State and local water managers from across the country are scheduled to meet this week with White House officials to discuss the very thing Oklahoma U.S. Sen. Alan Armstrong has targeted in his call for permitting reform—Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.
Sen. Armstrong wrote about it in a June Op-Ed piece for the Washington Reporter.
“For years, America’s permitting regime has strangled major infrastructure projects. Processes originally intended to ensure legitimate environmental review have increasingly evolved into de facto veto points. At the center of this dysfunction is Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.
Congress intended Section 401 to ensure projects complied with legitimate water quality standards, but over time states have expanded its use to evaluate the overall “campaign funding potential” of projects — effectively weaponizing the process to block infrastructure that political leaders oppose,” wrote the Senator whose term as the replacement for Markwayne Mullin ends in January 2027.
Section 401 requires that any projects that might result in pollution to a navigable waterway to receive a water-quality certification from the states or tribal lands where the pollution could originate before obtaining federal permits.
Sen. Armstrong singled it out in a June interview with David From on the American Potential Podcast and talked about energy and his mission in the Senate to help American producers build and grow the U.S. energy supply.
“You know, the single most weaponized tool out there to stop a project these days, surprisingly, is the 401 water quality certificate that is issued by states. And most of these big, long haul interstate projects are going across multiple states. Sometimes there’s a lot of benefit in that particular state for the project and sometimes there’s not,” answered Armstrong when asked what the number one roadblock for energy was permitting.
Armstrong suggested the weaponizing of Section 401 took place when New York denied approval of Williams Co.’s proposed 125-mile Constitution Pipeline, a project proposed when Armstrong was CEO of the Tulsa company. It is designed to deliver natural gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region to Albany, New York, and the pipeline system that connects with New England. The Constitution might possibly become one of the first tests if and when the EPA finishes proposed new Section 401 rules, something the administration revealed in January. Those rules will be the focus of this week’s White House meeting with the water managers and administrators.
At least 58 environmental groups are opposed to the changes and sent a joint letter to Congressional leaders this summer imploring them to maintain states’ role while they tackle the larger issues of federal permitting as Inside Climate News reported
One group fighting the proposed changes is the Environmental Law Institute which contends the Trump Administration’s proposed changes would “significantly narrow the scope of Section 401 and limit state and tribal review of nationwide and general permits.”
