Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new guidance on the Clean Water Act based on a new interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. EPA. This guidance claims to clarify the “continuous surface connection” requirement of the “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act. But the Biden administration had already amended the rules to follow the Sackett decision. Today’s guidance reinterprets the decision to further erode federal protections of vulnerable wetlands, ignoring the scientific evidence that shows wetlands are critical to maintaining clean waterways and safe drinking water.
The guidance is backed by the American Farm Bureau Federation—a lobbying group representing the interests of industrial agriculture that has denied the science of climate change, worked to water down requirements for corporate climate emissions reporting, counts as “members" millions of non-farmer customers of state-based insurance businesses, and spends millions of dollars on lobbying to influence our food and farm system.
“The Trump EPA is giving a green light for industrial agriculture to further pollute and drain valuable wetlands that currently provide substantial benefits to communities, including flood protection and clean drinking water,” said Dr. Stacy Woods, research director for the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “Big Ag interest groups like the Farm Bureau pretend to represent small family farms when they are really working for giant industrial agricultural companies who could not care less about draining, polluting and flooding rural America in service of their bottom line. Missing from this conversation are the voices of farmers who are invested in being good stewards of their land and who are actually part of the rural communities that benefit from wetlands.”
The Sackett v. EPA ruling stripped federal protections from almost all nontidal wetlands in the U.S. In the Upper Midwest alone, 30 million acres of wetlands providing more than $22 billion in annual flood mitigation benefits are now at risk of destruction by industrial agriculture and real estate development, according to recent research by UCS. The United States already has lost half its wetlands since the country’s founding primarily due to the rapid growth of agriculture and urban and suburban sprawl.
