Sackett v. EPA
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of an Idaho couple who fought the EPA for nearly two decades, holding that their backyard wetlands are not 'waters of the United States' and therefore not subject to the Clean Water Act's permitting requirements.
The decision sharply narrows the EPA's authority over wetlands nationwide, rejecting the agency's broad ecological 'significant nexus' test and limiting federal jurisdiction to wetlands physically indistinguishable from a river, lake, or other traditional body of water.
How it got here: After the EPA issued a compliance order, the Sacketts sued; the district court ruled for the EPA; the Ninth Circuit affirmed using the 'significant nexus' test; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Michael and Chantell Sackett bought a small residential lot near Priest Lake in northern Idaho in 2004 and began backfilling it with dirt to prepare for building a home. The EPA informed them that their land contained protected wetlands and that the backfilling violated the Clean Water Act. The agency threatened penalties exceeding $40,000 per day. The EPA classified the wetlands as regulated "waters of the United States" because they sat near a ditch — separated by a 30-foot road — that fed into a creek that eventually fed into Priest Lake.
The question before the Court
Does the Clean Water Act give the EPA authority to regulate any wetland with an ecological connection to nearby waterways, or only wetlands that have a direct, continuous surface connection to a covered river, lake, or stream?
The Court's answer
No — the EPA did not have authority to regulate the wetlands on the Sacketts' property. The Clean Water Act prohibits discharging pollutants into "the waters of the United States," a phrase the Court interpreted to cover only rivers, lakes, oceans, and similar permanent bodies of open water, plus wetlands that are physically indistinguishable from those waters because they share a continuous surface connection with them. A wetland qualifies only if the neighboring body of water is itself a permanent waterway connected to a traditionally navigable interstate water, and the wetland has no clear boundary separating it from that water.
The EPA's preferred "significant nexus" test — covering any wetland that ecologically influences a navigable waterway when aggregated with similar nearby wetlands — has no basis in the statute's text and creates serious constitutional fairness concerns because ordinary people cannot tell from it what conduct is criminal. Because the Sacketts' wetlands are separated from any covered waterway by a 30-foot road and have no continuous surface connection to Priest Lake or anything else, they fall entirely outside the Act's reach.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Homeowners, farmers, and developers who own land near wetlands, ditches, or seasonal streams will no longer need federal Clean Water Act permits before grading or filling many areas the EPA previously claimed to regulate. The decision removes the risk of tens of thousands of dollars in daily federal fines for activities like backfilling a residential lot, shifting much of wetland regulation back to state governments.
What changes now
The case is sent back to lower courts for further proceedings consistent with the new standard. The ruling immediately curtails the EPA's regulatory authority over wetlands nationwide; vast areas previously subject to federal oversight under the ecological 'significant nexus' test will no longer require federal permits before development. The EPA's most recently promulgated rule defining 'waters of the United States' — which relied on the significant nexus standard — is now inconsistent with this decision. State governments retain authority to regulate wetlands no longer covered by federal law.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not resolve every question the new test will raise — such as how temporary an interruption in surface connection can be, whether connections through culverts or pipes qualify, or exactly where one body of water ends and another begins. It also does not address the constitutional scope of Congress's commerce power over waterways, an issue Justice Thomas raised in his concurrence.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas joined the full majority opinion but wrote separately to argue the Clean Water Act must be read even more narrowly, tying its reach to Congress's traditional authority over waters used as actual highways of interstate or foreign commerce — the standard set by the 1871 'Daniel Ball' test. He argued the EPA has spent decades asserting a sprawling federal police power over land and water that belongs to the states, and that several features of the Sacketts' situation — including the purely intrastate Priest Lake — may not qualify even as navigable waters under that traditional test.
Concurrence — Justice Kagan
Justice Kagan agreed the Sacketts should win but argued the majority rewrote the statute. In her view, the word 'adjacent' in the 1977 Clean Water Act amendments plainly means 'neighboring' — not 'physically touching' — so wetlands separated from covered waters by a berm, dune, or dike are still covered. She accused the majority of invoking a judicially invented clear-statement rule not to resolve genuine ambiguity but to cut back an ambitious anti-pollution program Congress deliberately wrote broadly, repeating what she saw as the same error from the prior term's clean-air ruling.
Concurrence — Justice Kavanaugh
Justice Kavanaugh agreed the Sacketts should win and agreed the 'significant nexus' test was wrong, but disagreed sharply with the majority's new 'continuous surface connection' test. He argued that 'adjacent' is broader than 'adjoining' as a matter of ordinary English, that Congress used both words in the Act and chose them deliberately, and that every presidential administration since 1977 had recognized adjacent wetlands include those separated from covered waters by levees, dikes, berms, or dunes. He warned the majority's narrower test would strip federal protection from long-regulated wetlands, threatening flood control and water quality.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with the statutory text: the Clean Water Act prohibits discharging pollutants into 'navigable waters,' defined as 'the waters of the United States.' Because Congress used the plural term 'waters' — which in ordinary English refers to identifiable bodies like rivers, lakes, and oceans — the Court concluded the phrase covers only relatively permanent, flowing or standing bodies of water forming such geographic features, not any land that happens to be wet.
- Statutory context showed that at least some wetlands must qualify as 'waters of the United States,' because a separate provision on state permitting programs (§1344(g)(1)) references 'wetlands adjacent' to covered waters as included within that category. But the Court read this to mean only wetlands that are indistinguishably part of a covered body of water — not any wetland that is merely nearby or ecologically connected.
- The Court adopted the rule proposed by a four-justice plurality in the 2006 Rapanos case (which had produced no majority): to qualify as a regulated adjacent wetland, (1) the neighboring body of water must itself be a relatively permanent waterway connected to traditionally navigable interstate waters, AND (2) the wetland must have a continuous surface connection to that water, making it difficult to tell where the water ends and the wetland begins.
- The Court rejected the EPA's 'significant nexus' test — drawn from a solo concurrence in Rapanos — which would cover any wetland that, alone or combined with similarly situated nearby wetlands, significantly affects the chemistry, biology, or physical condition of navigable waters. No statute ever mentions this test, and it cannot be squared with the text of §1362(7), which is the operative provision defining the Act's geographic reach.
- Two background interpretive rules reinforced this narrow reading. First, Congress must use unmistakably clear language before significantly shifting the balance of federal versus state authority over land and water use — a traditional state domain — and no such clarity exists for the EPA's sweeping definition. Second, criminal statutes must be defined clearly enough that ordinary people understand what conduct is prohibited; the EPA's open-ended, factor-heavy ecological test fails this standard.
- Applied to the Sacketts' property: their lot's wetlands are separated from any covered waterway by a 30-foot road, have no continuous surface connection to Priest Lake or any other navigable water, and therefore fall entirely outside the Clean Water Act's jurisdiction.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Rapanos v. United States (547 U.S. 715)
The Court adopts the Rapanos plurality's 'continuous surface connection' test as the governing rule for wetland coverage.
Reaffirms Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook Cty. v. Army Corps of Engineers (531 U.S. 159)
Isolated ponds not adjacent to open water fall outside the Clean Water Act; that holding still stands.
Reaffirms United States v. Riverside Bayview Homes, Inc. (474 U.S. 121)
Wetlands that actually abut navigable waterways remain covered; the new continuous surface connection test is consistent with that prior ruling.