Supreme Court scales back federal authority to regulate under Clean Water Act

The Supreme Court scaled back the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to regulate "waters of the United States" broadly under the Clean Water Act, a win for landowners and business groups that argued the agencies have been overregulating small bodies of water such as wetlands.

In a unanimous ruling, the court said the Clean Water Act's reference to “waters” that can be regulated are limited to “geographic[al] features that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes’" and to "adjacent wetlands that are 'indistinguishable' from those bodies of water due to a continuous surface connection."