13. Environmental Protection Agency · Major · Needs Congress
Issue a WOTUS rule codifying the Rapanos definition of navigable waters
Printed page 429 13. Environmental Protection Agency
“A WOTUS rule that makes clear what is and is not a “navigable water” and respects private property rights. Coordinate with Congress to develop legislation, if necessary, to codify the definition in Rapanos v. United States that “waters of the United States” can refer only to “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water…as opposed to ordinarily dry channels through which water occasionally or intermittently flows.””
What has happened
- Partially done
Still a proposal, and now proposed a second time. Having considered the comments on the November 2025 NPRM, EPA and the Army issued a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking on the same docket (EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0322, RIN 2040-AG44) to "supplement the NPRM with additional regulatory options on certain aspects of the proposed rule". The Rapanos formulation the Quote asks be made clear is ten months into a rulemaking that has been reopened rather than finalized, so the rung does not move; the legislative half is still untouched.
- Partially done
EPA and the Army published the proposed "Updated Definition of 'Waters of the United States'" limiting jurisdiction to relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing waters and wetlands with a continuous surface connection — the Rapanos/Sackett formulation the Mandate quotes. Comments closed 2026-01-05; no final rule by 2026-08-27, and no codifying bill found.
- Attempted
Administrator Zeldin announced EPA and the Army would revise the 2023 WOTUS definition to track Sackett's "relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing" test; a Federal Register notice on 2025-03-24 opened a docket and listening sessions.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- EPA’s rule page (https://www.epa.gov/wotus/updated-definition-waters-united-states, read 2026-08-27) still shows only the proposal; a Federal Register API search for the title as a final rule returns nothing. The proposal is partial rather than attempted because the March 2025 directive preceded it, and a proposed rule that follows a directive counts as partial.
- Legislative half: a search of the 119th Congress bill titles we keep and search finds none titled for Rapanos, “navigable waters” or “waters of the United States”; the item is marked as needing an act of Congress because of the Mandate’s “if necessary” clause, so the rule alone can carry the item to done once final.
- Same instrument as #1106 (repeal-and-reissue), which also carries the Section 401 proposal.
- The 2026-09-09 supplemental proposal was not picked up by our automated matching, which paired it with an unrelated rail ask; it was found by reading that period’s new proposed-rule titles. Only its Federal Register abstract was read — the full text could not be fetched at the time, so the supplemental’s regulatory options were not read at govinfo.gov and are not relied on for anything above the title and abstract.
- Action
- issue
- Object
- Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule
- ID
- 1107