Sec. 3. Findings
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Congress finds the following: Water is a singular and precious resource that sustains all life and is fundamental to civilization’s survival, cultural practices, and indigenous ways of life. Clean and abundant water is important for public health, agriculture, transportation, flood control, energy production, recreation, fishing, and municipal and commercial uses. Rivers, streams, wetlands, and other water bodies are hydrologically connected within their watersheds, and scientific evidence shows that the pollution, impairment, or destruction of a water body in one location may significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of other waters.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. EPA, 598 U.S. 651 (2023), reduces the protections of the Clean Water Act contrary to, and impairing, the congressional objective of restoring and maintaining the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s protected water resources. The decision eliminates Clean Water Act protections for tens of millions of acres of wetlands, including wetlands that perform vital functions such as storing water to help reduce flooding, improving water quality by filtering pollutants, providing critical and important habitats for aquatic and other species, and recharging groundwater that provides drinking water and contributes to downstream flows.
The decision also puts at risk Clean Water Act protections for millions of miles of small, intermittent, and ephemeral streams that— comprise the majority of stream miles in the United States; transport large volumes of water to downstream rivers; reduce the introduction of pollutants to large streams and rivers; provide and purify drinking water supplies; are especially important to the life cycles of aquatic organisms; and aid in flood prevention. The peer reviewed scientific literature unequivocally demonstrates that— streams, regardless of their size or frequency of flow, are connected to, and strongly influence the function of, downstream waters; and wetlands, including wetlands that lack surface water connections, are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to, and affect the integrity of, other protected water resources.
Restoring and maintaining the Nation’s protected water resources, including intrastate waters, is necessary to prevent significant harm to interstate commerce and sustain a robust system of interstate commerce in the future. This Act restores Clean Water Act protections to the Nation’s protected water resources to ensure their chemical, physical, and biological integrity. The pollution or other degradation of the Nation’s protected water resources, individually and in the aggregate, has a substantial relation to and effect on interstate commerce.
Protected water resources, including streams and wetlands, provide protection from flooding, and draining or filling wetlands and channelizing or filling streams can cause or exacerbate flooding, placing a significant burden on interstate commerce. Millions of individuals in the United States depend on the Nation’s protected water resources, including streams and wetlands, to filter water and recharge surface and subsurface drinking water supplies, protect human health, and create economic opportunity.
Source water protection areas containing small, intermittent, and ephemeral streams replenish public drinking water supplies serving more than 110 million individuals in the United States. Millions of individuals in the United States enjoy recreational activities that depend on protected water resources, including streams and wetlands, such as waterfowl hunting, bird watching, fishing, paddling, and photography. Those activities and associated travel generate hundreds of billions of dollars of income each year for the travel, tourism, recreation, and sporting sectors of the economy of the United States.
Regionally specific protected water resources, such as prairie potholes in the upper Midwestern prairies, pocosins in the Atlantic coastal plain, playa lakes in the southern High Plains, and Carolina and Delmarva bays along the eastern coast of the United States, provide unique and critical benefits to their surrounding regions, including sustainable water quality and availability, groundwater recharge, wildlife habitat, and ecological benefits. Activities that result in the discharge of pollutants into the Nation’s protected water resources, including through dredging and filling, are commercial or economic in nature, and, in the aggregate, have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
Restoring and maintaining the quality of, and regulating activities affecting, the Nation’s protected water resources is essential to fulfilling the United States treaty obligations. Restoring and maintaining wetlands and other protected water resources is essential to North American wildlife, hunters, and anglers. Restoring and maintaining the quality of, and regulating activities affecting, the Nation’s protected water resources is necessary to protect Federal land and waters from degradation.
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- 598 U.S. 651