Fight Over A Return To WOTUS Continues

The fight over President Biden EPA’s move to roll back the Trump Administration’s Navigable Waters Protection Rule is heating up. At least 30 Republican, primarily farm-state senators are behind a bill to make permanent last year's Navigable Waters Protection Rule which reversed the Waters Of The U.S. rule, established by the Obama Administration. The issue's been in and out of the courts since 2015 and is a major concern for the American Farm Bureau and President Zippy Duvall, who with state presidents met recently with EPA chief Michael Regan.

“He said, pre-2015 ruling, there were some good things in the Clean Water Act, and he wants to evaluate what was good there, he wants to evaluate what was good in the 2015 ruling, and what might not have been good, and he wants to evaluate the current one,” Duvall noted.

But the AFBF head cautioned that if the EPA tries to take ‘navigable’ out of the rule, it’s probably going to be a deal-breaker for farm country. But, many of those senators, including Iowa's Chuck Grassley, are not waiting to find out.

“You need to stay with the current bill, and I’m a co-sponsor of a bill that would do exactly that," Grassley recently said. "But I’m sure that this administration’s going to want to change it, they may want to go back to the Obama era.  I’ve been led to believe that they’re trying to find something in between Trump and Obama, and I probably won’t even like that, but that’s better than Obama.”

Where isolated and even temporarily wetland features like ditches and potholes were considered 'navigable,' if any water flowed to a truly navigable waterway. Grassley and fellow Iowan Joni Ernst recently wrote USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack on Ag’s concerns the administration might roll back last year’s rule that replaced WOTUS.

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