President Donald Trump today criticized the Obama EPA, saying it had wrongly included "nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer's land" under the WOTUS rule. | Getty Trump moves to kill Obama water rule

President Donald Trump took the first step today toward killing a landmark Obama administration rule aimed at protecting the country's rivers, streams and wetlands, but which was fiercely opposed by industries from agriculture to homebuilding as a federal power grab.

The executive order signed by Trump is the latest in a series of moves by the White House to sweep away regulations from the Obama administration that conservatives have blasted as a drag on the U.S. economy. And it's expected to be followed by another order in the coming weeks that targets a separate Obama rule aimed at fighting climate change by curbing greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector.


Trump called the Waters of the U.S. rule "one of the worst examples of federal regulation," that showed the government had "truly run amok," at a West Wing signing ceremony attended by congressional opponents of the rule, county commissioners and new EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, who had sued the agency now runs over the regulation in his previous post as attorney general of Oklahoma.

"It was a massive power grab," Trump said at the signing. "The EPA's regulators were putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter. They treated them horribly. Horribly."

However, the rule had barely taken effect before a federal judged halted it while a series of legal challenges played out. The new Trump executive order will not just move to undo the Obama rule, but also lay the groundwork for a much more limited approach to determining which waterways are protected by the federal government under the Clean Water Act.

Trump on Tuesday criticized the Obama EPA, saying it had wrongly included "nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer's land" under the WOTUS rule.

But the Obama administration had explicitly excluded puddles in the regulation, and included exemptions for some -- although not all -- ditches, raising the hackles of environmental groups.

The WOTUS rule was intended to offer clear protections for headwater streams and wetlands under the 1972 water law following years of confusion sparked by two muddled Supreme Court decisions. The administration estimated it would increase the number of waterways protected under federal rules by about 3 percent, but that number was disputed by a slate of industry groups who called it a vast power grab that would intrude on land use decisions.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, one of the most vocal opponents of the rule, cheered today's move, calling it "a welcome relief to farmers and ranchers across the country."

"EPA has too long been characterized by regulatory overreach that disregards the positive conservation efforts of farmers and threatens their very way of life. Today’s action is as much a beginning as an end," Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall said in a statement.

Pruitt told the Farm Bureau Advocacy Conference this afternoon that he has started the process of formally withdrawing WOTUS. “After the president signed the executive order, he and I went back to his office and I sat at his desk and I signed the commencement of the rule to do just that,” Pruitt told the conference. “It's on the way, relief is on the way.”

But environmental and conservation groups say the move could leave 60 percent of U.S. stream miles and 20 million acres of wetlands unprotected and vulnerable to development or pollution. Chris Wood, president of Trout Unlimited, called the shift toward a more restrictive interpretation of federal protections "an unmitigated disaster for fish and wildlife, hunting and fishing, and clean water."

The order instructs the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers, which together implement the Clean Water Act, to review the water rule and begin the formal process of rescinding or revising it. That process would involve a a new rulemaking where the agencies would have to justify the changes — which will open the door for environmental groups and supportive states to sue, something they have indicated they are more than ready to do.

Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who led the development of the water rule for the Obama administration, argued the Trump administration is unlikely to be able to justify changes to the rule, and that today’s order is more bombast than substance.

"An Executive Order may give the illusion they’re fulfilling a campaign promise to gut the EPA, but it doesn't 'trump' a rule," she said in a statement. "The only thing these orders do is make clear this Administration will defer needed public health protections for the American people for the sake of partisan politics."

Particularly concerning for environmental groups is a provision of the order instructing the agencies to focus on a 2006 opinion from late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in any future rule.

That case, Rapanos v. United States, was the last time the high court considered the scope of Clean Water Act protections, but justices could not reach a majority opinion. Antonin Scalia led the court's four conservative justices in an opinion that set a test for federal protections that would severely limit which steams and wetlands were covered, while the court's four liberal justices voted to support the government's more expansive interpretation. Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with conservatives in overturning the government's approach, but wrote his own, stand alone opinion setting a separate test for when waterway should receive federal protection.

Since then, five circuit courts have backed Kennedy's test, which says that streams and wetlands with a "significant nexus" to larger downstream water used for navigation should be protected under the Clean Water Act. The Obama administration pegged WOTUS to Kennedy's test, as did the George W. Bush administration in its 2008 guidance on the issue.

Crafting a new rule pegged to Scalia's opinion would significantly shrink federal protections, leaving waterways in broad swaths of the arid West virtually unregulated by the federal government, since most rivers and and streams there flow only after rare rain storms. It would also leave major wetlands complexes, like the Dakota's Prairie Potholes region, off limits for federal regulators.

"It would be an all-out assault on the nation's water quality," said Jon Devine, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, arguing that wetlands and streams would be easier to bulldoze, subjecting local waterways and downstream rivers to more pollution and leaving them more prone to flooding.

But critics of the Obama rule, including Pruitt, the new EPA administrator, point out that states will still have the right to regulate those waters under their own laws. They contend that states have a better understanding of local conditions and are better poised to regulate wetlands and smaller waterways.

Ultimately, most players expect the issue will end up once more before the Supreme Court. But legal experts argue it will be an up hill battle to convince justices that Scalia's test should become the standard to meet, especially if Kennedy and the court's four liberal justices are still on the bench when the issue arrives.

In the meantime, the widely criticized George W. Bush administration guidance will remain the method that federal regulators use to determine which waterways are protected under the Clean Water Act, and thus require permits if developers want to harm them. Both industry groups and greens alike have complained that policy, which requires regulators to make case-by-case decisions in the field, is laborious, expensive and inconsistent.

Jenny Hopkinson contributed to this report

