Clean Water Is Being Rewritten in Washington

What has changed in clean water recently?

Since early 2025, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has pursued what its own administrator, Lee Zeldin, called the largest deregulatory push in the agency's history, announcing 31 rollback actions in a single day in March 2025 and describing it as "the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen." Several of those actions go straight to the water you drink and the rivers you swim in.

Two changes stand out. First, in November 2025, the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed narrowing the definition of "Waters of the United States," or WOTUS, the term that decides which rivers, streams, and wetlands the Clean Water Act actually protects. Building on the Supreme Court's 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision, the proposal would leave only about 19 percent of mapped wetlands in the lower 48 states federally protected, by the agencies' own analysis.

Wait, how do you "redefine" a body of water?

You don't, and that's the key to the whole fight. The Clean Water Act only protects what it calls "waters of the United States," but Congress never spelled out exactly what that covers. So the boundary gets set by whoever interprets those four words: the EPA and the Army Corps, within limits set by the Supreme Court. Redrawing the definition doesn't change a single wetland. It changes which ones the federal government has authority to protect. A marsh outside the new line is the same marsh; it just no longer needs a federal permit before someone fills or pollutes it.

Second, in 2025 the EPA moved to roll back part of the landmark 2024 drinking-water limits on PFAS, the "forever chemicals" linked to cancer and other health harms.

There are two ways to read all this, and honest coverage should include both.

The disagreement is real, and it is exactly why the next part matters.

Who is actually doing the polluting, and why?

For PFAS, the trail leads back to a short list of large chemical manufacturers. The names that come up most are 3M and DuPont, along with DuPont's corporate offspring, Chemours, Corteva, and EIDP, which were split off through a series of spinoffs. These companies developed and sold PFAS starting in the 1940s.

The "why" is almost mundane: these chemicals are remarkably useful. PFAS repel water, oil, and stains, and resist heat, which is why they ended up in nonstick cookware, waterproof and stain-resistant fabrics, food packaging, cosmetics, and the firefighting foam (known as AFFF) used for decades at military bases and airports. Every one of those ordinary uses is also a pathway for PFAS to escape into soil, groundwater, and eventually people. They are called "forever chemicals" for a reason: they do not meaningfully break down, so they accumulate in the environment and in human bodies over decades.

The part that has turned this from a pollution story into a legal one is what regulators and plaintiffs allege the companies knew. In lawsuits across the country, states and individuals claim the manufacturers understood early, in some cases as far back as the 1970s, that PFAS were toxic and building up in human blood, and kept selling them while concealing that knowledge from the public. The companies have generally not admitted liability, and courts have not made final findings on many of these claims. But the allegations are now central to one of the largest environmental legal fights in American history.

The courts step in where regulators step back

And here is the counterweight to the regulatory rollbacks. As federal rules have loosened, the courtroom has become the more active venue for holding polluters accountable.

The scale is enormous. As of 2026, more than 15,000 personal-injury claims are consolidated in a single federal case in South Carolina, brought by people, many of them firefighters and residents near contaminated bases, who say PFAS exposure caused kidney, testicular, liver, or thyroid cancer or other serious illness. The first major test trial, focused on kidney cancer from contaminated drinking water, is expected in late 2026, and its outcome is likely to shape the value of thousands of other cases.

And the pressure keeps building: on July 9, 2026, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued 3M, DuPont, Chemours, Corteva, and EIDP, alleging they knowingly sold toxic PFAS products while hiding the risks, and asking the court to make them fund statewide cleanup and put warning labels on PFAS products still being sold.

The companies deny wrongdoing, and the case is unproven, but the trend is clear: weakened regulation and intensifying litigation are happening at the same time.

So who fights these battles every day?

Big lawsuits make headlines, but the daily work of defending clean water falls to the people closest to it. And for a lot of American waterways, that means a Waterkeeper.

Waterkeeper Alliance is an international coalition of more than 350 community-based clean-water organizations working in over 45 countries. The model began on the Hudson River in the 1960s and 1980s, when polluted-out fishermen organized, put a patrol boat on the water, and hired the first full-time "riverkeeper" to serve as the public's eyes, ears, and, when necessary, plaintiff. The idea spread, and in 1999 the existing keeper groups joined forces to share legal firepower and strategy. Today each local keeper stays independently funded and directed by its own community, while drawing on the Alliance's shared scientific and legal muscle. The mission is global, but the accountability is local.

That combination is built for exactly this moment. Waterkeeper Alliance has been among the most vocal opponents of the WOTUS rollback.

When protections weaken in Washington, keeper groups are the ones documenting the harm on the ground and pressing the case in court.

Why we gave to our local chapter

This is what drew Essential Oxygen to Waterkeeper Alliance. A national fight is won or lost in specific watersheds, and we wanted our support to land in ours. So we gave to Russian Riverkeeper, the Alliance's chapter for the Russian River here in Northern California.

Russian Riverkeeper launched in 2001 as the 65th member of Waterkeeper Alliance, growing out of a local group that had been fighting gravel mining and pollution since 1993. Its record is tangible.

It helped end destructive gravel mining in the river permanently, opened a restored native-habitat park in Guerneville that doubles as an outdoor classroom, and through its Clean Team program pulled roughly half a million pounds of trash from the river in 2025 alone, with about 900 volunteers across 75 cleanup events. A cleanup crew hauling trash and a legal team defending water rights are two halves of the same job, and a donation to a local keeper funds both.

Find the keeper nearest you

Here's our ask. Whatever is happening at the federal level, the water closest to you almost certainly has someone fighting for it. Visit waterkeeper.org and search by your region or nearest body of water, whether that's a river, bay, sound, or lake. Because each chapter is locally funded and directed, your gift stays in your watershed. If you're in the Russian River area, you'll find our chapter at russianriverkeeper.org.

The easiest way to protect the water you rely on is to back the people already fighting for it.