Today’s Federal Register carries a supplemental notice from the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers reopening public comment on the definition of “waters of the United States,” the phrase that decides how much of the country’s wetlands and waterways fall under federal Clean Water Act permitting and one of the longest-running fights in environmental law.
- Environmental Protection Agency / Army Corps of Engineers. The agencies issued a supplemental notice asking for renewed public comment on how to define “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act, responding to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA, which narrowed federal jurisdiction over wetlands. The definition has been rewritten by nearly every administration since the 1970s because it determines whether a landowner needs a federal permit before touching a wetland or stream; reopening comment for another round means the public gets a fresh formal chance to weigh in, but it also means that three years after Sackett the agencies still haven’t settled on language built to survive the next legal challenge. Read the notice.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC published a notice formally restructuring its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, consolidating offices, retitling divisions and branches, and rewriting mission and function statements. A Federal Register notice is how a reorganization like this becomes official, and because NCIRD sets vaccine and respiratory-disease policy, which offices survive the consolidation and which get folded into broader units is worth tracking even though the notice itself offers little explanation for the changes. Read the notice.
- Department of Energy. DOE requested public input on implementing an executive order that declared a national emergency over the security of the U.S. bulk-power system, asking specifically what equipment and transactions should count as “covered” when they involve foreign-made grid components or what the order calls “Covered Foreign Entities.” A request for comment at this stage is where the real boundaries of an emergency declaration get drawn, since how DOE answers will decide how much of the grid’s supply chain ends up restricted and how much stays untouched. Read the notice.
- Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. PHMSA granted a request from Exxon Mobil for a determination that federal hazardous-materials law preempts state common-law tort claims over the safety of gasoline transportation, concluding that letting such claims proceed would obstruct compliance with the federal regulatory framework. Preemption determinations like this are unusual because they are issued at a single company’s request and can close off state-court lawsuits before they’re ever filed, which raises a fair why-now question about what prompted Exxon to seek this ruling and whether other carriers will lean on it in future litigation. Read the notice.
- Environmental Protection Agency. EPA proposed repealing its own December 2024 rule that had partially approved North Dakota’s regional-haze air plan, after the state and Basin Electric Power Cooperative petitioned for reconsideration and a federal appeals court agreed to pause the related litigation while EPA reworked its position. An agency proposing to undo a rule it finalized less than two years earlier is worth flagging on its own, and more so because the reconsideration was granted specifically at industry’s request rather than the agency’s own initiative. Read the notice.
- Agricultural Marketing Service. USDA withdrew a year-old proposed rule that would have cut the number of importer seats on the National Watermelon Promotion Board from nine to seven, stating outright that the calculation used to justify the change was “legally insufficient.” It’s a small commodity-board governance matter, but an agency publicly admitting its own math didn’t hold up is a useful reminder that not every proposal gets the scrutiny it needs before it lands in the Federal Register in the first place. Read the notice.
This edition reviewed all 127 documents published in today’s Federal Register. Excluded as routine: National Park Service NAGPRA notices (inventory completions, intended repatriations, and dispositions), SEC self-regulatory-organization rule filings, antidumping and countervailing-duty determinations, OMB/PRA information-collection notices, Superfund taxable-substance-list filings, routine safety-zone and drawbridge notices, FDA patent-extension regulatory-review-period determinations, presidential major-disaster declarations (five states today), and standard advisory-committee meeting notices.
Bureaucracy Times 