Many celebrate rollback of clean-water regulations

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Cabinet chiefs and GOP lawmakers celebrated alongside farm and business leaders Tuesday as the Trump administration made good on one of its biggest promised environmental rollbacks, proposing to lift federal protections for thousands of waterways and wetlands nationwide.

Environmental groups called the proposed overhaul a grave assault on the aims of the 1972 Clean Water Act, the foundational U.S. water protection law. Administration supporters praised President Donald Trump for knocking back what they said was federal overreach.

The Obama-era water protection targeted for replacement by Tuesday’s regulatory overhaul “was never about clean water,” Rep. Sam Graves, a Republican and farmer from Missouri, and one of about a dozen Republican members of Congress at the launch at headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. “It was always about the federal government getting more control over our water and our lives.”