Billions in Avoided Costs: Who Bought the WOTUS Delay
Decades of Senate-disclosed lobbying filings show agriculture, energy, and real estate industries spent hundreds of millions to repeatedly narrow federal water jurisdiction — and the compliance...
The single most documented fact in the four-decade battle over the Waters of the United States rule is this: in 2014, 231 members of the House of Representatives signed a formal letter demanding EPA withdraw its proposed water jurisdiction rule — while the agricultural, energy, real estate, and construction lobbies that opposed that rule were collectively spending tens of millions of dollars per year in disclosed federal lobbying. That letter is not speculation. It appears in U.S. Government Accountability Office Report B-326944, published December 2015 and available at gao.gov. The financial architecture behind it is documented in Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings at lda.senate.gov. The connection between the two is the story the public record tells, incompletely but unmistakably.
The Waters of the United States, defined under the Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. § 1251 et seq.), determines which wetlands, streams, and tributaries require federal permits before a landowner, developer, energy company, or farmer can discharge pollutants or fill them with material. The Army Corps of Engineers reports that individual Section 404 permits cost applicants between $28,915 and $271,596 each, with processing timelines averaging 788 days. Jurisdiction is money. A narrower WOTUS definition means fewer permits required, fewer delays, and billions in avoided compliance costs across the agriculture, construction, oil and gas, and real estate sectors. That is not an inference — it is the arithmetic of regulatory scope.
The American Farm Bureau Federation, headquartered at 600 Maryland Ave. SW in Washington, was the lead plaintiff in American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA and the most sustained financial force in the anti-WOTUS campaign. Senate LDA filings, compiled by OpenSecrets, show AFBF reported federal lobbying expenditures of $5.06 million in 2014, $4.52 million in 2015, $5.20 million in 2017, $6.08 million in 2020, and $6.23 million in 2022, with WOTUS and Clean Water Act regulation listed as primary lobbying issues throughout. AFBF's political action committee, AgPAC, contributed approximately $860,000 to federal candidates in the 2020 cycle alone, with roughly 78 percent directed to Republican recipients, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — the bodies with Clean Water Act jurisdiction — were among the recipients.
AFBF was not alone. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association reported federal lobbying of $2.08 million in 2015 and $1.62 million in 2022, per LDA filings, with WOTUS cited as a specific issue. The American Petroleum Institute — whose members face Section 404 permitting requirements for pipeline construction through wetlands — reported lobbying expenditures ranging from $5.27 million to $8.94 million per year between 2015 and 2022, per OpenSecrets and Senate LDA records, with WOTUS appearing in disclosed issue codes. ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Koch Industries and affiliates each disclosed WOTUS as a specific lobbying issue in their LD-2 quarterly filings during the 2017–2022 period, with individual company annual lobbying budgets — covering all issues — ranging from $6 million to $14 million annually. The National Association of Home Builders reported lobbying of $3.28 million in 2014 rising to $4.57 million in 2022, with WOTUS cited as a target issue and formal public comments submitted in the 2014, 2021, and 2022 rulemaking dockets.
The regulatory timeline that resulted from this sustained financial pressure is a matter of administrative record. The 2015 Obama Clean Water Rule was litigated immediately upon publication. President Trump's Executive Order 13778, issued in 2017, directed EPA to review and replace it. The resulting 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule adopted the narrowest federal water jurisdiction in decades, effective June 22, 2020. The Biden administration reversed course in 2023 with a rule restoring broader scope — which was then itself curtailed after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Sackett v. EPA, 598 U.S. (2023), which rejected the longstanding 'significant nexus' test established by Justice Kennedy in Rapanos v. United States, 547 U.S. 715 (2006), and imposed a strict adjacency standard that excluded most non-continuously-flowing tributaries from federal jurisdiction. The current Trump administration initiated yet another WOTUS review in 2025. Each cycle of reversal and delay represents, in practical terms, continued non-jurisdiction over contested water bodies — and continued avoided permitting costs for the industries that funded the opposition.
Environmental advocacy groups — the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council — participated on the other side of this battle, submitting public comments, filing litigation, and lobbying Congress. Their combined federal lobbying expenditures are a fraction of the opposition coalition's reported totals. This is not a both-sides story of equivalent financial firepower. The public record documents a structural asymmetry: the industries with the largest compliance cost exposure at stake deployed the largest disclosed lobbying resources, and the regulatory outcomes over four administrations have, net of the period from June 2020 through 2023, favored narrower jurisdiction. EPA's own 2022 Economic Analysis of the Revised Definition of WOTUS acknowledges partial compliance cost data but does not publish a sector-by-sector accounting of avoided costs attributable to the 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule. That accounting has never been completed by any federal agency.
What remains hidden is substantial. The 231 House signatories of the 2014 letter and their individual agricultural PAC receipts in the relevant election cycles have not been compiled in any single published analysis — the data exists in FEC records at fec.gov but has not been correlated against the letter. State-level lobbying expenditures by the fifty affiliated state Farm Bureau organizations are not aggregated in any federal database, meaning the true scale of the agricultural lobby's WOTUS spending is larger than the federal figures reflect. LDA disclosure rules do not require organizations to report the portion of total lobbying expenditures allocated to any single issue like WOTUS, so API's, ExxonMobil's, and NAM's WOTUS-specific spending cannot be isolated from their broader EPA lobbying totals. The instrument that would reveal most of what remains hidden is a mandatory LD-2 amendment requiring issue-level expenditure disaggregation — legislation that has been proposed and not enacted. Short of that, a joint Congressional Research Service and GAO analysis correlating the 231 House signatories' FEC records with the timeline of WOTUS rulemaking actions would, at minimum, complete the factual record the public is owed.