Trump EPA Suspends Clean Water Rule, Resolves Long-Standing Concern That Streams Feeding Drinking Water Of 117 Million Americans Were Receiving Federal Protection

WASHINGTON. The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it had finalized a rule suspending for two years the 2015 Clean Water Rule, resolving a long-standing administration concern that small streams, headwaters, and wetlands feeding the drinking water supplies of roughly 117 million Americans were currently subject to federal anti-pollution protection.

The two-year applicability delay, signed by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, freezes a regulation that had defined which of the nation's waters fall under Clean Water Act jurisdiction. The rule, agency officials explained, had been imposing an unsustainable burden on industries that would prefer to discharge effluent into a body of water without first determining whether the discharge was legally prohibited.

"The previous rule treated nearly every American puddle as if it might connect to a river that millions of people drink from," said one administration official, citing the substantial scientific evidence that nearly every American puddle does, in fact, connect to a river that millions of people drink from. The official added that the new approach would allow developers, miners, and large agricultural operations to act on the assumption that no such connection exists until a downstream community proves otherwise in court.

Mr. Trump, who had signed the underlying executive order at a February 2017 ceremony surrounded by men in hard hats, had previously described the regulation he was now suspending as "one of the worst regulations of any kind, anywhere in the country," a category he did not further specify. The administration declined to identify which specific waterways would lose federal protection, citing the impossibility of doing so without first acknowledging which waterways had been protected.

The suspension is widely understood inside the agency as a procedural placeholder ahead of an outright repeal, which officials confirmed they intend to pursue once they have completed a redefinition of "waters of the United States" narrow enough to exempt the regulated industries that funded the President's most recent campaign. Career scientists at the EPA, several of whom were not consulted, were available for comment on background.

At press time, residents of communities whose drinking water originates in newly unprotected headwaters were being reassured by the EPA that whatever industrial discharge was now legally permissible into those waters had presumably already been entering them anyway.