Most of the water in the Upper Ohio River Basin starts small: a spring seep on a Laurel Highlands hillside, a creek that runs hard in April and trickles by August, a wet meadow that holds a spring storm for weeks. A new federal proposal would decide whether those places keep Clean Water Act protection, and the public has until October 9 to weigh in.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers are taking public comments on new options for defining “waters of the United States” (WOTUS). Docket number: EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0322.
What is being decided
Since the 1970s, the Clean Water Act has protected “waters of the United States” from dumping, filling, and unpermitted pollution. The catch is that Congress never spelled out exactly which waters count, so the definition has been fought over in courts and rewritten by nearly every administration since.
After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA, which limited protection to waters that are “relatively permanent” and to wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to them, the agencies proposed a new rule in November 2025. They received roughly 220,000 comments. On September 9, 2026, they published a supplemental proposal offering tighter definitions of those key terms.
In plain terms, the new options would generally protect a stream only if it has water every day of the year under ordinary conditions, with allowance for a dry spell of up to 30 days. A wetland would need perennial surface water that connects it to a protected water. Streams that run seasonally, and most wetlands, would fall outside federal jurisdiction.
Share of U.S. wetlands that could lose federal protection, according to a preliminary analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The agencies’ own proposal acknowledges that most currently protected adjacent wetlands would not meet the new definition, because most wetlands do not hold surface water year round.
Why it matters for our watersheds
Small, seasonal streams are the plumbing of the Upper Ohio Basin. They carry water, sediment, and whatever else washes off the land into the creeks and rivers that supply drinking water for millions of people from the headwaters down to the Ohio. Wetlands do the quiet work of catching floodwater and filtering pollutants before they reach those same rivers.
Volunteers with the Izaak Walton League’s Nitrate Watch program see this up close. Nitrate from fertilizer, manure, and failing septic systems is invisible and hard to trace back to its source. When the small tributaries where it enters the system lose federal oversight, tracking it and cleaning it up gets harder, not easier. The same goes for runoff from new development, mining legacy sites, and pipeline and data center construction across our four states.
How to comment
- Open the docket. Go to regulations.gov and search for EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0322, or use the button below.
- Make it personal. Form letters get counted; specific comments get read. Name your stream or watershed, what you have seen change, and why it matters to your community.
- Bring your data. If you monitor water through Nitrate Watch, a watershed group, or a partner program, mention what you test for and what you have found, especially on streams that run seasonally.
- Be clear about what you want. Say whether you support or oppose the proposed definitions of “relatively permanent” and “continuous surface connection,” and why.
- Submit by October 9. Comments can also be emailed to OW-Docket@epa.gov with the docket number in the subject line.
EPA and the Army Corps say the supplemental options are meant to follow the Supreme Court’s direction in Sackett, give landowners clear notice of when a permit is required, and let people judge jurisdiction without hiring expensive consultants. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has described the goal as a durable definition that ends regulatory uncertainty. Many farm, home building, and industry groups support a narrower rule for the same reasons.
Conservation groups, including the Izaak Walton League, Waterkeeper Alliance, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, argue the options go further than the Court required and would leave most wetlands and a large share of streams without federal safeguards.
States still have a say
A narrower federal definition does not stop states from protecting their own waters. Pennsylvania’s Clean Streams Law covers all “waters of the Commonwealth,” and the state constitution’s Environmental Rights Amendment guarantees residents a right to pure water. Maryland and Ohio run their own wetland programs as well. West Virginia leans more heavily on the federal program. That patchwork means the same headwater stream could be protected on one side of a state line and not the other, which is exactly why a regional voice matters.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Water does not check a map before it flows downhill. What happens to a seasonal creek in Somerset or Garrett County shows up in the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, and eventually at the tap in Pittsburgh and points west. Ten minutes and a few honest sentences about the water you know is a small price for having it counted. The deadline is October 9.
Sources: Federal Register supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking, “Updated Definition of Waters of the United States,” published September 9, 2026 (Docket EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0322); National Law Review; Coastal Review; Planetizen (reporting the NRDC preliminary analysis); Izaak Walton League of America Nitrate Watch action alert. Current as of September 18, 2026.
