Arizona U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Marquez on Monday vacated the Trump administration’s scaled-back clean water rule that had limited the number of waterways that could be federally regulated.
The order brings a swift end to the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR), even though the Biden administration had begun the process of reworking the regulation, reports E&E Green Wire.
The EPA and Army Corps of Engineers has earlier been successful in getting courts in other parts of the country to allow the Biden administration to come up with a new definition of waters of the U.S., or WOTUS, without immediately scrapping the Trump rule.
CTV News Canada is reporting that Judge Marquez said that leaving the Navigable Waters rule in place while the Biden administration worked on their own rulemaking could lead to “serious environmental harm” and that the Trump rulemaking process was filled with “errors.”
Specifically, Judge Marquez said the Trump rule, which gutted the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Water Rule, was too flawed to keep in place.
“The seriousness of the Agencies’ errors in enacting the NWPR, the likelihood that the Agencies will alter the NWPR’s definition of ‘waters of the United States,’ and the possibility of serious environmental harm if the NWPR remains in place upon remand, all weigh in favor of remand with vacatur,” wrote Márquez, an Obama appointee.
The remand and vacatur of the Trump water rule is a victory for the six federally recognized Native American tribes who had sued the EPA and Army Corps for passing a rule that failed to protect their waterways, reports Reuters.
“The court recognized that the serious legal and scientific errors of the Dirty Water Rule were causing irreparable damage to our nation’s waters and would continue to do so unless that Rule was vacated,” said Janette Brimmer, attorney for Earthjustice, which represented the tribes.
