The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ignored hundreds of potential Clean Water Act violations since a 2006 Supreme Court decision weakened the law, said two lawmakers who called on President-elect Barack Obama to restore the program’s “effectiveness and integrity.”
Hundreds of oil spills are among the cases dropped or not investigated by the agency, said Representatives Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and James Oberstar, chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
The Democrats released the results of their joint investigation in a letter to Obama.
Waxman and Oberstar blamed lax enforcement in part on a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said the Clean Water Act applies only to wetlands and tributaries with a close connection to a river, lake or other navigable waterway.
The court opinion led the agency to abandon more than 500 potential cases, about half of the agency’s annual water enforcement docket, according to agency memos and e-mails obtained by House investigators.
Two EPA officials criticized Waxman and Oberstar’s report.
The investigation “fails to evaluate the many EPA initiatives under way to provide aggressive enforcement of our Clean Water Act programs,” Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water, and Granta Nakayama, assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance, said in a written statement Dec. 16.
The agency has reached agreements in the last year with Clean Water Act violators to invest an estimated $3 billion in pollution controls, Grumbles and Nakayama said.
Waxman and Oberstar subpoenaed the EPA documents related to clean water enforcement in August. The documents produced so far show “a drastic deterioration” of the agency’s clean- water enforcement since 2006, according to a summary of the investigation.
Oberstar said legislation will be needed to restore Clean Water Act protections.
“It is absolutely shocking that more than 35 years after passage of the Clean Water Act the EPA finds itself unable to take action to protect our waters against oil spills, illegal waste discharges and other harmful pollution,” said Ed Hopkins, director of the Sierra Club’s environmental quality program. •
