The fight over President Biden’s EPA move to rewrite the WOTUS rule is heating up.
A handful of farm-state Senators support a bill to make the Trump era rule and its wetlands permit requirements permanent.
It has been in and out of courts for years and is a major concern for the American Farm Bureau and its president, Zippy Duvall. They recently met 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... If they attempt to take ‘navigable’ out of there, it’s probably going to be a deal-breaker with us,” according to Mr. Duvall.
Farm-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, 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,” the Senator explains.
Grassley along with Joni Ernst recently wrote to Secretary Vilsack on the industry’s concerns that the administration might roll back last year’s rule that replaced WOTUS.
Related:
Tension continues to build as we await Biden’s WOTUS proposal
What is the definition of WOTUS?
Sen. Grassley on the outlook of WOTUS under Biden
NCBA on WOTUS win in circuit court decision