The Trump administration on Wednesday announced it will reconsider the reach of the nation’s bedrock clean water law and likely further limit the wetlands it covers, building on a Supreme Court decision two years ago that removed federal protections for significant areas.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said at agency headquarters in Washington that officials will listen to concerns from farmers and other groups worried about federal interference in how they use their land and then set limited, predictable and lasting rules defining which waterways the Clean Water Act protects.
President Donald Trump sought to shrink the law’s reach in his first term while prior Democratic administrations have expanded federal power to regulate the nation’s lakes, rivers, streams, wetlands and oceans. That’s created drastic swings in how the law is interpreted and applied.
In the 2023 Supreme Court case Sackett v. EPA, the majority of justices largely agreed with the Trump administration’s limited approach. That decision departed from decades of federal rules governing the nation’s waterways.
When the Biden administration rewrote protections to comply with Sackett, however, some conservative groups believed that the rule still protected too many wetlands and improperly limited private property rights. On Wednesday, the EPA issued guidance about how the ruling should be implemented to exclude certain wetlands.
“We are not looking for this to be a ping-pong anymore,” Zeldin said. “What we are looking for is to simply follow the guidance from Sackett.”
That decision was one of several Supreme Court rulings in recent years that drastically shrank the federal government’s power to regulate the environment and industry. Some states, however, have passed their own laws to strengthen wetlands protections.
For decades, environmental interests and left-leaning policymakers have fought right-leaning industry and agricultural interests in federal court over the Clean Water Act’s power. At the center of those cases is the definition of just five words in the law, “waters of the United States,” which determines its reach.
In Sackett, the conservative majority sided with those industry and agricultural interests that sought more flexibility to dig or fill wetlands, finding that federal regulators had long wielded too much authority.
Environmental groups have sharply criticized Sackett, saying it will mean more polluted and filled-in wetlands, which is expected to hit the arid southwest especially hard.
Julian Gonzalez, senior legislative counsel at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, called the Sackett decision industry’s “white whale” that achieved weakened environmental protections after years of work. He said the effort is especially concerning now that the EPA is facing drastic cuts, reducing its capacity to enforce the rules.
“Despite the fact that they finally got that decision after all those years, they are still not resting on their laurels,” he said. “They are going to continue to find ways to change the Clean Water Act to weaken public safeguards.”
Wetlands filter pollutants, reduce flooding, serve as important habitat and are worth protecting, Gonzalez said.
Sackett was brought by an Idaho couple who wanted to build a house near Priest Lake in the state’s panhandle. Chantell and Michael Sackett objected when federal officials identified a soggy part of their land as a wetland, which meant they had to get a permit before they filled it with rocks and soil.
Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion said federally protected wetlands must be directly adjacent to a “relatively permanent” waterway “connected to traditionally interstate navigable waters” such as a river or ocean. That viewpoint was similar to a 2006 opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
They also must have a “continuous surface connection with that water, making it difficult to determine where the ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetlands’ begins,” Alito said.
That departed from a 2006 Supreme Court opinion that had established the longtime standard for evaluating which waters were protected. In that case, then-Justice Anthony Kennedy described covered wetlands as having a “significant nexus” to larger bodies of water. Opponents have long objected that the standards were too vague and unpredictable.
American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall spoke during Zeldin’s announcement, saying farmers wanted a simple rule.
“I’m a farmer and I need a rule that’s on one page, that is sitting on the dash of my truck right next to my devotional book, and if I have a question about a ravine on my farm, I can pick that one page up, read it, and interpret it myself,” Duvall said.
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