The Supreme Court struck down some of EPA's rules regulating the discharge of treated sewage. The rules allegedly enforced the Clean Water Act. In a 5-4 decision, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing to join three progressive justices, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA can't play Humpty Dumpty and say the legal standard "means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

It started when the EPA fined the City of San Francisco nearly $10 billion because of alleged violations of its sewage discharge into the Pacific Ocean. There were $313 million in assessed fines and about $10.6 billion in mandated upgrades to its treatment plant. San Francisco did not deny that the EPA had the authority to police sewage discharge; its objection was that the standards were so vague that the city could not meet them because they were forever shifting.

“We simply want to understand our prohibition limits so we can comply with them,” Tara M. Steeley, the San Francisco deputy city attorney, told the justices.

This is how Justice Alito described the situation in his opinion.

Instead, this case involves provisions that do not spell out what a permittee must do or refrain from doing; rather, they make a permittee responsible for the quality of the water in the body of water into which the permittee discharges pollutants. When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards. For convenience, we will call such provisions “end-result” requirements. 

The permittee in this case is a wastewater treatment facility owned by San Francisco. For the past five years, the facility’s permit has included two end-result requirements, and if those provisions are upheld, the City could be heavily penalized even though it was never put on notice that it was obligated to take any specific step other than those it undertook.  San Francisco argues that the end-result provi sions in its permit are not authorized by the CWA, and its position is supported by many other similarly situated cit ies, including New York, the District of Columbia, Boston, and Buffalo, as well as national and state associations whose members collectively “provide wastewater and stormwater services to the majority of [the people in this country whose homes are connected to sewers].”

San Francisco vs. EPA by streiff on Scribd

Alito flipped the script on the EPA, saying that they can't establish a moving target as the "end result" (that sounds sort of gross when dealing with sewage disposal).

Determining what steps a permittee must take to ensure that water quality standards are met is the EPA’s responsibility, and Congress has given it the tools needed to make that determination.  If the EPA does what the CWA demands, water quality will not suffer. 

This case marks the latest entrant in the list of court cases that roll back the incredible authority that the EPA has arrogated to itself to manage the US economy. Previous court rulings curbed the agency’s ability to reduce greenhouse gases (2022, West Virginia vs. EPA) and protect wetlands from runoff (2023, Sackett vs. EPA). The attack on the overweening power of the EPA isn't coming from just the courts. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has ordered a review of EPA's "Endangerment Finding," (see Reconsidering the EPA’s Endangerment Finding: It’s About Time – RedState), which declared  carbon dioxide as a “threat to human health and welfare.”