June 12, 2018
The American Farm Bureau Federation, together with a broad coalition of other farm and business groups, filed a brief in support of 13 states challenging the EPA’s 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule before a federal district court in North Dakota.The brief explains how EPA repeatedly broke the law in writing a rule that would vastly expand its Clean Water Act regulatory authority to cover small and isolated land and water features.According to the brief, the 2015 rule “reads the term navigable out of the [Clean Water Act] and asserts jurisdiction over remote and isolated features that bear no meaningful relationship to ‘navigable waters.’” The coalition also argues that the rule is unconstitutionally vague because it “gives malleable discretion to bureaucrats to determine which land features are jurisdictional ‘waters’ and which are not.”
