EPA Reopens Comments on Narrowed Clean Water Rule

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency wants "a durable WOTUS definition that follows the law and ends burdensome regulatory uncertainty." The new comment round, he said, "reflects our continued commitment to transparency and public input, ensuring we have fully considered a wide range of potential policy options."

Zeldin has described the administration's broader deregulatory push as an effort to speed economic growth while putting "a dagger through the heart of climate change religion." He argues the water proposal strikes a needed balance between federal and state authority, and that lands dropped from federal jurisdiction will still be regulated by states and tribes.

EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Jess Kramer told reporters on a press call Thursday that the supplemental proposal "is designed to help the agencies consider a wide range of additional options as we work toward developing a final rule." She added: "We're just not going to regulate in a black box." Kramer said the administration wants to end "the whiplash that the regulated community has been in for decades."

Environmental groups say the rewrite guts the law. J.W. Glass, a policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said when the plan was announced last year that "the Trump EPA's shortsighted push to encourage industries to plow over more wetlands and streams will destroy thousands of miles of waterways critical to wildlife across the United States," and that the rule would most likely "wipe out life-sustaining waterways in every corner of the nation."

Common Dreams, reporting from the left, wrote that the revised rule "would protect only waters that flow every day of the year, abandoning most streams and virtually all wetlands." The New York Times reported the proposal could strip federal protections from most U.S. wetlands, many of which feed drinking water systems. Critics quoted in the coverage call the plan a giveaway to ranchers and industrial polluters.