A historic deal was reached yesterday to protect the Colorado River, but

negotiations over the debt ceiling are still deadlocked.

I'm Jeff Pierre and this is the seven from the Washington Post. It's Tuesday, May 23rd.

Let's get you caught up with today's seven stories. First up, the states along the Colorado River reached an agreement with the

Biden administration. California, Arizona, and Nevada will conserve an unprecedented amount of their water supply in exchange for $1.2 billion in federal funding.

The Colorado River provides water to more than 40 million people, but

overuse, climate change, and decades of drought have depleted it. The deal should

protect the country's largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, from dropping to critical levels

over the next three years. Negotiations over how the river is divided up after that

will begin soon.

Number two, debt ceiling talks ended with no deal yesterday.

President Biden met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the White House.

After that discussion, McCarthy sounded optimistic about reaching a deal.

I felt we had a productive discussion.

We don't have an agreement yet, but I did feel the discussion. We don't have an agreement yet, but I did feel the discussion was

productive in areas that we have differences of opinion. We're going to have the

staffs continue to get back together and work on base some of the things that we had talked

about. Even with the optimistic tone, Biden and McCarthy still seems stuck

over proposals to cut government spending, a key Republican demand.

The U.S. government could be days away from running out of money to pay its bills.

Congress needs to raise or suspend the limit on how much the U.S. can borrow to avoid a devastating

default.

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