The Trump administration is on the cusp of finalizing a rule that’s expected to remove federal protections on millions of acres of wetlands and hundreds of thousands of the nation’s streams. Environmental experts have warned of the far-reaching and likely devastating impacts of the rule, which could put the drinking water of millions of Americans at risk, imperil food safety and threaten countless natural habitats ― and the creatures that call them home.
“This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen,” Blan Holman, a lawyer and water expert at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told The New York Times this week of the impending rule, which the paper reported will be finalized Thursday.
The new rule, put together by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, will serve as a replacement to President Barack Obama’s 2015 Waters of the United States regulation, also known as WOTUS or the Clean Water Rule. Trump made it his mission early on in his presidency to dismantle the Obama measure, which had sought to clarify which streams and wetlands should be protected under the 1972 federal Clean Water Act.
The Obama rule extended federal safeguards to 2 million miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands. But Trump had excoriated the rule as a “disaster” and “one of the worst examples of federal regulation.” He signed an executive order within weeks of taking office to scrap the rule. It was finally repealed in September.
It appears, however, that Trump isn’t content with merely repealing the Obama-era regulation.
Legal experts and environmentalists told the Times that Trump’s new rule doesn’t just toss out the protections introduced by his predecessor, but also eliminates protections to smaller headwaters that have been in place for decades.
More than half the country’s wetlands and millions of miles of streams are expected to lose federal protection under the new rule, Politico reported.
Some groups, including farmers, real estate developers and fossil fuel companies, have celebrated the replacement of Obama’s rule with Trump’s.
At the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention on Sunday, the president’s announcement of the rule overhaul was met with applause and cheers.
“I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all: the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule,” Trump said. “It’s gone. That was a rule that basically took your property away from you.”
The president, however, didn’t mention the potential risks of the rule’s rollback. The drinking water of more than 100 million Americans could be threatened, as could the wellbeing of many animal and plant species, including endangered ones.
Pollutants in waterways could also endanger food safety, experts say, as well as recreational industries like hunting and sport fishing.
Even scientists appointed by the Trump administration have warned of the potential hazards.
The EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board, comprised of many Trump administration appointees, warned last month that the new rule is “not fully consistent with established EPA recognized science, may not fully meet the key objectives of the [Clean Water Act] … and is subject to a lack of clarity for implementation.”
The rule, the board added, “threatens to weaken protection of the nation’s waters” and potentially introduces “substantial new risks to human and environmental health.”
Trump’s new rule is not expected to go unchallenged. Several state attorneys general, with the support of environmental groups, are likely to sue the Trump administration over the measure.
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