Trump Eliminated the Rule Protecting Drinking Water for 117 Million Americans.

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Clean water protection sounds abstract until you think about where your tap water comes from. For most Americans, it starts as precipitation that flows into small streams, through wetlands, and eventually into larger rivers and reservoirs that feed municipal water systems. The Clean Water Act was designed to protect that entire system. But the Act's scope — which waterways count as "waters of the United States" and therefore fall under federal jurisdiction — has been legally contested for decades, with industry groups arguing for a narrower interpretation that exempts more waterways from regulation. WOTUS was an attempt to resolve that ambiguity in favor of protection. The Trump repeal resolved it in favor of industry.

What WOTUS Actually Did.

The WOTUS rule brought smaller streams, seasonal streams, and adjacent wetlands under the Clean Water Act's protections. This mattered because these smaller bodies of water are where pollution and agricultural runoff most often enter the water supply. Without federal protection, polluters can discharge into these smaller waterways knowing the contamination will flow downstream without triggering Clean Water Act liability. States can theoretically fill the gap with their own regulations, but many states — particularly agricultural states with significant farming and development lobbies — had weaker standards than the federal rule.

The rule was contested from the moment it was finalized. Agricultural groups, developers, and industry lobbies challenged it in court and through the political process. The Trump campaign promised to repeal it. The administration did so in September 2019, replacing it with the Navigable Waters Protection Rule — a deliberately narrower framework that removed protections from an estimated 51 percent of wetlands and hundreds of thousands of miles of streams that had been covered under WOTUS.

What Was Lost.

Environmental and public health groups documented what the repeal meant in practical terms: polluters could discharge into previously protected streams without federal permits. Wetlands that had filtered agricultural runoff before it reached drinking water sources were no longer federally protected and could be filled for development. The EPA itself estimated that millions of acres of wetlands lost protection. In states with weaker environmental laws, there was no backstop.

The Biden administration worked to restore WOTUS protections, finalizing a new version of the rule in 2023. That effort was then substantially undercut by the Supreme Court's decision in Sackett v. EPA (2023), which significantly narrowed the definition of "waters of the United States" beyond even what the Trump rule had established — removing federal protection from wetlands that don't have a continuous surface water connection to larger waterways. The conservative Court handed the agricultural and development industries a victory that Trump's rule had not fully delivered.