The Trump administration will strip away environmental protections for streams and wetlands Thursday when it finalizes the rollback of Obama-era rules that stopped pollutants from being dumped into the nation’s bodies of water. The New York Times reports Trump’s new rule will be implemented in the coming weeks and will remove federal protections from more than half of the nation’s wetlands, and hundreds of thousands of waterways. It will allow farmers to dump toxic substances such as pesticides and fertilizers into those waterways, and allow property developers to destroy wetlands for construction projects. Blan Holman, a lawyer specializing in federal water policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said: “This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution.” Trump has previously condemned the regulations as “horrible,” “destructive” and “one of the worst examples of federal” overreach.
