Republicans are reviving a push during the first Trump administration to speed up California’s glacial pace for permitting water projects by overriding its authority under the Clean Water Act.
The state had spent years battling the administration in court over changes to Section 401 certifications for hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects — permits that span 50-year timelines. State regulators then stepped in to fill some of the certification duties when a separate U.S. Supreme Court decision trimmed back the scope of 401 certifications.
With President Donald Trump back in office, the issue has returned to the forefront.
“In California, it feels like we’re constantly having to fight against our State Water Resources Control Board,” said Representative Vince Fong, R-Bakersfield, who claimed the board uses its Clean Water Act authority and state environmental laws to delay projects and undermine water storage and delivery operations. “The result is less water delivered to farms and communities in my district, less clean and renewable hydropower generated for our grid and less water security for everyone who lives in our state.”
Fong raised the criticism at a recent hearing for the subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment under the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. As a former assemblymember, Fong grew into one of the Republican minority’s chief antagonists to the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority by pushing back on Trump resistance measures.
He has maintained that focus in Washington, D.C. With storms delivering heavy precipitation to the Golden State earlier this month, the first-term representative blamed the water board for reducing pumping volumes at state and federal water project intakes in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Fong has also backed Trump’s water executive order last month targeting state and local laws perceived to “unnecessarily obstruct, delay, curtail, impede or otherwise impose significant costs on the permitting, utilization, transmission, delivery or supply of water resources and water infrastructure.”
Rep. Vince Fong, R-BakersfieldThe order falls in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint for remaking the federal government. The strategic plan calls for the U.S. EPA to develop a rule to “limit unnecessary delay” for water projects by narrowing the Clean Water Act’s scope to specific requirements and “excluding speculative analysis regarding future potential harm.”
The calls to overhaul Section 401 are not new. In 2019, soon after Trump’s EPA proposed rule changes to the section, then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra joined with 22 other states to oppose the rulemaking. They claimed it would limit state powers in regulating water quality and would benefit polluters.
The following year Becerra led a legal challenge to the rule change. In a statement of support, water board Chair Joaquin Esquivel called the lawsuit necessary for maintaining water quality protections.
Moderate Democrats like then-Assemblymember Adam Gray of Merced — also now in Congress — worried about the rhetoric coming from state lawmakers as they positioned California to lead the Trump resistance effort. Gray called the lawsuit a water grab by the board and warned the agency had for years been expanding its authority with regulating freshwater flows.
In 2019 the Legislature failed to gain Governor Gavin Newsom’s approval of a bill to dramatically expand the board’s authority and enable it to compensate for potential federal rollbacks. Yet the board was already at work crafting new regulations to Trump-proof the state, a move that would play a critical role years later.
While the Biden administration overturned Trump’s Clean Water Act changes in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court that year issued a narrow interpretation of the act, significantly redefining its jurisdiction. The ruling prompted the water board to lean on its new regulations to accommodate a suddenly shrinking federal footprint. Projects that went through EPA’s 401 certification process would instead go through a much slower regional approval process. To finance the dramatic increase in staff workload, the board bumped its fees on those projects 40% last year.
The additional level of regulatory oversight has seeded frustrations across water districts, according to Fong, and Trump’s reelection has reinvigorated calls for reform.
“The 401 certification process has been used in the past as an opportunity to address general or non-water quality-related concerns,” said Rob Singletary, executive director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, in his testimony to the Transportation subcommittee.
Singletary argued that broadening the scope of the process would undermine its legitimacy and enable third parties — such as environmental groups seeking to block projects — to force the state to address broader concerns. He called for statutory changes to bar a future Democratic administration in the White House from expanding the use of the process beyond certain limits.
That prompted Rep. Laura Friedman, D-Glendale, to push back on terms like “radical environmental activist.” Friedman, like Fong, is in her first term. In the Assembly the progressive Democrat often stood at odds with the agriculture industry over her proposed pesticide bans and efforts to block water infrastructure investments.
“I don’t think it’s radical for families to want to make sure their children don’t drink PFAS, chromium 6, lead and other harmful materials,” said Friedman of the “forever chemicals” and other contaminants. “It’s certainly not radical for the people of Los Angeles to be very frustrated that when we have our droughts … we can’t drink from our giant aquifer under Los Angeles because of historic pollution.”
Rep. Laura Friedman, D-GlendaleShe charged that strong regulations prevent industries from polluting while also avoiding the need to “waste” billions of taxpayer dollars on government cleanup projects. She added that they save on medical expenses as well by reducing the health impacts. Friedman also criticized the Supreme Court’s Sackett v. EPA decision in 2023 for “pushing back decades-old regulations” to the 1970s. She warned the Trump administration “stripped away environmental protections in their last administration and there’s every indication they want to do so again.”
That concern was raised during a confirmation hearing last month for Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator. The former New York representative vowed to honor the Sackett decision and described the ruling as “clear and prescriptive.” On reopening the rulemaking on the Clean Water Act, Zeldin said he could not “prejudge outcomes going in. It's important that corners aren't cut where durability is sacrificed.” Trump, however, pledged during his campaign to reverse course on Biden-era environmental protections.
Further opportunities for overriding California’s environmental policies have been outlined by Edward Ring, who directs water and energy policy at the California Policy Center, a conservative think tank, and who recently testified in a separate congressional hearing on California’s wildfire prevention and response tactics.
In a column for the conservative news site California Globe, Ring listed 10 state laws “to scrap.” Among them was the state’s expansion of its wetlands definition that led to shouldering more of the protections previously under 401 certifications. He argued the board ignored a court order to drop the definition and called the regulations unlawful.
With that political backdrop in the nation’s capital, lawmakers in Sacramento are considering ways to further expand the board’s authority as Trump’s second term gets underway.
In 2023 state Senator Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, pushed for expanding the board’s authority over senior water rights to further limit agricultural diversions. This week he filed a measure to “fill a void” in water protection standards created by the Sackett decision. Senate Bill 601 proposes to expand the definition of "waters of the state" and to hold project proponents accountable to federal pollution standards under the Biden administration by enacting new penalties for failing to comply.
As with previous attempts to aggressively reform state water regulations, the bill is likely to gather considerable attention and opposition from agriculture and water interests throughout the two-year legislative session. Policy committees will take up the measure for debate next month.
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