After the Biden administration on Tuesday released proposals to cut water allotments to the states that depend on the shrinking Colorado River, a progressive advocacy group criticized federal officials for failing to address an underlying cause of the region's hydrological plight: the overexploitation of water resources by the corporate agriculture and fossil fuel industries.

"Any legitimate plan for the Colorado River must directly confront a key driver of the crisis in the first place: the overuse and abuse of limited water resources by big agribusiness and fossil fuel corporations — the very same industries contributing to climate chaos in the first place," Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a statement.

The seven Colorado River Basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — have missed multiple federal deadlines to finalize an interstate water conservation pact.

Following months of fruitless state-level attempts to forge an agreement on how to preserve the region's waning water resources, the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Reclamation proposed two solutions in a draft analysis published Tuesday.

The agency also explored the devastating implications of a third alternative — doing nothing.