Washington Watch: Trump Set to Flush Clean Water Protections
This week, the Trump Administration is expected to propose slashing the amount of wetlands nationwide which would be protected from destruction under the Clean Water Act.
Sources indicated last week that the Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will support a new, unprecedentedly narrow definition of “waters of the United States” which would exclude many streams and most wetlands from federal environmental protection. The new regulatory definition would reverse one of the most important Obama Administration environmental actions. Under the new rule, federally protected wetlands include only those which are both “adjacent” to other protected waters and are “physically and meaningfully connected” to those waters with surface (not groundwater) connections.
The proposed new rule starts from a 2006 opinion written by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia which created new restrictions on which wetlands are protected, and narrows it even further. On its face, the Trump rewrite would eliminate protections for streams which only flow after rains, as well as isolated wetlands. The former are particularly important to protecting broader surface water quality, and the latter for wildlife habitat. Plus, who knows what an EPA led by policymakers actively hostile to most pollution controls will interpret “meaningfully connected” to require?
The national League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is already calling the expected Trump EPA action “a massive attack on the Clean Water Act.”
A statement from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said that the proposed Trump rewrite would “gut water protections nationwide” by in effect “exempting many oil companies, industrial facilities and developers from programs that aim to protect our rivers, lakes, streams and wetlands from degradation.”
Once the rule is formally published, clean water advocates nationally and in North Carolina will move aggressively to oppose this threat to drinking water, fishing, and wildlife resources.
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