Clean Water Network members Clean Water Action, Earthjustice, Environment America, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and the Southern Environmental Law Center released Courting Disaster: How the Supreme Court Has Broken the Clean Water Act and Why Congress Must Fix It. This new report details how muddied Supreme Court decisions and misguided policies by federal agencies have threatened water quality in many rivers, lakes, streams and other waters across the country.

This report contains more than 30 case studies from across the United States and demonstrates that without immediate passage of the Clean Water Restoration Act, a generation worth of progress toward cleaning up our Nation’s waters may be lost. These telling examples include numerous instances where:

• an administrative agency (Environmental Protection Agency or Army Corps of Engineers) limited legal protection for a given water body, ruling that it is no longer protected by the Clean Water Act;
• a court made a determination undercutting Clean Water Act protections for a water body;
• as a defense in an enforcement action, an alleged polluter raised the issue of whether the water they discharged into is protected water;
• a Corps of Engineers district office originally determined a water not be protected, forcing headquarters officials at EPA and/or the Corps to step in to overrule the Corps district office in order to protect the water body in question; and
• a discharger with a permit argued it may pollute waters without federal safeguards in the future.

To learn more about these specific cases and to read the entire report, please click on the file attached above.