Trump Court lowers EPA Sewage Treatment Plant enforcement

By Miranda Willson, Pamela King A@E @ A News at Politico

On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, “President” Donald Trump’s Supreme Court majority struck down one of EPA’s long-standing tools for ensuring sewage treatment plants and industrial sites do not degrade water quality.he 5-4 ruling in San Francisco v. EPA blocks the agency from holding the West Coast city liable for sewage discharged from a treatment plant into the Pacific Ocean based on language in its current wastewater permit.

Specifically, the EPA cannot enforce provisions that “make a permittee responsible for the quality of the water in the body of water into which the permittee discharges pollutants,” according to the opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito.

Instead, the court ruled that EPA must be specific about what permit holders can and cannot do, such as by imposing limits on each specific pollutant released by a facility.

The case involves permits issued under EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, a key Clean Water Act tool for safeguarding rivers, lakes, and streams nationwide. The ruling allows the EPA to continue to use narrative permit language about water quality in some cases instead of only numerical limits. Still, it also creates a massive workload for the agency and other permit writers.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett led a partial dissent in which all three liberal justices joined. Among other concerns, she wrote that EPA and state permitting agencies need to include less-than-specific language in wastewater permits for Clean Water Act enforcement.

The ruling is the second from the high court in two years that curbs EPA’s powers under the landmark 1972 law.

It pitted one of the most liberal cities in America — San Francisco — and trade groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against the nation’s top environmental regulator.

In a statement Tuesday, the National Mining Association praised the court for restoring “proper limits to EPA’s authority” and ensuring businesses know how to adhere to their wastewater permits.

The permitting provisions that the court ruled against have existed for decades, said Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. She noted that federal and state regulators often do not know what pollutants could come from a sewage treatment plant. According to Parenteau, who worked in an EPA regional office in the 1980s, this is why they rely on narrative language.

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