A federal judge in North Dakota blocked enforcement of the Biden administration's new clean water rule, delivering a short-term victory for West Virginia and other Republican-led states and interest groups intent on having the courts throw out the regulation.
The ruling, which only covers the 24 plaintiff states that challenged the rule, is another movement in the legal saga of the "waters of the United States" rule, a regulation governing how widely the federal government regulates the nation's waters that has been repeatedly challenged in court across presidential administrations. It also comes less than a week after President Joe Biden vetoed an effort by Congress to cancel his administration's waters of the U.S. rule on the grounds that it's too onerous.
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Judge Daniel Hovland, who was nominated to the court by former President George W. Bush, issued a preliminary injunction against the rule on Wednesday. Hovland's ruling said the court is skeptical that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate waters as expansively as the rule permits it to.
"The EPA’s 2023 Rule will require States, landowners, and countless other effected parties to undertake expensive compliance efforts when their property may implicate navigable waters in ill-defined ways," Hovland's order said, adding that it is "doubtful that Congress endorsed the current efforts to expand the limits of the Clean Water Act."
The preliminary injunction pauses the rule's enforcement until the court can perform a full review of the rule. West Virginia and other plaintiff states sought the preliminary injunction on top of a complaint they filed in February challenging the rule's legality.
The waters of the U.S. rule defines which "navigable waters" are subject to federal regulation, which has extended beyond rivers and lakes to other bodies, including some kinds of ditches.
The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers finalized the rule in the final days of 2022. Rewrites of the rule performed by the Obama and Trump administrations were blocked in court, and the Biden administration sought to finalize a legally sound version by shaping the rule around the version that preexisted the Obama-era rewrite.
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Republican lawmakers and construction and agriculture interests have argued the new rule is still too wide-reaching and could subject landowners and project developers to significant penalties for performing routine activities if those activities are found to have affected waters within the rule's scope.
Congress, with support from some Senate Democrats, voted in March to pass a resolution seeking to cancel the waters of the U.S. rule after the House passed a similar measure, but Biden vetoed the measure.