I’ve mentioned the Brandon admin’s EPA trotting out their Big Massive Government Waters of The US rule ahead of a Supreme Court decision a few times, to go with a few times while Brandon was Obama’s VP. Perhaps it’s time for an explanation of how bad this is
Biden backs his administration into a puddle
For a president who supposedly likes building infrastructure, President Joe Biden has a funny way of showing it. In a New Year’s Eve news dump, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new Clean Water Act regulations that will make it more expensive for people to build roads, bridges, and homes.
At issue is the definition of the term “waters of the United States,” which for decades meant interstate waters that were “navigable in fact,” such as a river, canal, or lake. But in a blatant power grab, the EPA expanded that definition to include not only “intrastate lakes, rivers, streams” but also all “mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, or natural ponds.”
If there is a puddle somewhere, Biden wants authority over it. Under his administration’s new definition, if your property has a dirt road that occasionally gets muddy after a hard rain, it was now part of the “waters of the United States.” Under the Clean Water Act, this meant that if you wanted to pave the road, put a building on it, or run a power line over, you would need to get not only state and local permits but also a federal permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Getting a permit to build even adjacent to “waters of the United States” takes an average of 788 days and $271,596 in costs. Almost $2 billion is spent on federal water permits each year by people trying to improve infrastructure and housing stock. No wonder infrastructure and housing are so expensive.
This is a massive, humongous, insane level of federal over-reach, of control of huge swaths of privately owned property.
Instead, Biden issued a new rule last week that restores the permitting process to its pre-Trump absurdity. This means there will be hundreds of days of delay and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for virtually every infrastructure project in the country.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court is set to deliver a decision that might overturn the Biden water rule. In 2004, an Idaho couple began to build a house across the street from a lake after obtaining state and local permits. Then EPA officials showed up and threatened them with thousands of dollars in fines per day unless they immediately stopped construction and got a federal Clean Water Act permit as well.
The couple sued, and their case was argued before the Supreme Court last October. A decision is expected this spring.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will do the right thing and smack the federal government around for assuming vast authority to regulate people’s private property.
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