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Ditching WOTUS Overreach

March 17, 2025
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Straight Talk with Sam

For years, farmers, landowners, and builders have lived under a cloud of uncertainty and threat from the federal government. For the last several years, the WOTUS, or “waters of the United States,” rule, has hung over their heads, threatening them at every turn. That’s about to change.

In 2015, then-President Obama decided to stretch, way beyond recognition, the fairly limited authority the federal government has under the 1972 Clean Water Act to regulate “navigable waters.” His new definition made it so that the federal government could regulate practically every little ditch or pond in the country – navigable or not. A violation of these onerous rules could have led to ridiculous daily fines. It was a dramatic overreach that threatened to bog folks down in endless bureaucracy for no good reason.

President Trump quickly changed the rule during his first term, but President Biden changed it back. I led an effort to overturn Biden’s overreach in 2023. We ultimately came up short of overriding Biden’s veto. Still, the Supreme Court agreed this overreach couldn’t stand and stepped in to stop it.

Their decision said the Clean Water Act’s use of “waters” encompasses only those with a “continuous surface connection” to traditionally navigable waters, like the Missouri River or Mississippi River. In other words, a farm pond, a ditch, or even a puddle in the middle of a home-building site weren’t under federal jurisdiction and certainly didn’t warrant the hassle and cost of getting a permit to do something on the land. Despite the Supreme Court’s clear ruling, President Biden worked to undermine the decision, leaving folks with even more uncertainty.

Thankfully, things are about to get a lot clearer. This week, new EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that he would work with the Army Corps of Engineers to review the definition of a WOTUS and clarify that a body of water must actually have a continuous surface connection to water that is under federal jurisdiction.

As Chair of the Transportation Committee, I’ve fought the increasingly overreaching, burdensome, and intrusive Obama- and Biden era definitions of WOTUS every step of the way. We can have clean water and common-sense regulations at the same time. There’s no reason for the federal government to have a say over all of our farmland. Thankfully, they no longer will.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves