The PERMIT Act: A Direct Threat to Clean Water and State Authority

Published 9/2/2025 | South Yuba River Citizens League

Congress is considering legislation that could dramatically weaken one of the most important tools we have to protect water quality: the Clean Water Act.

The Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today Act (PERMIT) Act (H.R. 3898) is a sprawling bill that packages together provisions from a set of House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee proposals introduced earlier this year. While billed as an effort to “cut red tape,” the reality is that the PERMIT Act strips away long-standing safeguards for rivers, streams, and communities.

The Clean Water Act is Federal legislation that does a number of things to protect water resources, including establishing water quality standards, outlining appropriate technologies to clean pollutants out of water before they enter the environment, and ensuring polluters are responsible for all pollutants they introduce into the environment, not just those which are “expected” by a given industry. The Clean Water Act also gives Tribes and states the authority to review federally permitted actives and place additional conditions to ensure those projects meet local standards.

What the Bill Does

Of biggest concern is Section 5 of the PERMIT Act. This section rewrites Section 401 of the Clean Water Act in ways that would drastically limit the ability of states and tribes to review and condition federally licensed projects that affect water quality.

Here’s what’s at stake:

Narrowed Scope of Review
The bill changes the language of Section 401 so that states can only evaluate discharges that “may directly result” from a federally licensed activity. This prevents states from considering upstream, downstream, or cumulative impacts of projects like dams, pipelines, or large-scale developments.
Limits to Federal Standards Only
Certification decisions would have to be based solely on a narrow list of federal water quality standards, excluding broader state water quality laws or protections tailored to local conditions.
Eliminates State Law Requirements
Current law allows states to impose conditions based on “any other appropriate requirement of State law.” The PERMIT Act deletes this authority, blocking states from applying their own water quality protections.
Strips Enforcement Power from States
Enforcement authority would rest only with federal permitting agencies, leaving states unable to enforce the very conditions they might place on a project.

All in all, this bill has 21 sections, each one attacking a different part of the Clean Water Act. The language used in the bill threatens freshwater resources, which, by extension, threatens all the communities across California which rely on clean water from the Sierra Nevada.

Of additional concern are:

Section 2: The foundation of the Clean Water Act is developing accurate water quality “criteria” – the science-based level of pollution that a water body can have while still meeting established uses like safe swimming or fishing. This section would mean that criteria are set considering polluters’ costs of treating their pollution. Essentially, unsafe levels of pollution would be deemed safe if treatment was considered too expensive.

Section 4: This section weakens the technological requirements for pollution standards. Currently, standards are based on the best-available technology. This section would change it so that only technologies which are commercially available in the U.S. and demonstrated “at comparable scale” can be considered for treating pollution. This means that an effective treatment technology that is widely used in Canada, couldn’t be considered for use in the U.S. Additionally under Section 4, if an effective emerging technology is being used in some locations, the Environmental Protection Agency could still choose whether or not to require its broad use.

Section 8: This section shields dischargers from Clean Water Act liability, even if dischargers are aware of certain pollutants in their waste and they do not disclose it to pollution control officials. Assuming the pollution control officials do not have reason to expect a specific contaminant.

Section 10: This section would expand current exemptions to the law which specifies that agricultural stormwater is not subject to industrial discharge permitting requirements.

Section 18: This section would significantly weaken the scope of the entire Clean Water Act by giving “the Administrator” or “the Secretary of the Army, acting through the Chief of Engineers” the ability to exclude water features. Essentially this means that the Army Corps could decide to exclude bodies of water (e.g. ponds) from the Clean Water Act by changing what is included in the definition of navigable waters.

Why It Matters

For more than fifty years, the Clean Water Act has been one of the strongest tools available to protect rivers, wetlands, and drinking water sources. It empowers the Environmental Protection Agency, states, and tribes to set science-based water quality standards, hold polluters accountable, and ensure that federally licensed projects do not compromise clean water. In California, this authority has played a central role in safeguarding rivers like the Yuba, defending fish, wildlife, and the communities that depend on them.

The PERMIT Act threatens to unravel these protections. By rewriting the Clean Water Act, the bill would severely restrict the ability of states and tribes to evaluate projects, limiting reviews only to direct discharges, and excluding cumulative or indirect impacts. This narrow approach would leave rivers, ecosystems, and communities vulnerable to long-term pollution and degradation, while silencing local voices in decisions that directly affect their water.

What’s at Stake for the Yuba

The bill would prevent California from evaluating the cumulative impacts of projects like dams, pipelines, or large water transfers on the Yuba. That means the state could be forced to ignore how a dam or hydroelectric project worsens downstream water quality, blocks fish passage, or fuels toxic algae blooms.

The Lower Yuba River is critical habitat for struggling salmon and steelhead. By limiting our state’s science-based water quality standards, the bill opens the door to more pollution, warmer water, and degraded habitat.

Families, farms, and businesses in our communities rely on clean, flowing water from the Yuba for drinking, irrigation, and recreation. The PERMIT Act would put those uses in jeopardy.

What’s Next

The PERMIT Act isn’t about efficiency; it’s about permission to pollute. By weakening state authority under the Clean Water Act, it prioritizes industry convenience over clean water and community health.

SYRCL stands firmly with our partners across the country in opposing this legislation. The health of the Yuba River and all rivers depends on strong, enforceable protections that reflect both science and community needs.

The Permission to Pollute Act (PERMIT) has already passed the relevant House committee.

We anticipate a full floor vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. will occur soon.

SYRCL’s Executive Director, Aaron Zettler-Mann, will be in Washington DC next week. He will be there as a member of the Hydropower Reform Coalition and will be meeting with federal Representatives and Senators to talk about the damage that the PERMIT Act will do to water resources across the country.

Alongside our partners, we will also be addressing our opposition to HR 4776, also known as the SPEED Act, which aims to amend the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and showing our support of HR 4503, which digitizes permitting to accelerate timelines while improving transparency through a unified portal, and HR 3657, the Hydropower Licensing Transparency Act.

We will need your help in the near future as our outreach must be backed by constituent voices and grassroots opposition to this destructive bill.

This post originally appeared on SYRCL.