11.19.21

Hoeven Statement on Biden Administration Taking Steps to Redefine WOTUS

WASHINGTON – Senator John Hoeven today issued the following statement after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed rule to reinstate the pre-2015 Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) definition and repeal the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR), which was put in place by the Trump administration.

“The EPA’s proposal undermines the certainty we worked to provide with the NWPR and is part of President Biden’s efforts to impose burdensome and costly mandates under a new WOTUS definition,” said Hoeven. “The Obama-era WOTUS rule was wrong for our nation, and our farmers, ranchers and energy producers, to name a few of the impacted industries, cannot afford a similar overreach from the Biden administration.”

As a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Hoeven worked to replace the 2015 Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule with the NWPR, which went into effect last year. This followed the senator’s efforts to defund WOTUS in 2016 and 2017 and prevent its implementation.

Earlier this year, Hoeven helped introduce a resolution to uphold the NWPR, after President Biden signed an executive order targeting the rule. Hoeven also recently urged EPA Administrator Michael Regan to ensure regulatory certainty and support commonsense, state-led approaches to regulation, rather than reviving unworkable, one-size-fits-all regulations from the past like the 2015 WOTUS rule. 

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