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A bill drastically reducing the scope of the Clean Water Act passed through committee in the U.S. House and will likely reach the floor for debate later this month.
The legislation would narrow the definition of bodies of water that qualify for protection under the Clean Water Act and would remove laws requiring permits before discharging pesticides or manure-contaminated stormwater from factory farms into waterways.
Some residents of Iowa, the nation’s leading producer of corn and pork, are concerned the bill and its allowances for agricultural pollution would be yet another blow as the state faces an already dire water crisis.
“It’s just morally wrong,” said Diane Rosenberg, president of Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors, a decades-old nonprofit opposing the growth of factory farms throughout Iowa. “It’s unconscionable that people’s well-being is being shunted aside for industry and corporate profits.”
Introduced by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican from Georgia, the PERMIT Act, or “Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today,” proposes a suite of amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, commonly known as the Clean Water Act, the primary law governing water pollution in the United States.
The bill narrows the definition of “navigable waters” or “waters of the United States” that qualify for federal protection under the Clean Water Act. If signed into law, it would remove groundwater, waste treatment systems, wetlands converted to cropland before 1985, rainfall-dependent waterways, and “any other features determined to be excluded” by the EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from the list of waters eligible for protection.
The definition of “waters of the United States” has been revised several times over the decades, most recently in the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency,which left tens of millions of acres of wetlands without protected status.
But if signed into law, this bill would bestow the final say on what constitutes a protected waterway onto the EPA and the Army Corps.
“It’s a completely unfettered exemption with no criteria,” said Nancy Stoner, senior attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center and former acting assistant administrator for the EPA during the Obama administration. “It completely undermines the rest of the definition of the waters of the U.S.”
Under the guise of permitting reform, the bill weakens the Clean Water Act, said Stoner. During her tenure at the EPA, Stoner oversaw the national program for implementing the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.
“They call it the PERMIT Act. We call it the Permission to Pollute Act,” she said. “A number of these amendments have been proposed in the past, but they are all together here in one bill that is the worst bill for clean and safe water that I have seen in decades.”
In a letter sent to Iowa’s U.S. House representatives, the Environmental Law & Policy Center, Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors and 12 other community and environmental organizations in the state urged elected officials to vote “No” on the PERMIT Act.
“Iowa is on the frontlines of a drinking water emergency,” the letter reads. “The PERMIT Act would make these problems worse.”
In addition to stripping whole classes of waterways of protection, the bill includes provisions that allow for the unregulated discharge of pesticides and agricultural stormwater into protected waters.
“They call it the PERMIT Act. We call it the Permission to Pollute Act.”
The amendments have raised alarms in Iowa, where agricultural pollution is to blame for a decades-long clean water crisis. Nitrate and phosphorus applied as manure or synthetic fertilizer leach into soil and waterways, fueling toxic algal blooms and dangerous nitrate pollution downstream.
The state’s Impaired Waters List categorizes more than half of tested waterways as unsuitable for public water supplies, recreational use or wildlife protection. And this summer, nitrate levels in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers reached record highs, sending drinking water treatment plants in Polk County, home to Des Moines, into overdrive and triggering a first-of-its-kind lawn watering ban.
A years-long analysis of the Des Moines-area watershed, commissioned by the county and published in July at the height of the nitrate crisis, attributed 80% of the nitrate load in the two rivers to upstream agriculture.
But clean water legislation in Iowa is highly dependent on the federal Clean Water Act. The state’s laws are no stricter than federal guidelines, nor do they significantly regulate farm pollution, the majority of which is considered “non-point specific,” meaning it doesn’t originate from a single source, and is exempt from the Clean Water Act.
Notably, the House bill proposes eliminating current Clean Water Act safeguards that require confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to treat any manure that will be discharged into waterways as stormwater following rainfall. It exempts agricultural operations from seeking stormwater discharge permits altogether and frees them from any nutrient management preconditions included in those permits.
Iowa has more CAFOs than any other state. Such an exemption would mean more animal waste, and more nitrate, in Iowa’s water, said Stoner.
“This takes a problem that’s already very bad, and as bad this year as it’s ever been, I believe. And it makes it worse by expanding the agricultural stormwater exemption,” said Stoner.
Water runs along the banks of the Des Moines River. Credit: Anika Jane Beamer/Inside Climate News
The PERMIT Act would also eliminate permit requirements for pesticide discharges into protected waterways. This means that, as long as a pesticide is registered under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, its users, except for factories or water treatment plants, could pollute waters without oversight.
The proposed deregulation of pesticides comes as agrochemical giants lobby for limited immunity from lawsuits in state legislatures across the country, including Iowa, Idaho, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming.
For the last two years, the Iowa state Senate has passed a bill that would make it impossible to file “Failure to Warn” lawsuits against pesticide companies for cancer and other health issues caused by their products. Amidst immense public backlash, the state House has repeatedly declined to take up the bill.
Eliminating permitting requirements for agricultural polluters chips away at already meager protections for Iowa waterways, said Rosenberg, president of Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors.
“It’s those permits that allow for public input. It’s those permits that put some measure of protection on waterways,” said Rosenberg.
Supporters of the bill include national associations representing the livestock, agrochemical, mining, and construction industries.
In a letter to members of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, the American Farm Bureau urged swift passage of the amendments, critiquing existing Clean Water Act guidelines for presenting, “unnecessary delays, regulatory uncertainty, and administrative burdens that hinder agricultural production, conservation, and environmentally beneficial projects.”
The Farm Bureau did not respond to further requests for comment.
Hot off the heels of the summer-long Des Moines nitrate crisis, the timing of the bill couldn’t be worse for Iowans, said Matt Ohloff, an Iowa-based policy advocate for the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
“People around the state are seeing water quality issues in their communities, and there are serious public health concerns across the state because of Iowa’s high water-pollution levels. So this bill being proposed at this moment is just particularly egregious,” said Ohloff.
U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, a Republican representing Iowa’s second district, “supports legislation, including the PERMIT Act, to get the government out of the way for important infrastructure projects in Iowa,” a spokesperson wrote to Inside Climate News.
Rep. Hinson has spearheaded several initiatives to both improve drinking water quality in Iowa and support Iowa agriculture, her spokesperson added, restoring voluntary conservation tools for farmers in northeast Iowa’s hilly Driftless Area and expanding access to precision agriculture technology.
In Hinson’s district,underground aquifers provide drinking water but are closely linked to surface water. Pollution originating above or below the surface is likely to manifest in well water.
Iowa’s three other U.S. House representatives, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn and Randy Feenstra, all Republicans, have not responded to multiple requests for comment on their stance on the bill.
“Anyone in the Iowa congressional delegation thinking that this is good for their constituents and good for Iowa is just baffling,” said Ohloff.
Barb Kalbbach, a fourth-generation farmer in Dexter, Iowa, and a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, agreed.
“Here we sit in Iowa, with our waterways full of nitrates, ponds that are full of algae, not to mention our rivers. … And our congress people are going to vote for the PERMIT Act so that we can diminish the Clean Water Act even more? What are they thinking? That’s my question.”
Amendments allowing more pollution in waterways contradict a clear public desire for cleaner water, said Stoner, of the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
The Clean Water Act has a long history of bipartisan and public support, but the recent difficulty in maintaining that bipartisan support is discouraging, she said.
Rosenberg of Jefferson County remains “cautiously optimistic.” It will require an immense amount of public pressure on representatives to prevent the bill from passing in the House, she said.
“Who does this help?” asked Rosenberg. “This doesn’t protect people. This doesn’t protect the environment. This doesn’t protect waterways. This protects the pocketbooks of industries.”
