As President Donald Trump pledges to help lower costs for Americans, his administration’s plan to reduce protections under the Clean Water Act is fueling new concerns about water affordability.
The administration is racing to finalize a rule that will chip away at federal oversight for millions of acres of streams and wetlands. Those resources play an important role in filtering pollutants out of drinking supplies and absorbing rainwater during floods — at no direct cost to consumers.
Trump administration officials say their proposal will provide clarity for farmers and landowners and ease costs for businesses. Yet local officials who oversee sewer systems and water treatment plants say the changes could shift costs to them, putting pressure on water bills at a time when millions of Americans struggle to pay them.
“The affordability issue is already a challenge, and this is going to exacerbate that even further,” said Tony Parrott, executive director of the metropolitan sewer district in Louisville, Kentucky. “If we’re losing that layer of wetlands as a tool, it means we’re going to have to make larger investments on the back end.”
Often described as nature’s sponges, wetlands absorb large quantities of water during rainstorms, which are becoming more frequent and intense in parts of the eastern U.S. due to climate change. Wetlands also help keep nutrients and other pollutants out of surface waters, making it easier to treat water to meet federal drinking water standards.
The Trump administration proposal redefining what counts as a “water of the U.S.” under the Clean Water Act would exclude over 80 percent of wetlands in the lower 48 states, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers estimated. That means that companies building homes, power plants, data centers, highways and other infrastructure might not need to pay mitigation fees or obtain permits to fill in wetlands.
Once finalized, the changes will be “a huge win” for affordability, said EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch. Under the current regulatory system, farmers and landowners must hire expensive consultants to tell them whether they need a permit to build on their property, she said.
“The new rule, if finalized, will put dollars back in the pockets of American families and business and make sure they aren’t bogged down with confusing regulations,” Hirsch said in a statement. “Having a durable, consistent, and clear definition of WOTUS is essential to lowering costs for Americans and accelerating economic growth while protecting human health and the environment.”
The White House referred questions on the rule to EPA.
Republican lawmakers and industry trade groups have backed the changes as key to accelerating infrastructure build-out. Still, the administration has not quantified how the effort may affect the cost of treating drinking water or of dealing with floods.
“The essential nature of the Clean Water Act is protecting sources of drinking water, and that doesn’t even appear in the preamble of the rule,” said Peter Goodman, director of water quality and research for Louisville Water, which runs the city’s drinking water system.
‘Our water is already really expensive’
The changes to the “waters of the U.S.” rule come as some stormwater utilities are increasingly turning to wetlands and floodplains as natural solutions to flooding.
In the Cleveland metro area, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District is seeking to “weave back into the landscape” streams and wetlands that were lost to development years ago, said Matt Scharver, director of the district’s watershed programs. An uptick in intense rain events across the Midwest has made it more expensive for the public utility to manage stormwater across its 360-square-mile footprint.
“If rule changes enable natural streams — perennial, intermittent or ephemeral — and natural wetlands to be not properly managed and removed from the landscape, that adds to that pressure,” Scharver said.
The draft rule would require wetlands to physically touch a larger waterway and have standing water at least for the duration of the “wet season,” in order to be federally regulated. Wet season isn’t defined in the rule, but the agencies said it would be based on past weather patterns in a given area.
The proposal would also end protections for many streams that do not flow year-round, including those that trickle into the drinking water supplies of major cities.
Wetland-rich Houston, for example, draws its drinking water from Lake Houston, a reservoir northeast of the city. Years of groundwater pumping have caused the land to gradually sink, which has forced the city to rely more on the lake instead, said Jill Boullion, executive director of Bayou Land Conservancy, a nonprofit land trust.
Lake Houston is fed by a network of streams and wetlands, some of which may dry up during droughts, Boullion said. If those resources lose protections because of the new rule, Boullion said they could become “a place where untreated runoff gets dumped.”
“What that means for the region is that treatment of drinking water becomes more and more expensive,” she said. “Our water is already really expensive because of that switch from groundwater to surface water.”
Houston isn’t the only place seeing increased treatment costs.
Goodman, of Louisville Water, said the city’s main drinking source — the Ohio River — has seen more frequent harmful algal blooms that degrade water quality. Last year, the water utility spent $1.2 million just for treating for “taste and odor issues” caused by excess algae growth, he said.
“We’re having a lot of discussions in the industry about affordability,” Goodman said. “When we do things that are less protective of water, that is going to have an impact on the cost to treat.”
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently took a stab at quantifying the benefits of wetlands, focusing on the Mississippi River basin. Their findings were published in a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
They found that for a large public water provider serving at least 100,000 people, a single acre of wetlands could yield $200 on average in avoided annual drinking water treatment costs, said Nicole Karwowski, the study’s lead author.
“Wetlands serve as a nature-based solution to water pollution in areas that deal with nutrient issues,” said Karwowski, who is currently an assistant professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University, in an email. “Restoring one wetland in a subwatershed has the potential to reduce ammonia levels by 8% — this leads to significant welfare benefits to local surrounding communities.”
A win for states?
The narrowing of the Clean Water Act comes as the administration is trying to ease concerns about affordability ahead of the midterm elections.
Over the weekend, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy traveled to Ohio and Michigan to highlight their agencies’ efforts to “lower car prices” and promote “consumer choice” for personal vehicles.
Meanwhile, the water sector is already grappling with higher costs, a trend that is leading to bill increases in some places. An analysis released last April from Bank of America Institute found that median water bills increased 7.1 percent between March 2024 and 2025, more than twice the rate of inflation.
Rising power costs since the Covid-19 pandemic are a key factor driving costs up for water utilities, Goodman said. So are tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and climate-related weather events, he added.
“With the impacts of tariffs on the cost of steel and pipe, we’ve seen a real, marked rise in our cost to operate: buying chemicals, buying power and buying pipe,” Goodman said. “Like, 50 percent increases in the cost of certain construction materials.”
Federal support for people who can’t afford their water and wastewater bills is scant.
Whereas low-income people have long been able to tap into the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) for help with energy bills, there is currently no federal program for water bill assistance. EPA estimated in a 2024 report that between 12.1 million and 19.2 million U.S. households lack access to affordable water services and struggle to pay.
EPA’s Hirsch noted that the agency under Trump has continued to dole out grants and loans to help communities pay for water infrastructure. The administration has also argued that a separate proposal to delay deadlines for removing “forever chemicals” from tap water will help keep water affordable.
As for the WOTUS rule, Hirsch said the changes will benefit states.
“This proposed rule also gives states and tribes more authority to manage their own land and water resources — with a much better understanding of those resources than can be found by people far away in D.C.,” Hirsch said.
Even so, the agencies noted in their rule that only about half of states have their own regulations for wetlands, surface waters or both. The rest rely on the “waters of the U.S.” definition under the Clean Water Act.
