EPA likely to move to further limit federal protections for wetlands
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 Tweety McTreason 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