At Last, EPA Believes in Common Sense

Originally published by Agri-Pulse

Imagine being fined over a million dollars simply for plowing your own field, land your family has farmed for generations.

This isn't a wild hypothetical; it was reality for California farmer John Duarte under an expansive federal interpretation of “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) – an Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency policy that needlessly regulated water on private land. Thankfully, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have announced they will move quickly to review and revise the WOTUS definition, and the House of Representatives recently advanced a bill to do the same thing.

These moves are crucial steps toward restoring sanity to regulation and affirming that the goal of policy should be American prosperity, not the preservation of untouched puddles. For too long, WOTUS has been a weapon of federal overreach, allowing bureaucrats to claim jurisdiction over ditches, seasonal streams, and even low spots that temporarily hold water.

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