Huffington Post - The Environmental Protection Agency is set to undo yet another Obama-era environmental regulation after releasing a proposal on Tuesday meant to dismantle a rule protecting rivers and streams from pollution.
The latest target from the notably anti-environmental administration of President Donald Trump is the Clean Water Rule, which in 2015 updated a longstanding act passed during the advent of the EPA to clean up heavily polluted federal waterways. The rule, passed under former President Barack Obama, expanded federal authority to include all “navigable” waters under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act. It ultimately protected the drinking water of more than 117 million Americans.
The Clean Water Rule was the result of more than 400 meetings with stakeholders and a review of more than 1 million public comments. However, Trump has long called the update that environmentalists hailed a “disaster.” He signed an executive order shortly into his term, urging the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to dismantle the rule.
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In a sense that has already been defacto policy at the state level in many regions, particularly those where large agribusiness interests hold sway. The federal presence in the form of active EPA investigators is negligible--if there's no one to report it, the problem doesn't exit. Such is one of the many frustrations of existence in the Great Heartland
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