Sackett v. EPA – “The Waters of the United States”
On May 25, 2023, the United States Supreme Court released their opinion on Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, addressing the federal Clean Water Act’s (CWA) definition of “the waters of the United States.” In summary, the Court found the CWA extends only to adjacent wetlands where the party asserting jurisdiction can establish, “first, that the adjacent [body of water constitutes]…’water[s] of the United States’ (i.e., a relatively permanent body of water connected to traditional interstate navigable waters); and second, that the wetland has a continuous surface connection with that water, making it difficult to determine where ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetland’ begins.” With this holding, the Court rejected U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) position, and most recent federal regulation, that adjacent wetlands are considered waters of the United States and thus jurisdictional if they possessed a “significant nexus” to a traditional navigable water. The Court found EPA’s interpretation to be inconsistent with the text and structure of the CWA.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision narrowed the definition and standard of what constitutes a “waters of the United States” as defined in the CWA. The Supreme Court held that the CWA extends to “wetlands with continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right,” so that they are “indistinguishable” from those waters. They further endorsed previous decisions that characterized the CWA’s use of “waters” as encompassing relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water resulting in “geographic[al] features that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes.’” The decision reversed the judgement of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and remanded the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.