Fellow Story

Hyun quoted on Trump challenge to the Waters of the United States rule

Fellow(s): Karen Hyun
Topic(s): Water Resources

“Keep navigable waters clean.” It sounds straightforward, but in practice it’s anything but. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has struggled with that task, after the Clean Water Act in 1972 gave them the authority to regulate “navigable waters.” But “navigable” doesn’t cover small streams and wetlands, and water in those areas has a habit of flowing downhill into other, larger bodies of water. Whether the EPA could regulate all that water before it reached someplace navigable was never clear.

So in 2015 the Obama administration finalized the Clean Water Rule, nicknamed the Waters of the United States rule or WOTUS, in the hopes of creating a functional definition to guide the EPA’s work. The agency says that before the rule, jurisdictional limbo affected about 60 percent of streams and wetlands in the country. Even with that restriction, the Clean Water Act has been quite successful, cleaning up rivers like the infamous “River that Caught Fire” Cuyahoga in Ohio from decades of urban and industrial pollution. In total, WOTUS placed 117 million people’s drinking water sources solidly under EPA jurisdiction—that’s about a third of the country’s population.

But President Trump sees the rule as over-regulation, and yesterday he signed an executive order that could spark its eventual demise. Nothing will change now that the executive order is signed—WOTUS cannot be overturned with a hastily scrawled signature—but the action is certainly a statement about the administration’s goals. “I don’t think this is going to be an easy exercise for them, but it’s clearly a priority,” says Karen Hyun, Director of Water and Coastal Policy for Audubon.

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