Trump goes after clean water (again)

President Trump is on a dirty water kick. He signed away safeguards that protected streams from coal-mining waste earlier this month, and today he signed an executive order that’s being called a “Dirty Water Rule,” making eight demonstrably false statements about its impact in just a few minutes. The order would start rolling back the Clean Water Rule—a regulation that protects wetlands and the drinking water sources for 1 in 3 people (more than 117 million Americans). Based on strong science and more than a million public comments, the Clean Water Rule was finalized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers in 2015. Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, sued the EPA over the Clean Water Rule when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general. Now that Pruitt heads the agency, the EPA will likely try to hamstring or rescind the protections altogether. The health of our nation’s lakes, bays, and coastal waters depend on clean streams and wetlands that flow into them, and Americans rely on these waterways to curb flooding, filter pollutants, and support fish and other wildlife. Trump's latest executive order is nothing more than a gift to corporate polluters.