Army Corps reverses course in Idaho property rights dispute

Washington, DC; December 5, 2025: An Idaho couple is celebrating a legal victory after an Army Corps of Engineers appeals official ruled that agency staffers wrongly claimed federal control of their property. The decision disapproves the staffers’ stated rationale for asserting power over Rebecca and Caleb Linck’s four-acre property. 

“The Supreme Court definitively ruled in Sackett that the EPA and U.S. Army Corps have limited power to regulate wetlands—not broad authority over any property in sight of a puddle,” said Charles Yates, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. “This ruling demonstrates that U.S. Army Corps leadership recognizes the need to abide by the Court’s ruling.” 

The Lincks filed an administrative appeal in July after the Army Corps declared authority over an acre of their Idaho property. Army Corps staffers ignored major physical barriers—including a decades-old road—to allege that areas of the Lincks’ property could be combined with land on a separate property to qualify as a unified wetland subject to federal control. 

Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps can only claim federal control of “navigable waters.” In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the limits of that phrase and the EPA’s and Army Corps’ authority under the CWA in Sackett v. EPA. Under Sackett, the Court held that these agencies cannot claim expansive authority it was never granted by continuously expanding its definition of “navigable waters” to claim power over landlocked properties. 

The Lincks’ case will now be reevaluated in light of the instructions from the appeals officer. 

Pacific Legal Foundation represents the Lincks free of charge. The case is In re: Linck.