New U.S. clean water rule repeals Trump-era changes

U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from rural Iowa, and Wally Taylor, a Marion lawyer for the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, agree a new federal rule announced Friday designed to protect waterways from pollution is ambiguous.

“They’re probably not strong enough. They leave too much to the imagination,” Taylor said. “Lawyers, as we do, could make some hay out of that if we wanted to challenge those rules.”

The rule revisions released by President Joe Biden’s administration define which “waters of the United States” are protected by the Clean Water Act. The rules have been a flashpoint between environmental groups that want to broaden limits on pollution entering the nation's waters and farmers, builders and industry groups that say extending regulations too far is onerous.

The new definitions replace a Trump-era rule, finalized in 2020, and modestly increase protections for some steams, wetlands, lakes and ponds that have connectivity with navigable waters protected under the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, federal officials said. But they roll back expanded protections sought by President Barack Obama’s administration, reverting to some language used in the rule in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president, the New York Times reported.

Still, many GOP lawmakers and agricultural groups spoke out Friday against the rule.

“The Biden administration’s untimely and out-of-touch new Waters of the U.S. rule is ambiguous and expansive,” Ernst, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement. “Our farmers and business owners are suffering from regulatory whiplash, and continue to bear the brunt of the Left’s radical climate agenda.”

Fellow Iowa Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who also sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee and is one of two crop farmers in the U.S. Senate, echoed Ernst.

“We can protect waterways without excessive (government) red tape on everyday Americans,” including developers, farmers and landowners in Iowa, Grassley posted on Twitter.

Iowa Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson of Marion said in a statement that “regressing to the Obama-era WOTUS regulations will hurt famers, producers and rural Iowans who are already struggling.”

“Farmers are the best caretaker of their own land,” Hinson said. “The last thing they need right now are bureaucrats who have never stepped foot on a farm adding more unnecessary red tape.”

The Iowa Farm Bureau said leaders were “disappointed” by the rule.

“Complicated overregulation requiring a team of lawyers and consultants to identify ‘navigable waters’ on farmers’ own land does nothing to advance our successful water quality efforts,” according to a statement released Friday.

Some national environmental groups Friday applauded the changes.

"Today, the Biden administration restored needed clean water protections so that our nation's waters are guarded against pollution for fishing, swimming, and as sources of drinking water," Kelly Moser, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center's Clean Water Defense Initiative, said in a statement.

But Chris Jones, a University of Iowa research engineer who studies water quality and blogs on the topic, said the new waters of the U.S. rules changes are not substantive and provide little enhanced protection for waterways.

The rules exempt much of the activities of agriculture — as well as ditches, gullies and “water-filled depressions” — so Jones said the criticism rings hollow.

“This is an attempt to keep people agitated in agriculture about the potential to regulate their pollution,” he said. “We might as well just regulate them because they’re going to claim we’re regulating them whether we are or not.”

Taylor said he’s concerned one the legal standards to be used to determine if a tributary falls under the Clean Water Act is whether it’s “relatively permanent,” which he thinks is unclear. Ephemeral streams, which only run part of the year, still can carry pollution to a river or lake, Taylor said.

“What does ‘relatively permanent’ mean?” he asked. “I wish they had gone back to the Obama-era rules or were more thorough and explicit.”

Federal officials said they wrote a "durable definition" supported by past decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court. But the high court is now considering arguments from an Idaho couple whose home building was halted in 2007 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which ruled wetlands on the property were federally protected. The case could limit the EPA’s authority.

The Associated Press and Tom Barton of The Gazette’s Des Moines Bureau contributed.

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