Blog

Take an oil and gas operator who spends millions upgrading equipment, filing emissions reports, and complying with air-quality rules that change more often than a coastal forecast. Every form is filed. Every inspection is passed. And yet, a permit is suddenly delayed or reinterpreted, a new reporting requirement is layered on top of the old one, or ...

When federal agencies want to stretch their powers beyond what Congress authorized, they can get almost admirably creative. Case in point: For fifty years, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service have redefined what it means to "take" an endangered animal. The Endangered Species Act authorizes the Fish ...

Note: The photo above is of the Sacketts' Idaho property (marked by dotted line), which the EPA claimed was regulable as "navigable water." It's been nearly two years since the Supreme Court ruled for our clients, Chantell and Mike Sackett, in the landmark Clean Water Act case Sackett v. EPA. Yet the government still isn't complying with the jus ...

Since the Supreme Court decided Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency on May 25, some commentators have been pushing a regrettable narrative, about how an "activist" and "anti-science" court bucked "expert" regulators to gut the Clean Water Act and pollute our nation's wetlands. Pardon the pun, but such criticism is a load of sewage. We wor ...

With the Sackett v. EPA decision on May 25, the Supreme Court restored proper limits on the federal government's Clean Water Act powers. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers stretched the definition of "navigable waters" to include semi-soggy parcels of residential land, like Chantell and Mike Sackett's half- ...

The Biden administration recently published its final definition of "navigable waters" — establishing the scope of federal power to regulate private property under the Clean Water Act. This is the relevant agencies' — Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — fourth attempt at crafting such a definition in t ...

Faced with a Congress that would not endorse his expansive regulatory agenda, President Obama famously remarked, "I've got a pen and I've got a phone." Almost 10 years later, governing by executive fiat continues. The latest round of policymaking by pen and phone came when President Biden designated 53,804 acres of land in north-central Colorado ...

The Clean Water Act turns 50 this fall—and like most things at age 50, it no longer functions like it once did.  Congress passed the Clean Water Act (CWA) on October 18, 1972, to combat pollution in the country's more-than-25,000 miles of waterways. But 50 years later, the government isn't enforcing the CWA as a water-quality statute. Instead ...

Entering its second year in office, the Biden Administration continues to undermine statutory constraints on the administrative state. Most recently, it proposed repealing the Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely rule, or Sunset Rule, that had previously been adopted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)â ...