Passing the Clean Water Act Over a Veto in 1972

Before 1972, the federal answer to water pollution rested on state water quality standards. A state set a goal for a stretch of river. An official who wanted to act against a factory had to show that the factory's waste caused the river to miss that goal. On a river with dozens of dischargers, that proof was nearly impossible to assemble. Enforcement actions were rare, and they moved slowly when they came.

Pressure for something better built through the 1960s. Rivers carried foam, oil, and untreated sewage. Fish kills made the evening news. A burning oil slick on a river in Ohio in 1969 became a national image of the problem. The first Earth Day came in April 1970. The Environmental Protection Agency opened its doors that December.

Congress did have one old tool. The Refuse Act of 1899 barred dumping into navigable waters without a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Courts and citizens revived it late in the 1960s. The law had never been written with modern industrial waste in mind, and the permit program built on it soon tangled in litigation.

Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine led the Senate work on a replacement. The bill that emerged changed the basic method. It no longer began with the condition of the river. It began with the discharger. Every point source, meaning a pipe, ditch, or channel, would need a permit. The permit would carry numeric limits set by what treatment technology could achieve. A plant that exceeded its limit had violated the law by that fact alone. Nobody had to prove that the river was harmed.

The bill also carried money. It authorized federal grants that paid most of the cost of building municipal sewage treatment plants. And it stated two goals meant to set direction. Waters were to be clean enough for fishing and swimming by the middle of 1983. The discharge of pollutants into navigable waters was to end by 1985. Neither deadline was met. Both gave the program a public measure that supporters and critics could argue over.

President Nixon objected to the spending. He had signed environmental measures before, and his veto message did not attack the permit system. He argued that the construction money was more than the country could afford without driving up inflation. He returned the bill to Congress in October 1972.

Congress overrode the veto the next day. Both chambers voted by wide margins, with members of each party on the winning side. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 became law without the president's signature. Within a few years people were calling the statute the Clean Water Act.

The fight over money continued after the override. The administration held back a large share of the construction funds rather than releasing them to the states. Withholding money that Congress has appropriated is called impoundment. Cities that had counted on the grants sued. In 1975 the Supreme Court ruled in Train v. City of New York that the law obliged the administration to allot the full amounts.

The results came in two forms. Thousands of municipal treatment plants were built or upgraded over the following two decades, and the water leaving them was far cleaner than before. The permit system also gave regulators a number to check, and it let residents bring a citizen suit against a violator without waiting for an agency to act. A river's condition was no longer the only evidence available.

One large problem stayed outside the system. Rain carries fertilizer off fields, oil off streets, and sediment off construction sites. That pollution enters a river from no single pipe, so a permit written for a pipe cannot reach it. Congress left most of this runoff to state planning and voluntary programs. In 1987 Congress brought large city storm sewer systems and construction sites under permits, but runoff from farms remains outside the permit system. Polluted runoff is now the largest remaining source of pollution in many watersheds. Congress also changed the money in 1987, replacing the construction grants with state revolving loan funds, so a city today borrows what an earlier city received.

The 1972 law is usually taught as the moment the country decided its rivers should be clean. It was also a decision about method. Congress chose to regulate the pipe rather than the river, and to pay for treatment plants with federal grants. Those two choices explain a great deal about what improved quickly and what has not improved since.

1. According to the passage, what did an official have to prove before 1972 in order to act against a polluting factory?
2. What reason did President Nixon give for vetoing the bill?
3. The passage says the 1972 approach began with the discharger rather than with the river. Explain how that change made enforcement easier.
4. Congress set goals for 1983 and 1985 that were not met. Using the passage, explain what those goals accomplished anyway.
5. Explain why the Supreme Court's 1975 impoundment ruling mattered to cities.
6. Give one example of a point source and one example of runoff from the passage, and explain why a permit system fits the first and not the second.
7. The passage ends by saying Congress chose to regulate the pipe rather than the river. Using two details from the passage, explain what that choice improved quickly and what it left unsolved.