David Williams of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance documents for Washington Examiner readers the role of government in California’s debilitating drought.

Unfortunately, this water crisis isn’t purely the consequence of bad luck — or the heavens snubbing California of the rains. Bureaucrats have managed to worsen the situation.

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard chief executive now running for president, said earlier this year that California “is a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of ideology. It’s a tragedy.” The worsening water crisis, the Golden Stater warned, “is a man-made disaster.”

She’s right, and that should terrify you.

Aided by compliant bureaucrats, California’s notorious environmental lobby has been agitating for stricter regulation of perchlorate, a ubiquitous compound with both natural and anthropogenic sources in the environment.

California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), an official state agency that lacks enforcement power but whose directives are considered by other agencies with the power to enforce, revised its Public Health Goal for perchlorate, lowering the state’s then-standard of six parts per billion (ppb) to a dramatically more conservative one part per billion.

Simply put: Golden State regulators have decided that the only safe amount of perchlorate is no amount, despite the peer-reviewed science. The problem is that this compound is not even remotely harmful at low levels and, because it’s naturally occurring, it’s everywhere. …

… The environmental lobby hopes to regulate what amounts to a fly speck in an Olympic-sized swimming pool — levels that would have no impact on even vulnerable populations, like infants and pregnant women, according to all the available science. These folks don’t care about science, which for 60 years has shown that this compound is non-threatening in low concentrations, as it’s normally found.