Trump and Conservatives Lead Attack on Clean Water
President Donald Trump, Republicans, and conservatives at the Supreme Court are escalating a decades-long assault on clean water protections. Through deregulations and cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency, Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and bills in Congress, conservatives are systematically eroding rules that have successfully granted Americans clean water.
These changes fit into a wider attack on environmental protections by the Trump administration that serve to benefit major polluters and industry. Reduced protections for clean water will affect all Americans, but particularly in low-income communities, communities of color, and rural communities.
“It’s a callous disregard for how these actions impact people and their access to safe water,” Mary Grant, Public Water for All Campaign Director at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch, tells Rolling Stone.
In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said he will look to significantly reduce a significant portion of the waterways, such as wetlands, rivers, and streams, that are protected under the Clean Water Act, a 1972 law that regulates the discharge of pollutants in water. A memo from the EPA emphasized that it would be minimizing the water covered by the Clean Water Act and enforcing their interpretation of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency. The Sackett decision found that millions of acres of wetlands — more than half — are not protected by the law, meaning that a permit is no longer needed to dump pollutants or destroy wetlands by filling them.
“This is to simply follow the rule of law,” Zeldin said. “We’re not looking for this to be a pingpong anymore. What we’re looking for is to simply follow the guidance of Sackett.”
“There’s a pretty basic attack against the Clean Water Act by industry and the Trump administration, and it’s been going on for years,” Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife, and oceans at the nonprofit Earthjustice, tells Rolling Stone. “It was a feature of the first Trump administration, and they made really clear already that they’re going to try and attack clean water protections in an aggressive way.”
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The definition of waters covered by the Clean Water Act has grown and shrunk for years. In 2015, President Barack Obama issued a regulation that clarified two previous Supreme Court rulings, establishing that the EPA has authority over smaller bodies of water like streams and wetlands. Then, in 2019, Trump repealed the measure. In 2022, President Joe Biden’s EPA reversed Trump’s move, going back to the rules that preceded Obama. In 2023, the Supreme Court issued the Sackett ruling that led Biden to weaken protections for wetlands. And in March, the Supreme Court ruled on a case about San Francisco dumping sewage into the Pacific Ocean that further weakened the Clean Water Act.
“That the Trump EPA is saying it wants to go back to the drawing board again” by revisiting the law’s scope “indicates to me that they’re only going to interpret the already restrictive decision even more restrictively and try to exclude more waters from federal jurisdiction,” Emily Miller, staff attorney at advocacy group Food and Water Watch, tells Rolling Stone.
The Clean Water Act is “the most successful environmental law in America,” Caputo says. “So we’re in a situation where efforts to weaken clean water protections are not only terrible public policy, because all Americans need and deserve clean water, it’s also a situation where we would be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by weakening protections for clean water.”
Sackett involved an Idaho couple, Chantell and Michael Sackett, who were building a home on a vacant lot that included wetlands protected by the EPA. Despite not having the necessary permit, the couple, who ran an excavation company, dumped gravel into the wetlands so they could build on it. The EPA toldthe Sacketts to undo the damage and stop construction. In response, the Sacketts sued. The Supreme Court decided that waters that did not have a “continuous surface connection” to major lakes and rivers were not subject to the Clean Water Act, leaving many wetlands, which may have underground connections to major lakes and rivers, unprotected.
Wetlands are important because they create clean water by filtering pollutants and they can absorb flood water. Many endangered and threatened species rely on wetlands for their habitats. The EPA estimated that more than 60 percent of wetlands lost protections under Sackett.
The Sacketts were represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which Earthjustice calls “a pro-industry group that seeks to dismantle key environmental protections.”
The Clean Water Act “drives industry crazy,” Caputo says. “It’s agribusiness, it’s property developers, it’s the oil and gas guys. A whole suite of industry is really hostile to protections for wetlands.”
The law requires that someone obtain a permit before discharging a pollutant from a pipe, tunnel, or other “discrete conveyance” into water.
“That’s become the cost of doing business and industry doesn’t like the cost,” Caputo adds.
Zeldin argued in a statement last month that the Biden administration’s previous definition of waters covered under the Clean Water Act “placed unfair burdens on the American people” and added costs for businesses. He claimed the Trump EPA will “protect America’s water resources consistent with the law of the land while empowering American farmers, landowners, entrepreneurs, and families.”
Conservative lawmakers have similarly framed the Trump administration’s water deregulation as benefiting everyday people. Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) said in response to the EPA’s changes that Biden and Barack Obama’s policies had caused issues for farmers and ranchers.
“It’s not every mud puddle that they should regulate,” he said. “If you can float a rubber duck in it for a half-hour after the rain, that does not mean this is something they can regulate.”
Zippy Duvall, president of the lobbying group the American Farm Bureau Federation, also praised the Trump EPA’s move. “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.
But the EPA’s water moves serve to benefit industry above all, experts say.
“There is little ambiguity in EPA’s announcement,” Mark Sabath, senior attorney at the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement. “We hear no concern for the health of people who depend on clean drinking water, or the safety of communities that rely on wetlands to slow flooding. Further weakening federal clean water protections may be what large polluters and wealthy developers want, but it is not what everyday people want — either in the South or throughout the nation.”
Caputo says there are still some ways to fight back.
“If you’re somebody like me who wants to protect those wetlands, there are really two ways to do it,” he says. “One is to have Congress pass a law that reinstates the protections for those 50 million acres. The other is to have individual states do that at the state level. So in the wake of the Sackett decision, we are pursuing both courses of action.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority further attacked the Clean Water Act in March when it decided a case about San Francisco dumping sewage into the Pacific Ocean. As a result, the EPA’s ability to stipulate certain basic requirements as part of permits was limited.
“It’s a decision that I think showcases the Supreme Court’s open hostility towards clean water protections, and what it does is it makes it harder for EPA and state regulators to protect water quality if the Clean Water Act requires, because it takes away an important tool that regulators have routinely used in the past to achieve water quality protection,” says Miller, of Food and Water Watch.
The case looked at the level of authority that the EPA and state regulators have to make polluters follow the rules. Before the ruling, the EPA would put restrictions in permits called end-result requirements — or provisions that generally “prohibit pollution discharges that violate water quality standards,” according to Miller.
These provisions were meant to serve as a backstop to make sure that their rules are followed. The Supreme Court ruled that these end-result requirements are beyond the EPA’s authority. As such, the EPA and state regulators must now issue more specific conditions for each permit, which takes time and money.
“In practice, I see this decision as making it a lot more difficult and time consuming and expensive for regulators to issue protective water pollution permits, and it may unfortunately lead to weaker water pollution permitting overall,” Miller says.
As was the case in Sackett, industry backed the polluter, San Francisco.
“It is unusual that one of the most liberal cities in the country would bring a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court that essentially weakens a really important environmental law,” Miller says. “And you might not be surprised to know that they were supported in their challenge by a number of industry lobby groups that represented fossil fuels and mining and industrial agriculture interests, because this decision and this type of weakening of EPA power benefits those polluters immensely.”
The Supreme Court’s decisions favor “industrial polluter interests and works to the disadvantage of the American public that relies on water for drinking, for recreation, for all sorts of things that are now at risk,” Miller adds.
Meanwhile, the EPA’s broader deregulation agenda threatens clean water protections as well. More than 30 actions that the EPA announced affect water pollution, air pollution, and climate emissions from fossil fuel plants. Trump also issued an executive order that said for every rule an agency issues, it must repeal 10 rules.
One such handout to the fossil fuel industry: The EPA is looking to change rules concerning wastewater created as a byproduct of oil and gas extraction. The agency will consider expanding circumstances where this wastewater can be used and discharged.
“EPA is playing a central role delivering on President Trump’s energy agenda,” Zeldin said in a statement. “EPA will revise wastewater regulations from the 1970s that do not reflect modern capability to treat and reuse water for good. As a result, we will lower production costs for oil and gas extraction to boost American energy while increasing water supplies and protecting water quality.”
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget separately withdrew a proposed EPA rule to set limits on the discharge of PFAS forever chemicals in wastewater. The administration did so based on Trump’s executive order on Day One freezing all regulations in progress pending review.
Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire leading Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, also want to make major cuts to the EPA’s budget and workforce. These cuts would threaten Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds, which provide major funding for local water infrastructure.
“I think a lot of industries view the EPA as just being in the way of what they want to do,” Caputo says. “And so there’s a bit of a right-wing fantasy playing out right now, which is to get rid of this agency whose sole job it is to deliver clean water and clean air to people, and to get them out of industry’s way.”
But, he adds, “the laws are still on the books.”
And in Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s recent stopgap spending law includes cuts to a program that helps communities have access to clean water. Its cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture include the Rural Water and Waste Disposal assistance program, which provides funding to rural communities for “clean and reliable drinking water systems, sanitary sewage disposal, sanitary solid waste disposal, and storm water drainage,” according to the USDA.
At the USDA, a leaked memo published by More Perfect Union showed that the Agricultural Research Service has banned many words and phrases from agreements and contracts — including “environmental justice,” “climate,” and “safe drinking water.”
“The Trump administration has tried to turn the term ‘environmental justice’ into a bad word that shall not be spoken, but the people that will be overwhelmingly and disproportionately burdened by these types of decisions are frontline communities,” Miller says.
The EPA moved to close its Environmental Justice Offices in March. These offices worked on pollution in poor communities and communities of color.
“Industry and industrial polluters tend to concentrate in particular areas, usually low income communities of color or rural, isolated areas that don’t really have the political power to fight them off. And so you know, decisions that let industrial polluters run wild will be felt in those communities. And simply removing the words environmental justice from the website, and you know, getting rid of the Environmental Justice Office and the EPA is not going to change that reality. It’s just going to hide it,” Miller adds.
Republican lawmakers also want to repeal the Lead Out of Water rule, which Biden issued last October and “was a massive victory in protecting public health against this neurotoxin, which is especially dangerous for children,” according to Food and Water Watch. The rule required that lead pipes in drinking systems be replaced within 10 years. Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) introduced the repeal legislation in January.
This kind of change will have lasting consequences.
“We are very worried that if Congress repeals lead and copper rule improvements… we’ll never be able to mandate removal of all these toxic lead service lines ever again,” Grant says.
If this wide variety of actions in the White House, in Congress, at the EPA, at the Supreme Court, and elsewhere seems overwhelming, that’s on purpose, Grant adds.
She says Trump and Republicans are deliberately “flooding the zone, doing a lot all at once to kind of hamstring opposition,” explaining: “It’s hard to keep track of, it overwhelms media attention, it’s hard to know where to focus. This massive influx of all these executive orders so fast, all these actions so fast, is intentional, and it’s designed to prevent people from falling into question every illegal action that’s taken, every harmful action that’s taken.”
“This agenda to deregulate, this agenda to gut the federal government, to dismantle the federal government, eliminate core functions of our government, remove these protections,” Grant says, “it’s just an ideology, and they’re acting on it without without care for how it impacts people, for how it impacts our access to safe water… Everyone needs access to safe water, and it’s harming communities across the country.”