By Dan Bacher 

In mid-January, the Trump Administration took action to roll back sections of the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, dumbfounding environmental groups in Northern California and around the nation. 

The Clean Water Act, or CWA, establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and controlling quality standards for surface waters. The basis of the CWA was enacted in 1948, when it was first called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. The act was significantly reorganized and expanded in 1972.  

The Clean Air Act, CAA, is the comprehensive federal law that regulates air emissions from stationary and mobile sources. Among other things, this law authorizes EPA to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to protect public health and public welfare and to regulate emissions of hazardous air pollutants. 

The local conservation group Restore the Delta issued a statement that characterized Trump’s rollbacks as “a direct assault on protections for vulnerable communities, decreasing oversight and regulation of pollutant discharges into our air and waterways,” adding that the proposed rollbacks would “essentially remove the legal tools that environmental justice communities and advocates have used to protect culturally sensitive areas and communities already burdened by high pollution levels.”

Restore the Delta has recently been tracking the environmental impacts of new data centers for AI in the region, infrastructure it has found can permanently remove up to 80 percent of drawn water from local systems, as outlined in an upcoming RTD report. The group’s executive director, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, says this is no time to be weakening guardrails.  

“These rollbacks silence the voices of the very communities most affected by pollution” Barrigan-Parrilla noted. “In places like Stockton and countless tribal communities across the country, residents already face elevated pollution levels. Stripping away these protections removes one of the last lines of defense against projects that threaten our health, water, and ways of life.”

GreenLatinos, an environmental non-profit organization, also slammed Trump’s cutbacks, noting that recent reporting shows that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to change how it evaluates air pollution rules. According to agency documents, the EPA would “stop including public health benefits in the analyses it uses when setting limits on air pollution and would instead only focus on the costs to companies.” 

Mark Magaña, GreenLatinos Founding President & CEO, called such decision-making reckless.

“Stripping health impacts out of air pollution rules is not a technical adjustment, it is a moral failure,” Magaña said. “This EPA action puts corporate profits ahead of children’s lungs, elders’ hearts, and workers’ health. When agencies refuse to take into account asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and premature deaths, they are telling our communities, especially frontline communities living next to highways, refineries, and power plants, that our lives do not matter.”

Meanwhile, in the California Delta, residetns say the proposed cutbacks in the regulation of water pollution couldn’t come at a worse time. The new rules were released just the latest California Department of Fish and Wildlife Midwater Trawl survey on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta reveals that zero Delta Smelt, an indicator species that once was the most abundant fish in the entire estuary, were found in the estuary for the eighth year in a row.

Additionally, the populations of pelagic Delta fish species, including Longfin Smelt, Sacramento Splittail, Threadfin Shad and Striped Bass, have crashed to record-low numbers in recent years.