screening tool known as EJScreen, along with several related pages, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which documented the removal as it happened. EJScreen had combined environmental burden metrics with Census-derived demographic data to let the public map cumulative impacts by community. Public interest groups challenged the removal in court. On March 13, 2026, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, holding that the groups lacked standing, according to a tracker maintained by Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. The outcome was procedural, and it left the removal in place without a ruling on its merits. A volunteer initiative called Public Environmental Data Partners has since released what it describes as an initial reconstruction of Version 2.3 of EPA’s EJScreen, stating that public access to the tool from EPA was discontinued on February 5, 2025. Two other federal systems, the Safe Drinking Water Information System and the Enforcement and Compliance History Online database, remained publicly accessible as of this writing.
Underneath the data fight sits a funding gap that predates it. The EPA’s own 2023 national needs survey put the twenty-year capital improvement need for drinking water infrastructure at 625 billion dollars for states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, plus a further 4.1 billion dollars for tribal water systems, for a combined estimate of 629.1 billion dollars through 2040. Against that need, the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directed more than 50 billion dollars to EPA’s water infrastructure programs, of which 15 billion dollars was earmarked specifically for replacing lead pipes. The arithmetic holds without adding a single new data point. The sum appropriated covers a fraction of what the federal government’s own engineers say is required. No source cited here measures where that shortfall will finally land. It sits, however, on top of a water system that the EPA’s own rulemaking, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study and the WHO and UNICEF programme already describe as burdening low-income and minority households first.
None of this sits outside the international commitments the United States has already helped shape. The UN General Assembly recognized the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right essential for the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights in 2010, and UN member states committed under Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030. The gap between that commitment and the household numbers is set out in the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme’s own 2025 report, and the identity of the households on the wrong side of it is stated plainly in the Environmental Protection Agency’s own account of who bears the cost of lead in drinking water. What has changed since 2025 is not the evidence but the ease of assembling it, and a country that removes a mapping tool while its own regulators are still writing the disproportion into rulemaking is making that assembly harder at the moment it matters most.
Artem Akulov is the founder of ZipCheckup, a free ZIP-code-level home safety data project in the United States, which publishes federal environmental records as open data.
