The Navigable Waters Protection Rule

On April 21, 2020, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of the Army (Army) published the Navigable Waters Protection Rule in the Federal Register  to finalize a revised definition of “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. For the first time, the agencies have streamlined the definition so that it includes four simple categories of jurisdictional waters, provides clear exclusions for many water features that traditionally have not been regulated, and defines terms in the regulatory text that have never been defined before. Congress, in the Clean Water Act, explicitly directed the Agencies to protect “navigable waters.” The Navigable Waters Protection Rule regulates the nation’s navigable waters and the core tributary systems that provide perennial or intermittent flow into them. 

The Navigable Waters Protection Rule is the second step in a two-step process to review and revise the definition of “waters of the United States” consistent with the February 2017 Presidential Executive Order entitled “Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the ‘Waters of the United States.’” This final rule became effective on June 22, 2020. On June 19, 2020, the District Court for the District of Colorado stayed the effective date of the Rule only in the State of Colorado. The rule is being implemented by EPA and the Army in all other states and jurisdictions.

This final action is informed by robust public outreach and engagement on the proposed rule, including pre-proposal engagement that generated more than 6,000 recommendations and approximately 620,000 comments received on the proposal. The final definition balances the input the agencies received from a wide range of stakeholders.

Read the final Navigable Waters Protection Rule.

Jurisdictional Waters

Under the final Navigable Waters Protection Rule, four clear categories of waters are federally regulated:

• The territorial seas and traditional navigable waters,
• Perennial and intermittent tributaries to those waters,
• Certain lakes, ponds, and impoundments, and
• Wetlands adjacent to jurisdictional waters

Non-Jurisdictional Waters

The final rule also details 12 categories of exclusions (i.e., features that are not “waters of the United States”), such as features that only contain water in direct response to rainfall (e.g., ephemeral features), groundwater, many ditches, prior converted cropland, and waste treatment systems.

Clarifications

The final rule clarifies key elements related to the scope of federal Clean Water Act jurisdiction, including:

• Providing clarity and consistency by removing the proposed separate categories for jurisdictional ditches and impoundments.
• Refining the proposed definition of “typical year,” which provides important regional and temporal flexibility and ensures jurisdiction is being accurately determined in times that are not too wet and not too dry.
• Defining “adjacent wetlands” as wetlands that are meaningfully connected to other jurisdictional waters, for example, by directly abutting or having regular surface water communication with jurisdictional waters.